15 Albums
My good friend (an "parallel life brother") Rich recently posted his contribution to a "meme" that is making it's way around the Facebook and blogosphere universe that asks people to do this: List 15 albums (or 8-tracks o cassettes or CDs, depending on your generation) that have truly stuck to your ribs since the first time you've heard them. I take that as meaning the albums that truly have become a part of your DNA and, not to be too melodramatic, but "changed your life".
In making my own list, from the top of my head and from memory and not by scanning my CD collection, I have come to realize that the albums I love most fall into a wide variety of categories. Some are just pure brilliance and the songs contained on them are brilliant from start to finish. Some are the snapshots that go with that place and time in my life when I heard them; they may not have held up as well but, regardless, I listened to them so much that they are like a part of me.
Making this list also made me have to be honest about a few things. For example, as you read this album you'll notice there is not a complete album by The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Neil Young, or Bob Dylan or other acts that I love and appreciate but never had that "album experience" with. I came to the Fab Four like a lot of people born post-1970 came to them. They were in the atmosphere, ever-present on radio and in popular culture but since my parents were never listen-to-an-album-around-the-house types I didn't grow up with Rubber Soul or The Beatles (aka The White Album); Led Zeppelin were over and done with by the time I was 7 so I didn't really come to them until later. I fell in love with Dylan and Young through individual songs or anthologies and have only hunted down their classic albums "after the fact". Put another way, I didn't cut my teeth on some truly great albums or go through puberty with them or go through college with them so, for whatever reason, they didn't make the cut.
What did make the cut says a lot about me, though. And I like that. My list is chronological based on when I first heard them and not by release date (think of the "Autobiographical sorting" scene in High Fidelity).
1. Duran Duran - Seven & The Ragged Tiger
The simple truth is that I don't know if Duran Duran ever truly made a superb album (seriously, if you want a truly excellent Duran Duran experience just get their anthology called Greatest) but when you give a 10 year old a Walkman for Christmas and give him this cassette to go with it, something superb can happen. I had heard complete albums before this one (Hall & Oates, Michael Jackson, and others) but I mostly I just wanted to either cue or fast forward to my favorite songs. Seven and The Ragged Tiger always compelled me to listen all the way through, past the massive hits like "The Reflex", "New Moon on Monday", and "Union of the Snake" and truly fall in love with the 'album cuts' like "I Take The Dice" and "Cracks In The Pavement". This was the last album the original lineup made before reuniting earlier this decade and while I know die-hard fans of this group will still swear by Rio as being their best, this album made me appreciate the very concept of an album: A collection of songs recorded at roughly the same time, with or without big radio hits to follow.
2. Bon Jovi - Slippery When Wet
Like Duran Duran and the string of hits that came from their album noted above, Slippery When Wet took Bon Jovi to that highest peak of pop music that very few can claim to have held, either for a short time or an extended period: The biggest band on the planet. And the reason why Slippery got them to that spot is because it did what their prior two albums couldn't achieve: Listen a few times and you'll know every word to every song and you'll want to hear them again and again. To this day this remains a huge achievement in hard rock. Call it lightning in a bottle or just a creative peak (which continued, I might add, on the more mature and very underrated New Jersey album), this band had it with this album. I was 13 when I got it and I have a 13 year-old son who thinks the songs on this sucker kick ass. That's called "timeless".
3. Def Leppard - Hysteria
You can probably see a pattern emerging here as we chronologically enter the late 80's and, yes, I was a hard rock and metal kid. But, as you'll see with the rest of the list, my tastes shifted over the course of time. And, seriously, it was a bit impossible to be in your teen years between 1986 and 1993 and not have either embraced or had to dodge a whole lot of hard rock records that were massively popular. I could probably have subbed a couple of different records in this particular slot (Motley Crue's Dr. Feelgood, Poison's Open Up and Say Ahh, or others) but Hysteria, much like Bon Jovi's Slipper When Wet, is one of those albums I had on cassette and eventually had to replace because the tape snapped from the wear and tear of being played all the time. As many know, the long wait (and a severed limb!) between the band's breakout Pyromania and the even bigger-selling Hysteria was a long one. When the former was huge (1983) I was a bit intimidated by hard rock but by the time the the latter came out (1987) I was ready for it. There were hit singles for sure but the strength of this album was in it's non-singles and the layers and layers of sound (thank you, producer Mutt Lange) that let you hear something new with each listen.
