20 Albums I Will Always Love & Why

Streaming services today generate upwards of 85% of music industry sales. 

CDs have essentially vanished. 

Thanks to humanity's relentless quest for efficiency, we now finger-sweep through precisely curated songlists on phones available any moment of our choosing, paid for seemless transactions we don't think about. To borrow a drug industry metaphor, we've decoded the active ingredient in all music that makes us feel a certain way, measured out exact dosages to achieve desired emotional levels, removed unnecessary filler, then hooked ourselves to an IV drip with a mainline port. Turn a valve anytime and in it goes....desired feeling....voila!

The notion of an album as an important creative statement feels obsolete today, lost to a bygone era. Artists still "drop" music as collections of songs we had since the origins of recorded music consumed as a tangible product, but they are no longer taken in thoughtfully in one sitting, with visual and contextual information that give the listener a full appreciation for what the artist is expressing.  

Think about how rapidly technology has changed photography. We have thousands of old photographs in boxes, ones that on occasion I linger through to wonder back in time; lousy lighting, yellowed colors and damaged corners, unfiltered people looking terribly imperfect, haphazardly scribbled dates and notes on the backs. But isn't it rich going through those sometimes? All the inefficient, flawed little things about the humanity in them bring you right back to when where those images happened. Would the memory be as vivid without that? I digress. 

Back to music. Vinyl LP records are making a modest comeback. Why? I suspect some still long for the nostalgia of holding a record, taking in the cover art, combing through the detailed liner notes while listening to the verses. For me, the full experience consisted of 1) hearing something new on the radio that intrigued me, 2) getting it stuck infectiously in my head for weeks as it popped up unexpectedly, 3) going into a record store, picking over stacks and stacks of albums while considering the purchase, 4) bringing it home, unwrapping it, putting it on a turntable, feeling the anticipation of placing the needle over the rotating vinyl disc while as the first notes crackled through a speaker, 5) digesting every detail of the packaging while listening to both sides, and finally 6) placing it on my shelf proudly as I built my library of musical favorites. 

What an inefficient waste of time and effort all of that was, right? Today, with that drudgery happily eliminated, I just tap a few buttons and the feeling happens. I can even shop for things and watch cat videos while it's playing. If it any moment I wanna toggle to something else...BAM! I'm there instantly.  Ah.....progress!!!

Enough with the cynicism. It is what it is. Like all humans, I too have adapted and am along for the ride. Spotify now tees up what I want to hear and when I want to hear it. But looking back on my entire life experience with music, from 45s on a tiny box turntable in my playroom, through albums and 8-tracks, cassettes and compact discs, and now, streaming services, I think I most enjoyed listening to music back when the experience was more interactive. When the music engaged me fully.

Like those old photographs, I've pulled from my mind and blown the dust off of twenty experiences with music that I want to share. I've owned all of these recordings in the popular physical format of that time, and the pleasure I had taking them is worth revisiting. 

This is in no way a Best Of All Time proclimation. I'm sure most of these are not on Rolling Stone's Greatest Ever lists (but a few are). These old photos are all mine, complete with little scribblings and goofy expressions. The height of self-endulgence...my list...my rules.

And they are......

When I want to just quietly reflect...an empty house, a glass of cabernet and Kind Of Blueplaying in the background transports me to anywhere I want to be.

I'd been a fan of Coltraine, Brubeck, and Ella, but never really appreciated Miles Davis until watching Ken Burns' 2000 Jazz documentary that explored his interesting life, with a focus on this recording in paricular. Miles conceived the overall vision, then scribbled down a rough idea of what a few of the best jazz musicians who ever lived should try and play in particular spots. It was recorded without rehearsal in just nine hours across two days. There are bands out there today that tour around and do nothing but cover this entire album live from start to finish, hopeful on any given night to recreate a tiny fraction of the magic of the original record.

Such intimacy always makes me feel like I'm prying into the private lives of the musicians themselves. But they're letting me in...just this once.

Years ago while cleaning out my mother's basement, I came across this treasure alongside a dusty 1928 Ethel Waters thick vinyl artifact. I'd always loved American bossa nova and had previously discovered Antonio Carlos Jobim and the Portuguese samba music that inspired it. But this musty discovery would reveal

exactly how the two managed to collide. The trio joined forces to play eight memorable tunes from the vast Jobim songbook, together; Jobim's gentle voice and guitar combined on the tracks with Getz' American radio-friendly tenor saxophone.

