13th Floor Elevators frontman Roky Erickson died this weekend. Any death is tragic, and much of Erickson’s life was tragic, but for listeners of the Elevators’ stunning debut, it may be hard to believe Roky ever occupied physical space on this planet in the first place.

Strip out Tommy Hall’s electric jug and the Elevators might sound like other music you’ve heard. Jefferson Airplane seemed to strive for a similar sound. Moby Grape had a lot in common. More than three decades later, Clinic paid homage to “Reverberations” on the wonderfully reverent “Internal Wrangler”. None of these bands, though, captured the chaos of “Psychedelic Sounds”.

It’s that electric jug that sets the scene, one bound by neither time nor place, perhaps from a dream or, more likely, a trip. If this music does recall a time, it’s almost certainly later in the ’60s than 1966, when the Elevators burst on the scene, invented a genre, and promoted a lifestyle. That lifestyle, detached from reality by LSD, would wreak havoc on the band and jeopardize each member’s future, but the document they left behind is a singular achievement.

Opening tracks “You’re Gonna Miss Me” and “Roller Coaster” are simply arresting. This is stop-whatever-you’re-doing-and-try-to-figure-out-how-these-sounds-are-coming-through-your-speakers territory. “Splash 1” descends into balladry, setting the jug aside to give Erickson’s voice and Stacy Sutherand’s guitar some room to breathe, briefly hinting that humans might be behind the instruments. But “Reverberations” brings the jug back in full effect, and it plays some role on the rest of the album, even when Sutherland’s guitar takes center stage on tracks like “Fire Engine”.

These same songs recorded by a different band may not have been a classic. These same songs recorded by the same band without the electric jug might still stand out as an early landmark for psychedelic rock. With the jug, this is required listening, a document so central to the story of rock and roll that every record store should put a copy at the check-out counter next to “Are You Experienced?” and “Revolver”.

That’s my 100th-favorite album.

I don’t really care about lyrics.

That’s an exaggeration, I suppose. Matching words and images with sounds is a key criterion in the way I rate music. I’ve written about Kendrick Lamar and Kacey Musgraves recently, and while both make great music, their lyrics are central to their appeal. Let’s start this essay another way:

I have no idea what The National are singing about most of the time, but I can’t get enough of them.

Let’s take a look at some lyrics from “Bloodbuzz Ohio”, the centerpiece of The National’s best album, 2010’s “High Violet”:

Stand up straight at the foot of your love
I lift my shirt up

I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees
I’ll never marry but Ohio don’t remember me

I’m on a bloodbuzz
God I am
I’m on a blood, buzz

The National aren’t alone in writing lyrics that may seem obtuse to many listeners. Most art walks a fine line between recounting one’s personal experiences and sharing universal concepts in a relatable way. Much of popular music is externalizing the internal and deciding how much to tell the listener and how much to let her interpret on her own. Let’s try something a little more straightforward from “Conversation 16”:

I was afraid, I’d eat your brains
I was afraid, I’d eat your brains
‘Cause I’m evil
‘Cause I’m evil

Ok then.

Why, if I don’t know or care what they’re talking about, is “High Violet” one of my 20 favorite albums of the current decade? It’s those same songs. Not the words, but the sounds.

Try listening to the nonsense above in Matt Berninger’s rich baritone and not singing along. Try listening to Bryan Devendorf’s slow-build drum frenzies without feeling your own bloodbuzz (whatever that is). Let Bryce Dessner’s arrangements wash over you and you’ll be so transfixed that the balderdash coming out of Berninger’s mouth might as well be your personal diary.

In anyone else’s hands, “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks” would be rubbish. In The National’s hands, it’s a strangely poignant anthem, worthy of closing one of the great albums of this era. But enough about the end. This album starts strong too. “Terrible Love” doesn’t quite match “Fake Empire”, the opener of the band’s previous album (#176 on my list), but it shares that song’s winning start-subdued-and-wake-us-up-with-drums aesthetic. “Anyone’s Ghost” and “Afraid of Everyone” are songs that get stuck in your head even if you don’t know any of the lyrics (or titles).