4. Paul Simon - Graceland
In the middle of all my hair metal youth there was this, straight out of my father's record collection. Actually, Graceland was the only album in my father's collection and that is why he played it all. the. time. In the car, especially. So when he picked me up from practice there was "You Can Call Me Al"; when we ran to the grocery store for milk or whatever there was "Homeless"; and when we drove 1/3 of the way across the country from California to Montana on a family vacation there was the whole shebang... over and over. Sometimes we complained and sometimes he'd relent and let us listen to something else he at least moderately liked (Sting's Dream of the Blue Turtles was one) but deep down my siblings and I like Graceland. How could we not? It was poppy and catchy but it was also different from anything else we were listening to, be it my hard rock and metal, my sister's Prince records, or my brother's fetish for Run DMC and early hip-hop.
5. Queenrcyhe - Operation: Mindcrime
In retrospect, I can't believe I actually made it through this album a few times before I realized that, duh, this Seattle hard rock band was telling a story over the course of over a dozen songs! This was remarkably different. Bon Jovi were singing about getting wild in the streets and giving love a bad name. Queensryche were crafting a tale of an underground revolution, megalomaniac leaders, a salacious preacher, and a hero who was a smack addict in love with a prostitute turned nun trying to escape the powerful forces of mind control, murder, and deceit. Sound nuts? Maybe it was, but damn if this record didn't knock me on my ass and, more importantly, symbolize that an album as a whole could truly be greater than the sum of it's parts. Individual tracks from Mindcrime certainly work on their own outside of the context of it's concept/story but when you heard "I Don't Believe In Love" or "Revolution Calling" in the framework it was intended it becomes something bigger. This was a smart, compelling listen and I'm still waiting for someone off or on Broadway to adapt it!
6. Jellyfish - Bellybutton
I think I can honestly say that this band and their 1990 debut album (one of only two they recorded) prepared me for what was to come in the next 2 years: The death of the hard rock/hair metal era I'd grown up in and the emergence of something new (grunge and early 90's alt-rock). And yet Jellyfish were not grunge or terribly alternative. If anything they were retro, combining influences of The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Queen, and The Hollies into one delicious concoction known before and after their arrival as "power pop", a genre I still have a love affair with. I mined the songs on Bellybutton for many a senior year mix tape and the album is still one of those "How in the world did this band not become HUGE?" mysteries of the pop universe.
7. Pearl Jam - Ten
I should really given an honorable mention here to Mother Love Bone's album Apple, released after the death of their singer Andrew Wood. The rest of the story, in short summary, goes like this: Two members of MLB joined with two members of Soundgarden and recorded Temple of the Dog as a tribute/mourning session for their friend. Along the way those two members of MLB -- Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament -- formed a nucleus for a new band that became Pearl Jam. Future Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder made his recording debut on the Temple of the Dog track "Hunger Strike", which was later released as a single after both Soundgarden and Pearl Jam achieved breakout status. As a Mother Love Bone devotee I had Pearl Jam on my radar before their debut Ten was even released. I bought it just as I was moving into my dorm room for my freshman year of college. By the end of that academic year the musical landscape had been overhauled on a massive scale. Warrant? Out. Nirvana? In. Way, way in. Pearl Jam became part of that tidal wave and they were far an away my favorite of that era. Ten is, in my opinion, one of the strongest debut albums of all time.
