Bill Withers had swagger for days.

Ask anyone to name the great soul singers of the ’70s and you’ll probably hear Al Green’s and Marvin Gaye’s names first. One may cite Aretha Franklin and Van Morrison and Curtis Mayfield and Stevie Wonder as well before they get to Bill Withers.

Now ask those same people to name two songs any of those artists put on a single album more iconic than “Lean On Me” and “Use Me”. Here’s guessing they can’t.

Ticking off albums with two great singles and not much else would be a horrible way to put together a greatest albums list. But “Still Bill” is better than those two songs. And those two songs are better than your average one-two punch.

Beyond the velvet bassline of “Use Me” and the I-dare-you-not-to-sing-along “Lean on Me”, it’s the swaggy funk that runs through “Lonely Town, Lonely Street” and “Who Is He (And What Is He To You?) that makes “Still Bill” a great album.

Imagine a singer dropping “Ain’t No Sunshine” on a debut album today, then following it up with “Lean on Me” and “Use Me” a year later. He would be the best-selling artist in the world, right? Bill Withers never reached that status, but the closest he ever came was after the release of “Still Bill”.

That’s my 999th-favorite album.

The music that gets labeled “college rock” has always made me a little jealous. The idea that college dorms were blaring The Replacements and Pixies in the ’80s and Yo La Tengo and PJ Harvey in the ’90s makes me wonder if there were actually schools where party soundtracks branched out beyond DMX and Dave Matthews Band.

I graduated from college in 2002 and while I’d defend my tastes in that era against those of just about any of my college classmates, I wasn’t yet taking chances with bands with names like …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead.

As the 2000s matured, music streaming services made it easier to leave one’s comfort zone and try new genres. My CD collection spanned classic rock and R&B, the college rock referenced above, britpop, and bits of hip-hop and jazz. Over the next decade, my Grooveshark and Spotify favorites expanded to include genres and subgenres like alt-country, dubstep, and hardcore.

When the drums meet the guitar in “It Was There That I Saw You”, hardcore is the clear influence screaming through AYWKUBtToD’s music. Nearly an hour later, you’ve certainly heard Nirvana in their sound, but you may have also heard Manic Street Preachers, The Smashing Pumpkins, and even The Beach Boys.

“Beaudelaire” is jarringly beautiful. “How Near, How Far” is an unexpected flirtation with pop sensibility. “Monsoon” is a showcase of skill the band had hardly hinted at on prior albums.

Labels do a disservice to “Source Tags and Codes”. Whatever genre you think you’re listening to when it starts, you’ll have taken a tour through a few others and landed in an entirely different place by the end. And you’re almost certain to be grateful for that tour.

That’s my 201st-favorite album.

When I started this blog, I wanted an Album of the Day feature, but I suspected I wouldn’t have time to write about a new album every day, at least beyond the first few days. Album of the Week seemed like a more appropriate approach, but in week one, I’ve profiled three albums and am jonesing to write about others.

It’s only because I chose to schedule these next few pieces for future publishing that you’re probably not reading this on a Sunday, and if that is indeed the case, I apologize, because Sundays are for Chet Baker.

There’s another pretty famous trumpeter who shows up nine times in my book, so I won’t get too hyperbolic here, but few trumpeters past or present have had the power to invade the listener’s mind and transport her from the worst of moods to a world of peace, pleasure, and prosperity like Chet Baker.

Chet’s trumpet isn’t Dizzy or Satch getting the party started. It isn’t Miles or Wynton traversing octaves for a thrill. It’s romance, if that’s what you hear, or solitude if that’s your preference. “It Never Entered My Mind” is a lake view on the back porch at camp, a welcome breeze and a cold drink. “September Song” is a late-summer kayak ride on a placid morning.

To praise this album and Baker’s trumpet is perhaps to ignore the elephant in the room. Chet’s voice, a weapon every bit as piercing as his trumpet, is absent here. “Chet Baker Sings”, released three years earlier, is the gold standard, a top-100 masterpiece. Unfortunately, in an effort to choose the thousand albums in my book from a finite sample, I drew the line at 1957 and had to leave that one out.

One thing I vowed not to include in For the Record was tokens- lesser albums that represent the best of a group like The Four Tops or The Hollies, who released loads of great music without ever scoring a classic album. While not the bit of perfection he released in ’56, “Chet” is anything but a token. It’s the soundtrack to that gift we choose to embrace all too infrequently- the lazy Sunday.

That’s my 608th-favorite album.

I once heard The Decemberists’ “A Perfect Crime” in the grocery store.

My two favorite albums of 2006, the year I got married, moved to Maine, and established my career, share very few common traits outside of the year of their release. Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black” is hyper-charged R&B sleaze- the album that turned a smoky-lounge jazz singer into an international icon. The Decemberists’ “The Crane Wife” is a modern prog rock classic- the album Yes or Emerson, Lake, and Palmer would have made if they had a better sense of melody.