Some albums draw you in with lyrics. Others, like “High Violet”, wrap you up in sounds and let the lyrics burrow under your skin. Me and your sister do live in a lemonworld. I am walking with spiders as a result of some terrible love. I am afraid I’ll eat your brains.

That’s my 175th-favorite album.

Every Beatles album between “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Abbey Road” is canon. Universally known, roundly praised, generally loved. To bring a critic’s ear to any of these albums in the 21st century is to acquiesce to popular sentiment or to try to contradict that sentiment and look like a fool.

Those albums are rock and roll, not because they sound like the rock and roll that came before, but because they defined the rock and roll that came after. The Beatles hit on 20 every time and drew an ace every time.

If one can have a personal relationship with a Beatles album, it has to be from the beginning or the end. To claim to be a fan of “Revolver” or “Abbey Road” is akin to claiming a personal relationship with sunshine or chocolate. Tell me “Please Please Me” is your favorite, though, and I’m genuinely curious as to why.

My book states my preference for four Beatles albums, all straight from the canon, that I believe are better than “Let It Be”. That said, I relate to “Let It Be” differently than the other records. From the goofy opening “I dig a pygmy” speech and the throwback drum thump of “Two of Us”, it’s clear that this is not the natural progression from the White Album or “Abbey Road”. It’s no edict on the direction of rock. It’s just four guys jamming in the studio and celebrating each other’s idiosyncrasies. And it’s awesome.

Some of my adoration for “Let It Be” may be the result of the way it entered my life. I grew up with mid-sixties Beatles. My mom was playing “Rubber Soul” and “Beatles For Sale” before I had any opinions (nor interest in forming any opinions) about music. Classic rock radio played the hits from late-sixties Beatles an endless loop. I knew and loved The Beatles before I even cared about the music of my own generation.

“Let It Be”, on the other hand, came to me later. I heard Fiona Apple sing “Across the Universe” in the closing credits of “Pleasantville” before I ever heard John Lennon sing it. It’s a Beatles-caliber song, but not a Beatles-typical song. That’s true of so much of “Let It Be”. A first listen feels more like uncovering a lost gem by Monks or 13th Floor Elevators than adding one more Beatles record to your collection.

It’s quite an anomaly that an album with three classic-rock radio staples is full of moments that feel like intimate conversations between artist and listener. Even the well-known title track is preceded on the album by the strange and playful “Dig It”. Side two is filled with genre exercises like the rockabilly “One After 909″, the blues of For You Blue”, and the neoclassical “The Long and Winding Road”. Quirks abound, but the music is as slick and deft as anything else in the group’s unparalleled catalog.

I may be one of millions who feel this way, but “Let It Be” is my Beatles album.

That’s my 146th-favorite album.

Just after I wrote the last entry, in which I praised Kacey Musgraves as a breath of progressive, fresh air in the smog of conservative country music, I read Allison Glock’s essay about Dolly Parton in “Here She Comes Now: Women in Music Who Have Changed Our Lives”.

Glock bestows very similar praise upon Dolly, painting her as the benevolent rebel I credit Kacey with being, only with a forty-year head start. Did I underrate Dolly by missing that context? I took the morning to investigate, checking out five of Parton’s records, culminating with multiple spins of her masterpiece (and one of two of her albums I already new well), “Jolene”.

I think the difference between Dolly’s progressiveness and Kacey’s is that Dolly doesn’t flaunt it with her lyrics- she proves it just by showing up. Dolly’s persona was a revolution in itself. An empowered woman who broke free of her personal songwriter right before recording “Jolene” to start writing her own songs and sharing her truth with a vast audience. Kacey arrived after the revolution, using the platform offered to her by Dolly and the other pioneers to further advance the rights of her LGBT listeners and young people who still felt constrained by cultures that hadn’t pushed forward as much as others had in the years since Dolly paved the way.

“Jolene” is a great album largely on the strengths of two classic songs- the hard-charging but weary title track and the move-you-to-tears “I Will Always Love You”. Both songs are so ubiquitous as a result of copious cover versions that hearing the original recordings here arouses a nostalgia that’s hard to pin to a time or place. As great as these two songs are, five minutes of bliss don’t make a top-1,00 album. The rest of these tracks are worthy filler, songs that fit like a sequin dress over Dolly’s honey-sweet voice and the down-home pep of her backing band. Closer “It Must Be You” is the best of the rest, its sweet sincerity matching the tone of the hits.