8. REM - Automatic For The People
Take someone older than myself by anywhere from 5 to 10 years in age and I can almost guarantee that if an REM album is on their list it will be something like Murmur or Fables of the Reconstruction but among *cough* my generation *cough* it will be this one of Out of Time. For me it is the softer, reflective, and utterly beautiful Automatic for the People. I love this album for a lot of reasons but maybe the biggest one is this: I am not a huge REM fan. I like them, I appreciate them, but they are not one of my "rush out and buy that new album" acts. If I was making a list of my 10 favorite songs by them you could probably count on at least 4 of them being from Automatic. I was a college freshman when it came out and like a lot of people who go through age 18 and 19 I was at a time in my life when I wanted to hear music different from my "usual". I was ready for something deeper than the very fun but largely shallow music of my youth. Automatic For The People was exactly what I needed. In any other year I may not have fallen in love with it so hard.
9. Toad The Wet Sprocket - Fear
Truly Hall of Fame worthy bands have multiple "career" albums in their cannon and that is what makes them truly great. People can endlessly debate which is the best Beatles album (Rubber Soul), the best Zeppelin album (Led Zeppelin), or the greatest U2 album (Achtung, Baby!). Other bands don't spur such debates except for maybe among the most devoted of their following. Fear from Toad The Wet Sprocket is a fine example. Sure, they had other good albums and some great songs but Fear is head and shoulders above. And, like REM and Pearl Jam, they were the soundtrack to the beginning of my college experiences. Poppy but smart, catchy but deep... Toad had something to say (they literally had a song called "Something to Say" on this album) with Fear and they did it in grand fashion. I'd been writing lyrical poetry since I was 15 and when I heard Fear for the first time it made me have conflicting reactions: I never wanted to write again because they had just said everything I'd ever tried to write but, at the same time, I couldn't stop writing and they made me want to write better.
10. The Jayhawks - Hollywood Town Hall
I think my wife knows this but if she doesn't I really need to tell her more explicitly: I fell in love with her and with this album at pretty much the exact same time. And just like before I heard the Jayhawks I'd never had much use for country or country-influenced music, I'd never dated a brunette or a girl older than me before. The two both were and weren't connected. I was definitely in the mood for change in my life circa 1993, which was why I had moved to a different campus dorm and I was listening to albums like Blind Melon and definitely Hollywood Town Hall. Simple, beautiful songs with harmonies as great as you'll hear in any genre, and lyrics that just felt so totally human it was impossible not to relate to them. When I met Kelly and made her that inevitable first mix tape the "message" song, buried a few songs in, was "Crowded In the Wings" by The Jayhawks.
11. The Replacements - Tim
I would actually love write that I was a Replacements fan from Day One of their career but my age and the arc of their work would make me a huge liar. The truth is that I knew who they were -- via a crush on a girl in high school who often wore Replacements t-shirts from the Don't Tell a Soul era -- but didn't really buy any of their albums until just around the time they were falling apart. I had the cassingle (score!) of "I'll Be You" and when both the movie and soundtrack Singles came out I instantly fell in love with former Replacements singer Paul Westerberg's "Dyslexic Heart" and "Waiting For Somebody". Those songs made me want to go through the Replacements discography in reverse order and one by one I kept finding copies of their albums and kept going until I found one I didn't like. And that never really happened as I now own all their albums, but the one that really knocked me out was 1985's Tim. I was 12 when it was originally released and I can guarantee you I'd have had no use for it at that time. But when I was 20? Oh, hell yes. This is the album I listened to en route from the house to the chapel (rec hall) on my wedding day.
