Copping from my friends Liz and Dan, here is a list of my Top 5 Albums for a Rainy Day. (Although they wrote theirs for a snow day, it's no longer snowy in upstate New York - we have entered monsoon season.) Qualifications for list status: must be an album you can thoroughly enjoy listening to from start to finish without skipping over any tracks. I find that to be a tall order because there are SO many wonderful songs out there that just didn't make it onto a 5-star album full of nothing but other stellar tracks. Sometimes an artist has a real burst of inspiration that doesn't necessarily carry through an entire album, forcing them to come up with some filler to conform to the album format. I don't hold that against artists any more because I think the album is kind of an artificial construct and doesn't need to be the way people acquire music any more (not exactly a groundbreaking pronouncement - clearly the album is losing ground in today's music scene). Anyway, to dig up such gems I'm finding I have to look outside the current decade - any big surprise there?
In autobiographical order:
The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper
Paul Simon: Graceland
Bonnie Raitt: self-titled
Ladysmith Black Mambazo: Liph' Iquinso
Weezer: Pinkerton
Apparently they stopped making good albums when I graduated high school.
Is there a theme here? Sing-alongables? Certainly not, as I can't sing one word of the Ladysmith album. But that album, along with the others, were all listened to so intensely at a certain point of my life that the entire group of songs evokes a time and place and set of emotions which I wouldn't mind re-living sometime. Next rainy day, maybe.
2 comments:
I think that rain and snow are fairly interchangeable so the theme definitely still works. I have to disagree about the album comment though. It is important not to confuse a collection of unrelated pop songs on the same CD with a true album, a collection of thematically related ones that tell a story and provide a snapshot of an artist in a specific period of time.
You know, I hadn't thought of it that way. I guess I just thought we were going for albums that are all good, no filler, but I hadn't taken it the step further to consider the "album" as a singular artistic statement. Fair enough! Doesn't change my list, but it does remind me to have more appreciation for the full-album format.
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