I first heard Amy’s “Rehab” in my car. I was riding home from a Portland (not the Decemberists’ Portland) bar with friends visiting from Brooklyn when the Dap-Kings shook my speakers and a once-in-a-generation voice introduced herself with an omen of her tragic near-future. I asked who I was listening to, got an answer, and owned the album the next day.

Of course, “Back to Black” is so much more than “Rehab”. “Me and Mrs. Jones” is a lamentation of a 21st-century relationship steeped in fuckery. Closer “Addicted” is equal parts hilarious and haunting. Every track showcases the perfectly aligned talents of the Dap-Kings’ classic brass and the singer’s Aretha-for-a-new-era swagger.

Back to that grocery store. When “A Perfect Crime” wafted harmlessly through those Hannaford speakers, I’d heard the band’s prior album, the quirkily excellent “Picaresque”, and as such, was more prepared for their next sonic joyride than I was for “Back to Black”. Still, all three title tracks are beautiful, “Sons and Daughters” is a singalong for a new frontier, and “The Island” medley is the epic Jethro Tull never quite mastered at this level.

“The Crane Wife” slows a bit in the middle, veering from the Japanese folk tale theme that binds the rest of the record by introducing a pedestrian lead single fit for the produce aisle.

Both of my favorite albums of 2006 are fantastic. Neither sounds like anything else that permeated the airwaves in the middle of the 2000s. Both employed extreme songwriting talents and bands capable of maximizing those songs. I agonized over which was my favorite album of 2006 and would occupy more precious real estate toward the end of the book. The Decemberists, while their flights of fancy veer further into exotic realms, fit in well with the esoteric-but-accessible rock aesthetic that’s always occupied a place close to the center of my music tastes.

As often as I still spin “The Crane Wife”, which, more than a decade later, has become one of my son’s favorite albums as well, the one I first heard on a late-night bar crawl is the right answer.

What makes an album great? Is it a critical mass of good songs, united by a theme? Is it a showcase for a great voice and/or a talented band? Is it an artist’s lyrical and melodic interpretation of a moment in time?

I love Kula Shaker’s debut not because it was exactly the album that 1996 needed, but because it was exactly what I needed in 1996. A British band with Indian influences, equally informed by the classic rock I’d grown up with and the Britpop that was just penetrating my consciousness? And the frontman’s mom was in the first season of “Saved by the Bell”? Yes, please.

It didn’t hurt that Crispian Mills likely wrote these songs with 16-year-olds in mind. “Hey Dude” was unapologetic teen bravado. Citing “Tattva” as my favorite song made me feel worldly. “303” was air-guitar heaven.

That I loved an album in high school is not a meaningful criterion for inclusion in the book. I once loved Kula Shaker’s follow-up to this one, “Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts”, but it’s hard to spin that one in 2019 without cringing now and then at the manufactured mysticism. Stone Temple Pilots appealed to my teenage brain but loaded their albums with enough filler to make Queen seem consistent in comparison. Cake took the same “sing for the kids” approach but didn’t take enough chances musically to hold up beyond the first summer.

I recognize that “K” is no world-renowned classic. If it came out in 2014, I may have lost track of it in a sea of quality new releases. But in 1996, Kula Shaker was my world, and a listen to “K” in 2019 brings me back to punishment ping-pong in friends’ basements, consumption of Swedish fish at dangerous levels, and my friends’ band turning their speakers to 11 to bang out “303”.

That’s my 822nd-favorite album.

Hi, folks. Welcome to the promotional site for my soon-to-be-released book, For the Record: My 1,000 Favorite Albums of all time.

If it’s not clear what this book will be about, here’s the synopsis I submitted with my copyright filing:

For the Record weaves a countdown of one amateur music critic’s 1,000 favorite albums with a collection of essays about the ways we consume popular music. The Beatles and Nina Simone share ink with Sleater-Kinney and Viktor Vaughn in a kitchen-sink trip through six decades of radio staples and indie nuggets.

After every 100 albums in the countdown, an essay explores a topic like biases that pervade commercial music rankings, the evolution of music distribution channels and its impact on the quantity of great music in different eras, and whether bands really suffer from a sophomore curse. Later chapters offer deep dives into which artists show up most and highest on the list, which musicians appear as members of multiple bands or projects, and which classic-caliber albums evade popular appeal and why.

Recommendations abound for readers stuck listening to the same playlist on every commute or at every party. Fans of jazz, classic rock, R&B, punk, indie, hip-hop, electronica, and even country will nod their heads at celebrations of their favorite records and find new music to bolster their collections.

I’ll introduce an album of the week feature here soon. Leave comments. Tell your friends. Let’s do this.