12. The Refreshments - Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big and Buzzy
By early 1996 when my wife and I went out to see the Gin Blossoms in concert, I'd easily seen over 100 bands play live in my 23 years. And it took and still take a lot for an opening act I've never heard of to make an impression. But that happened when I saw The Refreshments open up for their fellow Arizona compadres the Gin Blossoms on that winter night. I was blown away from the opening song and when the singer said their first album was "coming out soon" that was not enough for me. I was working for a radio station at the time and with the internet in it's relative infancy, at least on a mass scale, it took a little doing to find out what label this band was with (Mercury) and a couple of phone calls to label contacts to get what I wanted: An advance copy of the band's debut, Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big and Buzzy. But I did get my copy and I loved it from start to finish. The band would go on to record a second album before ultimately calling it quits, with two members going on to form Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers, an act that has since recorded 5 studio albums and has been at the forefront of the DIY, who-needs-a-major-label ethos of the past 10 years. RCPM is one of my favorite bands and several of their albums have been a big part of my adult life, but I probably wouldn't even know who they are if it weren't for that amazing opening act and their incredible debut album I just had to have... NOW!
13. Joe Henry - Fuse
I'm putting Fuse in place of some other seriously great albums from my 20's and 30's because it was one of those listens that truly broadened my horizons to what music can be; that an artist or a band can take the sound they're known for and turn it on it's ear and reinvent who they are. Joe Henry started out his career as folk influenced singer-songwriter in the tradition of Bob Dylan or the quieter moments of Bruce Springsteen. He dabbled in country-rock for a few records and right around the time I was playing some of his albums in my first public radio job he went and altered his sound quite a bit, with drum loops and Helmet guitarist Page Hamilton bringing some interesting textures to his album Trampoline. Then, with 1999's Fuse he took it even further, falling somewhere between Curtis Mayfield and Tom Waits. Soulful, strange, dark, sexy, eclectic, smart, haunting, catchy, and abstract... pick an adjective and chances are it'll fit something on Fuse. And as a music fan, Henry's Fuse broadened my scope.
14. Butch Walker - Letters
It is hard to believe but I've actually been listening to Butch Walker in some way, shape, or form since I was 18, back when he was bassist and back-up singer in the short-lived later-era hair band Southgang. I had both of that band's albums and when Walker reemerged in the mid 90's as lead singer of Marvelous 3 it was that Southgang connection that made me curious. The two excellent major label albums from Marvelous 3 made me want to follow Walker as he embarked on a solo career (and as a highly in-demand producer for other artists), which has varied from arena rock on his first album, a wildly 70's era glam rock sound on his third, a personal collection of straight-ahead rock songs on his fourth disc, and flourishes of country and Wall of Sound-style pop on his fifth and latest disc. Letters was his sophomore solo effort and one could call it his best work. What I would call it is his "slow burn" of a record. Not so much a concept album but, as the title implies, a "thematic" record, with each song very much like a letter in verse-chorus-verse form. It makes an impression on first listen but the more you repeat it the deeper it gets into your skin. I include it here on this list because there are some acts in my history as a music fan that are "instant purchases"; I don't have to hear a preview track. I just buy it because their name is on it. Butch Walker is one of those acts and it was Letters that made that happen.
15. The Gaslight Anthem - The `59 Sound
I was hesitant to include this album on the list, especially when I've left some other very significant albums off of it (hello and full nods to Crowded House, Counting Crows, Mother Love Bone, The Wallflowers, and a few others). But the concept of the "meme" is to list the albums that have truly stuck with you and, granted, this album is only 2 years old. But I'm including it for several reason. One, it's a great piece of work. Second, it is an album that I fell in love with in unison with both of my kids, who love it to pieces and gravitated to it like nothing else before it. Finally, with the incredible songs on the band's follow-up, this year's American Slang, I am fairly confident they're a band that is going to be with us for a while. At the very least, I have a strong feeling the best is yet to come from singer and songwriter Brian Fallon. The `59 Sound is, to make a fun comparison, like my musical version of Frosted Mini-Wheats; it appeals to the grown-up in me and the kid in me. It rocks hard and it full of passion and cries of youth but it's lyrics references to growing up, to ghosts of girlfriends and places past, are reflective and haunting. I can listen to and fully grasp why my kids dig it and I especially like the notion that if they dig it up in 5 years or 10 years they'll still love it but hear something different in each of it's 12 songs.
