My Top 20

1. The Band, The Band, 1969. Tough to pick a favorite, but right now I'd have to go with this one. The music ranges from straight blues ("Rag Mama Rag," with a wonderful fiddle intro) to pop-rock at its best ("Up On Cripple Creek"). All the songs are flawless, and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" is an absolute classic.

2. Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys, 1966. The original concept album. At times it approaches sonic perfection. "Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)" and "God Only Knows" are obvious highlights, but the album works as an organic whole--songs build on each other and create a pervasive atmosphere of lost love and frustrated dreams. "Caroline, No" is the perfect last song.

3. Blood On the Tracks, Bob Dylan, 1975. Dylan improved with age, naturally. This is him in his prime. Nowhere does he tell a story better than in "Tangled Up In Blue" and "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts." The former is perhaps the canonical Dylan song. So much is evoked by so few words. One of my favorite songs on the album is "Meet Me In the Morning"--he's singing to a woman he desperately wants to run away with, but he knows their love is doomed to fade quickly. Yet there is still some sort of hope: "We could be in Kansas/By the time this love begins to thaw."

4. Abbey Road, Beatles, 1969. This is by far the Beatles' best album. Each Beatle was at his best--Lennon created "Come Together and "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" (one of my favorite songs as a 5-year-old), McCartney had the brilliant "You Never Give Me Your Money" and "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," Harrison grew out of his silly Indian phase and wrote two of the Beatles' prettiest songs, "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun," and Ringo sang "Octopus's Garden" and had a nice drum solo on the famous medley on the second side of the album.

5. Kind of Blue, Miles Davis, 1959. The best jazz album of all time. Listen to it on a great stereo system, and/or with incredible headphones. This is what jazz is supposed to be.

6. Aja, Steely Dan, 1977. Speaking of masterpieces, this is it for Steely Dan. The height of their smooth, jazzy, studio-perfect sound is these seven songs. "Peg," "Deacon Blues," and "Josie" are impossibly catchy FM-radio classics, "Aja" is a triumph of "fusion" which literally resulted from fusing two different songs, and the best of the songs might be the Fagen-Becker version of the Odyssey, "Home at Last."

7. Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Beatles, 1967. Some critics say this is the best album of all time. Well, perhaps if "She's Leaving Home" were less maudlin, or "Within You Without You" shorter, or "When I'm Sixty-Four" less cutesy. It is a great album, not the greatest, but still pretty incredible, and a fun listen every time.

8. 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul, 1989. The best rap album of all time. "The Magic Number" and "Jenifa Taught Me (Derwin's Revenge)" (the latter being probably the only rap song ever containing an unaccompanied rendition of "Chopsticks") are examples of the straight hits which peppered the album, but the true genius of the album comes out in the filler. "Transmitting Live From Mars" is a looped French instructional record. "Can U Keep a Secret" is hard to describe, but brilliant nonetheless. And the sampling is impeccable. "Eye Know" samples both Steely Dan's "Peg" and Otis Redding's "Dock of the Bay," and "Say No Go" samples Hall and Oates. But the centerpiece of the album is "Me Myself and I," the irresistible hit.

9. The Joshua Tree, U2, 1987. The first few songs of the album are among the top 5 or 10 pop-rock songs of the 1980s--"Where the Streets Have No Name," "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," and "With Or Without You." But the rest of the album is nearly as good. "Running To Stand Still" and "In God's Country" are standouts as well. And the songs manage to actually be about something.

10. Graceland, Paul Simon, 1986. We were driving back from Maine to Boston after a depressing loss (ultimate, Regionals, 1998). The driver says, "Instead of rehashing the game and what went wrong, I'm going to put in this album and we're all going to sing along." An hour later, our spirits were raised and our voices were gone.

11. OK Computer, Radiohead, 1997. The "concept" sounds stupid: man against machine in the near future. But this isn't a Rush album, it's a subtle, sweeping, desolate soundscape. Critically acclaimed albums like this are often like the great books that no one's ever read (one that springs to mind is Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks," which I agree is absolutely brilliant but hasn't been played on my stereo in years). But this is too catchy to fall into that trap. The best songs are early on: "Paranoid Android" and "Subterranean Homesick Alien."

12. Automatic For the People, REM, 1992. Every REM fan has an opinion about when their best work was. I'm not a hardcore fan, but it seems to me like they reached their peak here. The silliness of "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite," the pathos of "Everybody Hurts," and the almost unbearable sweetness of "Nightswimming" and "Find the River"--and one of my personal favorites, "Star Me Kitten," with a lazy, relaxed atmosphere and some truly disturbing lyrics.

13. Blonde on Blonde, Bob Dylan, 1966. Anger, frustration, and a certain resigned attitude--things happen and Dylan takes them in stride as best he can. "One of Us Must Know" and "Most Likely You Go Your Way And I'll Go Mine" are just perfect songs about relationships gone bad, and the latter has one of my favorite Dylan verses of all time: "You say you're sorry for/Telling stories that you know I believe are true/You say you've got some other/Kind of lover and yes, I believe you do/You say my kisses are not like his/But this time I'm not gonna tell you why that is." The pieces de resistance, "Visions of Johanna" and "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," are vintage Dylan, but I like the less mystical stuff even better--"Temporary Like Achilles," "Absolutely Sweet Marie," and the wry "Leopard-Skin Pill Box Hat."