The recording of The Girl From Ipanema leads with Jobim's original Portguese, then transitions to Astrid Gilberto's sultry, globally recognizable English vocal. And the liner notes, essentially love letters they each wrote about the sheer joy of working together on this record, are themselves a work of art.

Of all their groundbreaking, culture-shaping creations, this collection is ironically one of The Beatles least unified; a giant pile of compositions they worked on separately while meditating their way across India. But the sheer number of awesome songs (it was their only double album) puts this at the very top of my Beatles favorites. Whenever I put this on it's usually to hear one specific song, but everything is so great that I have to let it run itself out. Each song so unique, so unconcerned about its own mass appeal or radio suitability, like a mosaic of hand-written, deeply personal essays.

Every once in a while I run across the inspiration behind one of these classic songs, it's original motivation an exciting new discovery....a musical gift that keeps on giving.

Recently I watched a TV benefit concert for the LA Wildfires. Pink absolutely crushed a cover of Led Zeppelin's Babe I'm Gonna Leave You, a song that no doubt most of her audience had never heard before. She characterized it as one of the few songs that made her feel good way deep down inside, something the audience needed that night. Her take was so terrific that it got me back into this album, off of Led Zeppelin's 1969 debut record. I was surprised at how fantastic this entire things still sounds.

Back in the '50s, Elvis introduced the white world to Rock & Roll, an electrified, up-tempo collision of popular music and American delta blues. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones would take it further, but it was Led Zeppelin, and specifically this album that would take it to the highest heights. Drinking beer with buddies until the wee hours, we'd play stacks of Zeppelin records on a turn table on the floor, reveling in its coolness. Of all their more commercially successful albums that would come later, this one best shows off the brilliant musicianship, spectacular production work, and most of all the raw virtuousity of Robert Plant's bluesy voice back then.

Check out their mind blowing version of You Shook Me, a Willie Dixon blues cover, complete with harmonica and Hammond organ, to hear what I'm talking about.

As a child I remember roadtripping in my single mom's white Volkswagon Beetle to visit her friends and their kids about my age. A black handled case was full of 8-track cassettes shaped like plastic pop-tarts that we'd jam into a portable player at my feet, plugged into an always full dashboard ashtray. With the windows rolled down, we would jam out to The Carpenters, Roberta Flack, The Fifth Dimension, and this Carole King classic, Tapestry.

I was too young at the time to know how central King was to the 1960s American songbook, but I'd heard and loved every song on this early '70s album that would become King's signature musical statement as a singer of her own songs. There's something so organic and relatable and nostalgic about these songs that I never get tired of. 

I hadn't discovered Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon until college, my young ears at the time trained only to hear songs with a beginning, a middle and defined ending. Dark Side was more a musical stream of consciousness, flowing from one sonic crescendo to the next, a journey with sometimes jarring pivots and alarming sounds that explored the darker side of musical fame and fortune the songwriters had no doubt personally experienced. Floyd would take this theme further with the 1980 release of The Wall, with an accompanying full-length concept movie, a cultural phenomenon of my late high school years.

My college friends would gather at someone's apartment, retap a lukewarm keg from the night before, put Dark Side on the stereo and lie about, haphazardly daydrinking while the afternoon sun beemed through a window, all thoughts of schoolwork and productivity blissfully forgotten. If only the conversations between me and my faux intellectual friends on those hazy days of youth could have been taped, they'd sure sound cringy today.

But this album, which spent a mind-blowing record 980 weeks on the Billboard Top 200 charts since its 1973 release (yes, that is NOT a typo), still today resonates with multiple generations as a distinctly unique musical experience.

As a child I'd heard little Steveland Morris (a.k.a Stevie Wonder) on the radio, but Songs In The Key Of Life was the first album he released when I was old enough to be paying attention - an epic two-disc masterpiece. Loaded top to bottom with wildly popular radio hits dropped between utterly fantastic songs never to be skipped, he'd nearly blown off making it to focus on African charity work. The commercial world was sure glad he did decide to make this record; while his three previous albums all won Grammys, this one, Songs In The Key swept nearly every one that year. 

What I feel when I listen to it is simply pure joy, delivered by possibly the most prolific male singing voice in modern music history who wrote every one of his songs hand played many of the instruments on his records himself. I have Love's In Need Of Love in my current spotify rotation, mainly to counterbalance the hateful vitriol permeating society today. 

There's something spiritually grounding in Stevie Wonder's music. I always come out of listening to it way happier.