--
Thanks for reading and I hope some other friends take a cue and make their own list, be it descriptive like mine or just a list. :)
J
In making my own list, from the top of my head and from memory and not by scanning my CD collection, I have come to realize that the albums I love most fall into a wide variety of categories. Some are just pure brilliance and the songs contained on them are brilliant from start to finish. Some are the snapshots that go with that place and time in my life when I heard them; they may not have held up as well but, regardless, I listened to them so much that they are like a part of me.
Making this list also made me have to be honest about a few things. For example, as you read this album you'll notice there is not a complete album by The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Neil Young, or Bob Dylan or other acts that I love and appreciate but never had that "album experience" with. I came to the Fab Four like a lot of people born post-1970 came to them. They were in the atmosphere, ever-present on radio and in popular culture but since my parents were never listen-to-an-album-around-the-house types I didn't grow up with Rubber Soul or The Beatles (aka The White Album); Led Zeppelin were over and done with by the time I was 7 so I didn't really come to them until later. I fell in love with Dylan and Young through individual songs or anthologies and have only hunted down their classic albums "after the fact". Put another way, I didn't cut my teeth on some truly great albums or go through puberty with them or go through college with them so, for whatever reason, they didn't make the cut.
What did make the cut says a lot about me, though. And I like that. My list is chronological based on when I first heard them and not by release date (think of the "Autobiographical sorting" scene in High Fidelity).
1. Duran Duran - Seven & The Ragged Tiger
The simple truth is that I don't know if Duran Duran ever truly made a superb album (seriously, if you want a truly excellent Duran Duran experience just get their anthology called Greatest) but when you give a 10 year old a Walkman for Christmas and give him this cassette to go with it, something superb can happen. I had heard complete albums before this one (Hall & Oates, Michael Jackson, and others) but I mostly I just wanted to either cue or fast forward to my favorite songs. Seven and The Ragged Tiger always compelled me to listen all the way through, past the massive hits like "The Reflex", "New Moon on Monday", and "Union of the Snake" and truly fall in love with the 'album cuts' like "I Take The Dice" and "Cracks In The Pavement". This was the last album the original lineup made before reuniting earlier this decade and while I know die-hard fans of this group will still swear by Rio as being their best, this album made me appreciate the very concept of an album: A collection of songs recorded at roughly the same time, with or without big radio hits to follow.
2. Bon Jovi - Slippery When Wet
Like Duran Duran and the string of hits that came from their album noted above, Slippery When Wet took Bon Jovi to that highest peak of pop music that very few can claim to have held, either for a short time or an extended period: The biggest band on the planet. And the reason why Slippery got them to that spot is because it did what their prior two albums couldn't achieve: Listen a few times and you'll know every word to every song and you'll want to hear them again and again. To this day this remains a huge achievement in hard rock. Call it lightning in a bottle or just a creative peak (which continued, I might add, on the more mature and very underrated New Jersey album), this band had it with this album. I was 13 when I got it and I have a 13 year-old son who thinks the songs on this sucker kick ass. That's called "timeless".
3. Def Leppard - Hysteria
You can probably see a pattern emerging here as we chronologically enter the late 80's and, yes, I was a hard rock and metal kid. But, as you'll see with the rest of the list, my tastes shifted over the course of time. And, seriously, it was a bit impossible to be in your teen years between 1986 and 1993 and not have either embraced or had to dodge a whole lot of hard rock records that were massively popular. I could probably have subbed a couple of different records in this particular slot (Motley Crue's Dr. Feelgood, Poison's Open Up and Say Ahh, or others) but Hysteria, much like Bon Jovi's Slipper When Wet, is one of those albums I had on cassette and eventually had to replace because the tape snapped from the wear and tear of being played all the time. As many know, the long wait (and a severed limb!) between the band's breakout Pyromania and the even bigger-selling Hysteria was a long one. When the former was huge (1983) I was a bit intimidated by hard rock but by the time the the latter came out (1987) I was ready for it. There were hit singles for sure but the strength of this album was in it's non-singles and the layers and layers of sound (thank you, producer Mutt Lange) that let you hear something new with each listen.