“Jolene” isn’t the consistent tour-de-force “Same Trailer, Different Park” is, but Musgraves hasn’t written an anthem as Texas-sized as “Jolene” or “I Will Always Love You”. That Kacey was able to carry the torch to such heights is largely a testament to the trail Dolly blazed. “Jolene” is the most worthy landmark along that trail.

That’s my 654th-favorite album.

Earlier this week, I recorded an episode of The Maine Show with Ben Sprague in promotion of the book (which you can still buy here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0578468220). Ben asked what genre(s) may be underrepresented on my list and I mentioned that I only included 15 or 16 country albums (it could be as many as 25 if we’re willing to stretch the definition of country).

I don’t listen to much country and when I do, it’s usually because it comes to my attention through some connection to another genre (Bob Dylan, The Byrds, and The Gun Club, for example, all dabbled in country). A rare example of an unabashed country album that found its way into heavy rotation on my speakers is Kacey Musgraves’s debut, “Same Trailer, Different Park”.

If the boots on the album cover aren’t a dead giveaway, the twang that opens “Silver Lining” is- Kacey Musgraves makes country music for country music fans. What sets her apart is the message- one often diametrically opposed to the values with which the American South is commonly associated. “Merry Go ‘Round” attacks southern traditions like marrying young and blindly following church leaders. “Follow Your Arrow” encourages the listener to be herself, regardless of social pressures to conform to a certain standard. “Blowin’ Smoke” attacks cigarettes and their users, adopting the plural first person to avoid preachiness.

The lyrics alone make “Same Trailer” a great album, but it’s the music that makes it a modern classic. Just 25 when the album was released, Musgraves had already been self-releasing music for over a decade. This allowed her to hit the scene fully-formed, self-assured enough to stand up to country hegemony, but down-home enough to win over the same fans whose travails she documents.

My knowledge of both country music and Southern American culture is admittedly limited, probably distorted by pop culture imagery and election maps. Young people in every community embrace progressive values, and the Nashville sound certainly courted fans along the political spectrum before Kacey Musgraves came along.

That said, picture this: You’re an LGBT youth in a town where every grocery store radio station plays country music and every gas-station TV is set to Fox News. Kid Rock’s and Ted Nugent’s hate and bigotry are commonly accepted as one side of a civilized discourse. Now you’re standing at a concert where thousands are singing along with “Follow Your Arrow”, each basking in her freedom to be the person they want to be. Not many musicians are capable of that kind of impact.

That’s my 390th-favorite album.

A few weeks ago, I reported that Sundays are for Chet Baker. This piece makes no effort to rescind that affirmation. After spinning two Chet Baker albums to open this Sunday morning on exactly the right note, I pivoted to Lee Morgan to try to keep that feeling going.

It missed, but in the right direction.

As soon as opening track “The Sidewinder” kicked in, the whole family reacted as I imagine most listeners do. Toes tapped. Thumbs drummed on the dining room table. Lips became trumpets.

It was still Sunday. We still pretended we didn’t have a care in the world (though we’d already returned from a morning Little League game and ushered countless grandparents out the door after some had helped with backyard construction projects). But Lee’s version of carefree (everything’s groovy; come out to play) is markedly different from Chet’s version (let’s celebrate the little things while pining for old times).

“The Sidewinder” is the soundtrack to that movie you remember having loved, but you can’t remember the title. It’s the product of the speakers at the community pool in halcyon days populated with polka-dot bikinis and strawberry lemonades. It’s the song that played in the park between the opening act and the headliner, just before the sun went down over the trees.

The rest of the album is a mix of further moments of Sunday afternoon serenity, often ushered by Barry Harris’s piano, and more upbeat saxophone and trumpet workouts, powered by Joe Henderson and Morgan himself, respectively. “Gary’s Notebook” picks up the pace, with both horns feeding off each other. “Boy, What a Night” even reaches a shrieking crescendo. By the time the hard-bopping “Hocus-Pocus” spins to a close, you’re checking to make sure you’ve set your app to repeat so you can get one more crack at “The Sidewinder”.