14. Flood, They Might Be Giants, 1990. "Istanbul (not Constantinople)" and "Birdhouse In Your Soul" are two of their best and best-known songs, but the geeky sensibility doesn't quite get in the way of the funny lyrics and the uniquely wonderful harmonizing. I'm still not sure what "Dead" is about, but I love to sing along. The melodies are what hold the humor together here, though. This album is a great album to listen to over and over again; it's just not like anything else I've heard. "Where was I/I forgot the point that I was making/I said if I was smart then I would save up for a piece of string and a rock to wind a string around." "I didn't apologize for when I was eight and I made my younger brother have to be my personal slave." "Would you mind if we balanced this glass of milk/Where your visiting friend accidentally was killed/Would it be OK with you if we wrote a reminder of things we'll forget to do today/Otherwise, using a green magic marker-if it's all right-on the top of your head?"

15. Katy Lied, Steely Dan, 1975. This is the best of pre-"Aja" Steely Dan, with songs about deadbeats ("Daddy Don't Live in That New York City No More"), jailbait ("Everyone's Gone to the Movies"), unattainable women ("Your Gold Teeth II"), more jailbait ("Rose Darling"), stock market crashes ("Black Friday"), drugs and relationships (the majestic "Doctor Wu"), nostalgia for New York ("Bad Sneakers"), alienation ("Any World (That I'm Welcome To)"), fishing and life ("Throw Back the Little Ones"), and God knows what ("Chain Lightning"). Beautiful music, smart lyrics, and wonderful singing (I confess to liking Michael McDonald's voice, especially on the backup vocals for "Rose Darling").

16. Time Out, Dave Brubeck, 1959. Well, of course the masterpiece here is "Take Five," which everybody has heard billions of times. The version here is not all that great; it's mostly a drum solo, and I recommend the live version on his "Great Concerts" album. The jazz on this album, by contrast, is slow, almost stilted, and restrained. With piano dominating, it reminds me of modern recordings of ragtime, with the same formal attention to melody and pacing. "Blue Rondo A La Turk" is another great song, also in a weird time signature (the theme of the album), and perhaps my favorite is "Three To Get Ready," which keeps alternating between 3/4 and 4/4, as if it can't make up its mind.

17. Here, My Dear, Marvin Gaye, 1979. This is such a unique album in so many ways--it's brutally honest without navel-gazing, pouring out deeply personal confessions and emotions without once losing its connection with the listener. With the haunting refrain "When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You" running throughout the album, this is the chronicle of a rather famous breakup. As part of Gaye's divorce settlement with his wife, the judge decreed that the royalties from his next album go to her. Hence the title of the album, and the content of the music. Songs like "Anger" and "You Can Leave, But It's Going To Cost You" (undoubtedly one of the greatest song titles of all time) will elicit rueful, knowing smiles from anyone who's ever survived the fallout from a bad breakup, and--importantly--the lyrics are not the only brilliant part of the songs (see "Time To Get It Together" and the beautiful, sad "Anna's Song"). Gaye may have had the last, bitter laugh here--the album flopped after the release of only one single, the laughably bad "A Funky Space Reincarnation," which I like to think was made intentionally to flop. Skip it and put the rest of the album on repeat.

18. Hejira, Joni Mitchell, 1975. Her masterpiece. Not as simplistic or self-indulgent as her earlier and later work (respectively), with a spare and unique sound coupled with the type of lyrics she tried too hard to write in her less-brilliant moments, full of killer lines like "And looking down on everything/I crashed into his arms," that most songwriters not named Bob Dylan would kill to write once. The road-trip theme circulates through all the songs, including "Amelia," which is probably the best of the lot, musing on life, love, and myths of Icarus and the pilot referred to in the title. I'm also quite fond of "Refuge of the Roads," the album's coda, with bittersweet memories of a turbulent life.

19. Exile in Guyville, Liz Phair, 1993. A little of this "I'm-a-strong-woman-and-screw-you-men" stuff goes a long way; I mean, when I can sum up the entire worldviews of certain pop singers in eight words like this, their music gets pretty tiring pretty quickly. I can't listen to Alanis Morrissette without wishing she'd just shut up and go talk to a psychiatrist. But this album is just fantastic--an unrepentant, cynical, melancholy review of past hurts and relationships gone bad. All eighteen songs are similarly brilliant. My favorites: "Explain It To Me," "Divorce Song," and "Stratford-On-Guy."

20. Songs in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder, 1976. I'm cheating a little here, since this is a double album. But maybe the thing to do is to burn a CD of all the good stuff. Maybe there's too much for one CD, but, like all double albums ever, the full set is a little uneven. I'd put in songs 5-9 of the first disc, and tracks 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 10 of the second. That's eleven brilliant songs. (You could add disc 1, track 3, disc 1, track 10, and disc 2, track 5 if you have room.) At any rate, this is gorgeous music at its best. Parts of the melodies of "Knocks Me Off My Feet," "Summer Soft," and "As" send chills up my spine pretty regularly. The songs I left out of the list above are all nice enough, with maybe only one clunker ("Saturn"), but I always get impatient and skip to the good stuff. These are spirited, happy, and--of course--catchy songs; most critics say this was the end of a five-year stretch during which Stevie Wonder was at his creative peak, and that stretch produced a lot of great music.
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