4. Paul Simon - Graceland
In the middle of all my hair metal youth there was this, straight out of my father's record collection. Actually, Graceland was the only album in my father's collection and that is why he played it all. the. time. In the car, especially. So when he picked me up from practice there was "You Can Call Me Al"; when we ran to the grocery store for milk or whatever there was "Homeless"; and when we drove 1/3 of the way across the country from California to Montana on a family vacation there was the whole shebang... over and over. Sometimes we complained and sometimes he'd relent and let us listen to something else he at least moderately liked (Sting's Dream of the Blue Turtles was one) but deep down my siblings and I like Graceland. How could we not? It was poppy and catchy but it was also different from anything else we were listening to, be it my hard rock and metal, my sister's Prince records, or my brother's fetish for Run DMC and early hip-hop.
5. Queenrcyhe - Operation: Mindcrime
In retrospect, I can't believe I actually made it through this album a few times before I realized that, duh, this Seattle hard rock band was telling a story over the course of over a dozen songs! This was remarkably different. Bon Jovi were singing about getting wild in the streets and giving love a bad name. Queensryche were crafting a tale of an underground revolution, megalomaniac leaders, a salacious preacher, and a hero who was a smack addict in love with a prostitute turned nun trying to escape the powerful forces of mind control, murder, and deceit. Sound nuts? Maybe it was, but damn if this record didn't knock me on my ass and, more importantly, symbolize that an album as a whole could truly be greater than the sum of it's parts. Individual tracks from Mindcrime certainly work on their own outside of the context of it's concept/story but when you heard "I Don't Believe In Love" or "Revolution Calling" in the framework it was intended it becomes something bigger. This was a smart, compelling listen and I'm still waiting for someone off or on Broadway to adapt it!
6. Jellyfish - Bellybutton
I think I can honestly say that this band and their 1990 debut album (one of only two they recorded) prepared me for what was to come in the next 2 years: The death of the hard rock/hair metal era I'd grown up in and the emergence of something new (grunge and early 90's alt-rock). And yet Jellyfish were not grunge or terribly alternative. If anything they were retro, combining influences of The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Queen, and The Hollies into one delicious concoction known before and after their arrival as "power pop", a genre I still have a love affair with. I mined the songs on Bellybutton for many a senior year mix tape and the album is still one of those "How in the world did this band not become HUGE?" mysteries of the pop universe.
7. Pearl Jam - Ten
I should really given an honorable mention here to Mother Love Bone's album Apple, released after the death of their singer Andrew Wood. The rest of the story, in short summary, goes like this: Two members of MLB joined with two members of Soundgarden and recorded Temple of the Dog as a tribute/mourning session for their friend. Along the way those two members of MLB -- Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament -- formed a nucleus for a new band that became Pearl Jam. Future Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder made his recording debut on the Temple of the Dog track "Hunger Strike", which was later released as a single after both Soundgarden and Pearl Jam achieved breakout status. As a Mother Love Bone devotee I had Pearl Jam on my radar before their debut Ten was even released. I bought it just as I was moving into my dorm room for my freshman year of college. By the end of that academic year the musical landscape had been overhauled on a massive scale. Warrant? Out. Nirvana? In. Way, way in. Pearl Jam became part of that tidal wave and they were far an away my favorite of that era. Ten is, in my opinion, one of the strongest debut albums of all time.