Rumors was one of the first albums I ever bought myself at a record store. With four top-ten singles on the radio, It was everywhere. As kids do, I'd constantly lift the record player needle and move it to another song on the record that I already knew. Eventually this album would teach me to give the unknown tracks a chance, and when I did, a whole trove of great stuff immediately revealed itself. Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks all proved to be formidable song writers. Later I would appreciate the extreme challenges these five young people faced, making only their second record together while fighting through romantic breakups among/between each other (inspiring the album's eventual title), competing amongst themselves for coveted record space (so many great songs ended up on later projects), all while battling various alcohol and substance abuse issues. Through the extreme tumult, they sensed the creative enormity of what they were making, and they fought hard to hold it together.

I'm not going out on a limb by saying that Rumors still holds up as one of the all-time great contemporary rock/pop albums.  My daughter's friends love it. The older it gets, the better it sounds.

This just might qualify as my #1 favorite album of all time. In high school I'd heard Peg and Josie on the radio but they hadn't yet registered fully on me. One of my college roommates was a big Steely Dan fan and would talk endlessly about their cynicism and ironic lyrics (the band named after a dildo from the Burroughs novel The Naked Lunch). We'd dig through the old campus record store for vinyl copies of Countdown To Ecstacy, The Royal Scam and Pretzel Logic, take them back to the apartment and totally nerd out on the weird arrangements and Fagan's whiny voice (one either becomes obsessed with it or can not stand it). We both fell hard on the totally obsessed side.

As our descent into Dan deepened, Aja emerged for us as musical genuus, as if Donald Fagan and Walter Becker reached their creative summit and planted a perfection flag. They'd managed to do for pop/rock music what Miles Davis did for jazz, however it took over 40 musicians, several years and an insane amount of studio manipulation to get there.  I think Aja marks the birth certificate for what we now call yacht rock.

I'd venture if you asked AI today to formulate the ultimate pop/rock/jazz record, out would come Aja. From the opening ping on Black Cow to the fade at the end of Josie, I wouldn't alter a single note. Larry Carlton, one of their go-to guitarists summed it up best. "First, they insisted on making everything sound perfect. Then they would rough it up just a little, as if it all happened by accident."

In their relentless quest for effortless perfection, only the two of them could see the path. But when they finally finished it, the rest of us would finally see it too.

I remember my senior year in college hearing a song on the radio. Time And Tide didn't get much airplay and disappeared quickly. But there was something about the foreign accent of the singer that kept me wanting more. After graduation I bought the the album. Ten songs, every one terrific. Cool jazz elements. All stylistically similar but each one unique. Couldn't stop listening to it. So I made a casette and mailed it to my long distance Italian girlfriend. She tried to claim my discovery as her own...that the singer was definitely part of some Italian band she knew. Turns our she was right. Barbara Trzetrzelewska (a.k.a Basia) was in Matt Bianco, an Italian jazz band prior to this, her American debut record. 

Our shared love for this album lasted through a long distance courtship, a San Diego wedding, and remains a popular Spotify go-to today. Basia would eventually reunite off and on with Matt Bianco in later years, making even more super cool, super jazzy stuff.

I'm not a fan '80s music. Commercialism was metasticizing. Music on the radio sounded as if it had been extruded from a cheese grater. Many of the '70s musical greats adapted, employing more synth pop and catchy hooks....a lot of empty calories for the ear.

Not Linda Rondstadt. Firmly established as a folk/rock/pop legend and a reliable performer, she consistently crushed live gigs with one of the most skilled singing voices in the industry. Her journey through the cultural pop wasteland of this decade brought her to entirely new genres. She'd taken on the great American songbook with Nelson Riddle. She'd done a collaborative country album with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris. Next, she would tackle the authentic Mariachi of her Spanish father's heritage. 

But Rondstadt didn't just try it out...she so fully absorbed every vocal subtelty and musical nuiance on Canciones De Mi Padre that you would swear she'd spent her entire life singing in Spanish. You need not be a fan of this music to fall madly in love with Linda's interpretations of these songs. You may not even wander into or out of this genre ever again. But I urge anyone who appreciates beautifully human music as an art form to give this a complete listen. J. D. Souther once referred to his dearest friend and musical collaborator Linda Rondstadt as "A true auteur".

I once supervised a warehouse staffed mainly by young Mexican women who worked Saturdays for the OT. I snuck back there one weekend morning to catch them scurrying up and down ladders, unpacking material, speaking in Spanish, and I heard this blaring from their portable CD player (it was Saturday after all). They smiled unapologetically. The songs were all well known in the Mexican barrios from the countless Mariachi bands that played them over the years. But they told me this album, performed by a gringo that never spoke truly fluent Spanish, captured the feeling in them more beautifully than anything they'd ever heard before.