That’s my 325th-favorite album.

Collaboration albums occupy a unique space in music criticism. The primary motivation, it seems, for two artists to collaborate on an album is likely either lust for album sales by consolidating fanbases or a genuine desire to work with another person or group an artist respects. Rarely does a collaboration aim to make a definitive statement or define an era through an artist’s eyes. It follows that collaboration albums don’t usually top critics’ lists of a year’s best albums.

To wit, my top 1,000 albums between 1957 and 2017 include exactly ten one-time collaborations between two musicians or groups. None of these is among my 250 favorites.

What this analysis misses is that not every great album is the result of an artist intending to make a definitive statement or define an era. Often, a group writes some songs because they like writing songs, records them because they like playing music, releases them because they want people to hear their music and/or they like making money, and the album just turns out to be a classic.

Forty years after his hospitalization for drug addiction broke up The 13th Floor Elevators, Roky Erickson had spent far more time battling physical and mental illnesses than making music intended for public consumption when a unique opportunity presented itself. Erickson met Okkervil River’s Will Sheff, an Austin native and a fan, and Sheff agreed to produce some sessions for which he’d lend Erickson his band. With Okkervil at the peak of their powers, such an opportunity, I imagine, was hard to pass up.

“True Love Cast Out All Evil” sounds nothing like The 13th Floor Elevators. Most of it doesn’t sound much like Okkervil either. Rather, it sounds like an immensely talented musician making his first album on earth after spending the last fifty years in space. His psychedelia is traded for a dash of folk, a little bit of country, and some straightforward rock and roll. He pleads for his life with a judge and a lawman. He asks for help from various entities, divine and corporeal. There’s suffering and despair behind these tracks, but the music itself is loaded with hope.

The title track couldn’t be much simpler, but it hits hard. “Goodbye Sweet Dreams” would fit on an Okkervil River greatest hits collection. “Think of As One” is a man surrounded by friends helping him cling to his sanity. The whole album seems to celebrate the fact that it was even possible to make after so many decades of travails.

That’s my 653rd-favorite album.

Which is the best Kendrick Lamar album?

This question is as complex as they come, but I’m about to grace you with the unequivocal, incontrovertible, unassailable truth.

They all are.

If you’re looking for a document of the times- bold storytelling that challenges conventional wisdom and exposes truth- each of Kendrick’s albums is better than the prior one, peaking with the Pulitzer-Prize-winning “Damn”. If you want great beats and raps- homage to classic hip-hop while pushing the genre ever forward- “Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City” is the apex, with small steps back over the next two.

In between those two masterpieces lies “To Pimp a Butterfly”, perhaps the strongest combination of those two elements. Opener “Wesley’s Theory” and “King Kunta” suggest we might be in for a fun ride packed with car-rattling bass and singalong raps, but both are multi-part suites that expand from “at first I did love you, but now I just wanna f***” to an accounting of Lamar’s travails and successes via extended metaphor built on Alex Haley’s rebel slave Kunta Kinte. In between, “For Free?” is balls-out slam poetry reframing the politics of gender. This isn’t just a joyride.

Over 29 minutes, Lamar explores institutionalized racism, gang violence, police brutality, fighting one’s inner demons- topics that span states, nations, and eras- somehow keeping the whole thing grounded in a time and place- 2015 Compton.

“The Blacker the Berry”, “Alright”, and “i” are all classics that would stand out as the crowning achievement of most rappers’ careers, but on “To Pimp a Butterfly”, they’re all just part of the exercise. Every song treads more ground than we’ve been programmed to believe a hip-hop song is capable of covering. Dr. Dre and Compton’s G-funk ancestry are certainly launching points, but Kendrick proves himself capable of so much more that no one is thinking about the past after finishing a listen.

Each of Kendrick Lamar’s last three albums is an era-defining statement, the type of record that proves the power of music as perhaps the highest form of artistic expression, while at the same time making all other music feel trivial. In the middle of that run is “To Pimp a Butterfly”, a record that doesn’t rank as my favorite Kendrick Lamar album, but one that few other musicians could dream of making.