8. REM - Automatic For The People
Take someone older than myself by anywhere from 5 to 10 years in age and I can almost guarantee that if an REM album is on their list it will be something like Murmur or Fables of the Reconstruction but among *cough* my generation *cough* it will be this one of Out of Time. For me it is the softer, reflective, and utterly beautiful Automatic for the People. I love this album for a lot of reasons but maybe the biggest one is this: I am not a huge REM fan. I like them, I appreciate them, but they are not one of my "rush out and buy that new album" acts. If I was making a list of my 10 favorite songs by them you could probably count on at least 4 of them being from Automatic. I was a college freshman when it came out and like a lot of people who go through age 18 and 19 I was at a time in my life when I wanted to hear music different from my "usual". I was ready for something deeper than the very fun but largely shallow music of my youth. Automatic For The People was exactly what I needed. In any other year I may not have fallen in love with it so hard.
9. Toad The Wet Sprocket - Fear
Truly Hall of Fame worthy bands have multiple "career" albums in their cannon and that is what makes them truly great. People can endlessly debate which is the best Beatles album (Rubber Soul), the best Zeppelin album (Led Zeppelin), or the greatest U2 album (Achtung, Baby!). Other bands don't spur such debates except for maybe among the most devoted of their following. Fear from Toad The Wet Sprocket is a fine example. Sure, they had other good albums and some great songs but Fear is head and shoulders above. And, like REM and Pearl Jam, they were the soundtrack to the beginning of my college experiences. Poppy but smart, catchy but deep... Toad had something to say (they literally had a song called "Something to Say" on this album) with Fear and they did it in grand fashion. I'd been writing lyrical poetry since I was 15 and when I heard Fear for the first time it made me have conflicting reactions: I never wanted to write again because they had just said everything I'd ever tried to write but, at the same time, I couldn't stop writing and they made me want to write better.
10. The Jayhawks - Hollywood Town Hall
I think my wife knows this but if she doesn't I really need to tell her more explicitly: I fell in love with her and with this album at pretty much the exact same time. And just like before I heard the Jayhawks I'd never had much use for country or country-influenced music, I'd never dated a brunette or a girl older than me before. The two both were and weren't connected. I was definitely in the mood for change in my life circa 1993, which was why I had moved to a different campus dorm and I was listening to albums like Blind Melon and definitely Hollywood Town Hall. Simple, beautiful songs with harmonies as great as you'll hear in any genre, and lyrics that just felt so totally human it was impossible not to relate to them. When I met Kelly and made her that inevitable first mix tape the "message" song, buried a few songs in, was "Crowded In the Wings" by The Jayhawks.
11. The Replacements - Tim
I would actually love write that I was a Replacements fan from Day One of their career but my age and the arc of their work would make me a huge liar. The truth is that I knew who they were -- via a crush on a girl in high school who often wore Replacements t-shirts from the Don't Tell a Soul era -- but didn't really buy any of their albums until just around the time they were falling apart. I had the cassingle (score!) of "I'll Be You" and when both the movie and soundtrack Singles came out I instantly fell in love with former Replacements singer Paul Westerberg's "Dyslexic Heart" and "Waiting For Somebody". Those songs made me want to go through the Replacements discography in reverse order and one by one I kept finding copies of their albums and kept going until I found one I didn't like. And that never really happened as I now own all their albums, but the one that really knocked me out was 1985's Tim. I was 12 when it was originally released and I can guarantee you I'd have had no use for it at that time. But when I was 20? Oh, hell yes. This is the album I listened to en route from the house to the chapel (rec hall) on my wedding day.
12. The Refreshments - Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big and Buzzy
By early 1996 when my wife and I went out to see the Gin Blossoms in concert, I'd easily seen over 100 bands play live in my 23 years. And it took and still take a lot for an opening act I've never heard of to make an impression. But that happened when I saw The Refreshments open up for their fellow Arizona compadres the Gin Blossoms on that winter night. I was blown away from the opening song and when the singer said their first album was "coming out soon" that was not enough for me. I was working for a radio station at the time and with the internet in it's relative infancy, at least on a mass scale, it took a little doing to find out what label this band was with (Mercury) and a couple of phone calls to label contacts to get what I wanted: An advance copy of the band's debut, Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big and Buzzy. But I did get my copy and I loved it from start to finish. The band would go on to record a second album before ultimately calling it quits, with two members going on to form Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers, an act that has since recorded 5 studio albums and has been at the forefront of the DIY, who-needs-a-major-label ethos of the past 10 years. RCPM is one of my favorite bands and several of their albums have been a big part of my adult life, but I probably wouldn't even know who they are if it weren't for that amazing opening act and their incredible debut album I just had to have... NOW!