After Sheryl Crow's first big radio hit, the quirky, catchy All I Wanna Do, many wrote her off as just another novelty. When her second album came out, I decided on impulse to buy the CD, simply entitled Sheryl Crow, to give it a listen.

Concerns about her musical credentials were quickly put to rest.  Recorded in a small New Orleans studio right by Bourbon Street, Crow was determined this time to prove her musical metal. She wrote and produced each of these 13 songs herself, even playing everything from electric guitar, bass, and piano/electric keyboards (she's also an accomplished accordian player). Modern relationships, moral dilemmas, blurred lines between right and wrong; absolutely stellar songwriting with a voice that richly interprets every complicated emotional element of these songs. Years later, the Oscar-winning film Erin Brockovich would turn many of them into chart busting pop hits.

For me, as great as all the radio hits were (and still are), the darker songs (Home, The Book, Ordinary Morning) remain my personal favorites. Ordinary Morning, the CDs intense final track, feels a lot like John Lennon's I'm So Tired. Utterly fantastic from start to finish!

I'm breaking with the format here including this one, a collection of her past and present (at the time) material. But for me, this is the definitive set of early-career Alison Krause and Union Station classics. 

If you were to cast a movie with an angel, and if that angel had to sing, you'd need to hire Alison Krause for the voiceover. Everything about this collection reveals what is so special about Alison Krause. And with this band, they literally take Bluegrass to a new level of sophistication. The first track, Baby, Now That I Found You, is pure perfection. Her pitch perfect volce transitions seemlessly into a string solo, followed by Alison's own empathetic violin. Every note is in just the right place. It all literally floats to you on a cloud. I particularly love Oh, Atlanta, and their cover of John Lennon's I Will. You won't be able to just skip through this collection, every song here is a must-listen. 

I've written extensively about his album already so I wont repeat myself here. Finally getting the chance to visit Blues Alley recently and be in the very spot where this night actually happened was the fulfillment of a major bucket list item.

Eva's music never fails me. It's always there when I need it. Every time I hear her voice I feel fortunate she existed at all. Had she lived, I fear the commercial world might have kidnapped her against her will, the ensuing creative compromises ultimately runining everything.

This single night of music, in front of a tiny DC club audience, represents the height of what music should constantly aim to be.

She'd been an indie artist on the gradual rise for years just outside the mainstream. But Sarah McLachlan's 1997 Surfacing got nearly everyone's attention. Personal, emotional, even gut-wrenching in places. She sang about friends dying of AIDS, heroin addiction, "facing ugly things about yourself", all in a lush soprano voice with yodel-like vocal transitions. I think of it as music that makes me just want to be held. My wife and I fell asleep holding each other to this album many nights back then.

Her ensuing Lilith Fair concerts celebrated "girl power", female indie artists who wrote boldly, bravely.  Lilith Fairs got wildly popular over a three-year stretch until McLachlan one day just shut them down. They'd become too commerical in her view.

All good things must one day come to an end.  But never this record.

The path to Welsh folk/rock singer K.T. Dunstall came to me gradually, clue by clue. An American Idol performer once covered a catchy new song I'd never heard, Black Horse And The Cherry Tree. Then a friend, a real musical connissuer, sent me a random compilation CD that included Under The Weather. Then I heard Other Side Of The World in a movie, that voice now becoming recognizable to me. It was finally time to go out and buy her 2004 debut CD and hear all of it. 

Wow! The songs I hadn't heard were even more impressive than the ones out there. K.T. (Kate in actuality, the initials just a for-fun affectation) makes everything sound raw, spontaneous, highly charged, like someone who just bursts off the couch, plugs into a random amp and goes off (there must be more to it?). I checked out little youtube clips of her just strumming acoustic and playing some of her deep cuts. Way beyond great!

I used to joke about hearing her play at some small venue someday as making my bucket list. Happily got to check that one off in 2023, when she came this way with another beloved artist, Shawn Colvin. Happy to report that at 49, K.T still rocks with the best of them.

By 2006, Pandora had become the way I was finding new music. One singer I found that way that really stuck for me was Melody Gardot. The first song of hers I stumbled onto was Baby I'm A Fool. Backed by only brushes, a floor base and her own acoustic guitar, that bombshell Bridget Bardot hair and dark sunglasses was an immediate attention getter. But beyond all that, this French-Canadian jazz vocalist really blew my mind.