That’s my 42nd-favorite album.

“Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” was released in 1995. To me, it’s the soundtrack of 1997. I was never out in front of social trends.

That The Smashing Pumpkins were ever a social trend is something of a miracle. Their lead singer had a voice like a cornered animal. They dabbled in so many genres that they never spent more than a few minutes tethered to one. The second-biggest single of their career starts with a deadpan acknowledgement that “the world is a vampire”.

Despite all this, The Pumpkins were huge. That cornered animal, Billy Corgan, was a wizard with a guitar or basically any contraption that emits sound. Drummer Jimmy Chamberlain may have been more skilled at his craft than anyone else in his generation. More importantly, the band’s hyper-jaded worldview followed a road paved by Nirvana straight into the soul of a generation of teenagers whose only scout badges were for sarcasm and ennui.

So why is “Mellon Collie”, the Pumpkins’ third studio album, among my favorites? It’s hard to call it a hallmark of any genre, as the alt-rock label so often assigned to them is broad enough to house Hüsker Dü and Hootie and the Blowfish and welcomes The Wallflowers and Ween. I know all the lyrics from years of screeching along in my ’88 Corolla, but I couldn’t synthesize them into any kind of coherent message beyond “don’t care about anything, except someone named Lily and maybe ‘the girl I’ve loved all along’ cited in ‘Muzzle'”.

I think I love “Mellon Collie” because The Smashing Pumpkins didn’t need to be everything to everyone, or even anything to anyone. Billy Corgan loved music and his band and this weird little niche he’d carved out that seemed to resonate with young people despite not really being for or against anything. Debut album “Gish” was the band’s straightforward introduction, equal parts accessible melody and shredded solo, with weirdness stopping by only for the occasional cameo. “Siamese Dream” was the masterwork, sprawling-yet-somehow-focused, adjacent to recognizable radio, but daring enough to be “alternative” and deft enough to be an instant classic.

“Mellon Collie” was the two-hour indulgence only a band with a “Siamese Dream” in its oeuvre is allowed. Misfit ballads rub elbows with scorched-earth metal. Full orchestras swing by while other tunes are held aloft by nothing but a bongo and an awful voice. “1979” is a nostalgia exercise that borders on pop; “X.Y.U.” is screamed nonsense you’ll sing along with years later; “Thru the Eyes of Ruby” is all the awful, beautiful excess of prog rock loaded into a 7 1/2-minute “centerpiece” dropped 80 minutes into the album.

There are misses among the hits. Every double album has misses. What sets The Smashing Pumpkins apart is the talent that justifies the sprawl. They do prog well. They pay proper homage to classical. They’re a credible metal act. They write a worthy pop song in any time signature. You and I might agree that most of these songs are great and some of them are bad, but I bet we don’t agree which are the misses. That may be the mark of a justifiable double album.

That’s my 274th-favorite album.

It is a popular opinion that each of Sharon Van Etten’s five studio albums has been better than its predecessor. I happen to agree that her last two, “Are We There” and “Remind Me Tomorrow” each represent growth on the foundation established by her earlier work. That foundation, though, starts with 2010’s “Epic”, a worthy entry in its own right.

“Epic”, ironically, runs a scant 32 minutes over seven tracks. While closer “Love More” and centerpiece “Dsharpg” may border on epic individually, the album is small. Released right on the heels of her debut LP, “Because I Was In Love”, Van Etten may have felt pressured to get something out quickly to a growing audience. I prefer to think she saw value in brevity and saw fit to release a measured record on which every note counts.

And it does. The intimacy that would come to define her later work is present in spades on opener “A Crime” (“I’d rather let you touch my arm until you die”). “Save Yourself” and “Don’t Do It” build to powerful crescendos with memorable hooks. The aforementioned mini-epics stretch out Van Etten’s composition skills and demonstrate her uncanny ability to convey a lot by saying a little.

The haunting “Peace Signs” served as my introduction to the album and is nearly worthy of top-1,000 status on its own. No moment on “Epic” is less than essential listening. While future albums offered more simply by running longer, “Epic” is the perfect starting point for someone wanting to get into Sharon Van Etten.

That’s my 911th-favorite album.