13. Joe Henry - Fuse
I'm putting Fuse in place of some other seriously great albums from my 20's and 30's because it was one of those listens that truly broadened my horizons to what music can be; that an artist or a band can take the sound they're known for and turn it on it's ear and reinvent who they are. Joe Henry started out his career as folk influenced singer-songwriter in the tradition of Bob Dylan or the quieter moments of Bruce Springsteen. He dabbled in country-rock for a few records and right around the time I was playing some of his albums in my first public radio job he went and altered his sound quite a bit, with drum loops and Helmet guitarist Page Hamilton bringing some interesting textures to his album Trampoline. Then, with 1999's Fuse he took it even further, falling somewhere between Curtis Mayfield and Tom Waits. Soulful, strange, dark, sexy, eclectic, smart, haunting, catchy, and abstract... pick an adjective and chances are it'll fit something on Fuse. And as a music fan, Henry's Fuse broadened my scope.
14. Butch Walker - Letters
It is hard to believe but I've actually been listening to Butch Walker in some way, shape, or form since I was 18, back when he was bassist and back-up singer in the short-lived later-era hair band Southgang. I had both of that band's albums and when Walker reemerged in the mid 90's as lead singer of Marvelous 3 it was that Southgang connection that made me curious. The two excellent major label albums from Marvelous 3 made me want to follow Walker as he embarked on a solo career (and as a highly in-demand producer for other artists), which has varied from arena rock on his first album, a wildly 70's era glam rock sound on his third, a personal collection of straight-ahead rock songs on his fourth disc, and flourishes of country and Wall of Sound-style pop on his fifth and latest disc. Letters was his sophomore solo effort and one could call it his best work. What I would call it is his "slow burn" of a record. Not so much a concept album but, as the title implies, a "thematic" record, with each song very much like a letter in verse-chorus-verse form. It makes an impression on first listen but the more you repeat it the deeper it gets into your skin. I include it here on this list because there are some acts in my history as a music fan that are "instant purchases"; I don't have to hear a preview track. I just buy it because their name is on it. Butch Walker is one of those acts and it was Letters that made that happen.
15. The Gaslight Anthem - The `59 Sound
I was hesitant to include this album on the list, especially when I've left some other very significant albums off of it (hello and full nods to Crowded House, Counting Crows, Mother Love Bone, The Wallflowers, and a few others). But the concept of the "meme" is to list the albums that have truly stuck with you and, granted, this album is only 2 years old. But I'm including it for several reason. One, it's a great piece of work. Second, it is an album that I fell in love with in unison with both of my kids, who love it to pieces and gravitated to it like nothing else before it. Finally, with the incredible songs on the band's follow-up, this year's American Slang, I am fairly confident they're a band that is going to be with us for a while. At the very least, I have a strong feeling the best is yet to come from singer and songwriter Brian Fallon. The `59 Sound is, to make a fun comparison, like my musical version of Frosted Mini-Wheats; it appeals to the grown-up in me and the kid in me. It rocks hard and it full of passion and cries of youth but it's lyrics references to growing up, to ghosts of girlfriends and places past, are reflective and haunting. I can listen to and fully grasp why my kids dig it and I especially like the notion that if they dig it up in 5 years or 10 years they'll still love it but hear something different in each of it's 12 songs.
--
Thanks for reading and I hope some other friends take a cue and make their own list, be it descriptive like mine or just a list. :)
J