At 19, she suffered a serious brain injury from a bicycle accident. Doctors recommended music therapy for regaining her cognitive and verbal functions. During a full year in the hospital she graduated from humming to singing to writing songs, playing a guitar while lying on her back. Three years later, Worrisome Heart was released. The arrangements are sparse, her vocals soft and understated, not unlike Norah Jones on her debut, Come Away With Me. She remains permanently sensitive to bright light, thus the everpresent uber-cool shades. 

My ten-year old daughter became equally obsessed with her. I ended up scoring us tenth-row tickets when Gardot announced a show at nearby Berkeley. We overdosed on this CD all the way to the concert.

Before Austrailian artist Sia Kate Isabel Furler (a.k.a Sia) struck gold writing anthems for major artists frequently sung out car windows, she produced several years of stunning artistic work as a toiling, relatively unknown artist. This collection of mostly live recordings includes one of a kind covers, songs she'd written and recorded with British downtempo/techno band Zero 7, and a few selections from a budding solo career. These songs showcase a supremely tuned vocal instrument that can make me feel exactly what I'm supposed to feel. Her gift for writing emotionally charged songs with moments of dramatic irony is so unique that pop artists now line up to commission her songs to advance their own careers. 

Sia's foray into crazy wigs, bizarre videos, hiding her face during live performances over the past fifteen years has admittedly put me off a bit.  But it doesn't diminish this sweet spot in her career, the singularly moving quality of her voice, the way she would breathe through certain sections, dragging notes artfully, literally inhabiting the songs she performed. I will always return back to and fondly remember these songs and the power of her those performances back then.  This recording captures every bit of that.

Long ago a local musician my wife worked with (most musicians actually have day jobs) tried to turn me onto a new singer at the time, Brandi Carlile. I checked out her debut album but it failed to move me. And then I pulled up a youtube clip of her playing in what looked like a pub somewhere, with two identical looking bald dudes playing acoustic guitar sitting astride from her on barstools. The song was called The Story, and it began gently. But when the second verse came around, the second line of that verse blasted into me like a fireball. The twins kicked it into high gear with backing harmonies as Brandi Carlile properly introduced herself in a big way.

And then all the fabuolus qualities of her vocal repertoire showed up; the Roy Orbison-like yodel that kept sneaking in, the ability to go from gentle to raw and raging in an instant, the sheer poetry of every line (Ironically she's more poet than storyteller). Each song knew when to begin, when to end, where to intensify and when to gently caress your soul. I quickly gobbled up all four of her CDs she had out at the time and have been a big fan ever since. Several songs from this CD remain on my everyday spotify feed (Turpentine, Cannonball, Downpour (oh that mornful cello in the middle always gets me!), this recording emotionally engages me from start to finish.

Her career has since rocketed upward. She can be found today working with the industries most iconic superstars. But that uncommon gift, the ability to poetically capture the human experience, is still present in everything she does.    

By 2018, I'd been following young Tori Kelly's career for several years, a musical prodigy that, despite dazzling looks, off-the-charts vocal talent and inventive songwriting skills, hadn't yet broken through to secular music's A-List. A straight-arrow moral compass and unwillingness to sex it up likely contributed to the pedestrian pace of a career that seemed initially so fast tracked.

Christian/Gospel was calling for her. And with the 2018 release of Hiding Place, she finally answered that call, and in styleno small way.  With the help of gospel Godfather Kirk Franklin, Kelly traveled to his Dallas studio to discuss maybe recording a song together (neither had ever written collaboratively). In just a few weeks and with the help of a mind-blowing choir, it was made. It scored Grammy Awards for Best Gospel Album and Best Gospel Song (Never Enough). The final track, the epic full-on acapella original, Soul Anthem (It Is Well) will send chills through anyone with a functioning soul.

If you took the trueness of spirit of a very young Amy Grant, then added the musical skills and vocal virtuosity of mid-career Stevie Wonder, then tossed in the modern musical spicy edge of Meghan Trainer, you'd have the recipe for Tori Kelly.

I first heard this CD while driving home. I was so moved I raced in to my wife waving it. "You need to stop whatever you're doing and listen to this right now."  From upstairs I could here it playing. When it ended, I heard a click, then she started playing it all over again from the beginning. Now we were both obsessed.

*****

And so all good things do in fact come to an end. Aside from the nearly extinct used record shops I sometimes find and wonder into, the era of the album for me is basically over. I think Hiding Place may have been one of the very last CDs we ever purchased.

I'm not sure what new music experiences await. Going to hear someone play live is now the only way I get the same buzz I once got buying and listening to a full-length album for the first time.  At least I have these old photos. 

It is what it is.