This one comes straight from the pages of For the Record. Did I mention it’s available now on Amazon? Click here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0578468220

I listened to a few hundred jazz albums in compiling this project, but I’m neither a musician nor a critic, so I can’t intelligently tell you why Cannonball’s “Somethin’ Else” tops everything by Miles, ‘Trane, and Mingus as my favorite jazz album.

I can, however, tell you that the note Cannonball plays beginning at 8:32 of the opening track, “Autumn Leaves”, is perfection. In the seventies and eighties, I believe Congress passed legislation dictating that the last time a chorus was played in a song, the most prominent note/word in said chorus must be played/sung at least a half an octave higher than its counterparts earlier in the tune. Over the years, many a song has been soiled by this trick, which often breaks a singer away from her comfort zone in an attempt to knock us off our feet for a fleeting moment. Cannonball’s alto sax owned that higher note and delivered it so perfectly that I wish it were the last such lift in music history.

That’s my 4th-favorite album.

Anyone with studio access and a backing band could have recorded “I Love Your Lovin’ Ways”, the first track on Nina Simone’s “Wild is the Wind”. It’s an uptempo R&B number that would have felt in place on a Ray Charles record, a Kinks album, or any demo submitted by an ambitious band’s manager to a label exec.

The blandness of “I Love Your Lovin’ Ways” is worth noting only because of what comes next. “Four Women” is a massive statement- an epic portrait of American suffering that no artist could possibly bring to life the way Nina Simone does.

Fortunately, “Wild is the Wind” is more “Four Women” than “I Love Your Lovin’ Ways”. Simone’s singular talent is on display on the riveting “Break Down and Let it All Out”. “Lilac Wine” requires all the range and all the lived experience of the era’s foremost chanteuse. “If I Should Lose You” is a low-register reinvention of a jazz classic. The title track and “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” deftly navigate torturous trials with equal parts heartbreak and determination.

Nina was jazz, Nina was soul, Nina was the blues. That her label saw fit to open an album almost a decade into her career, at the peak of her powers, with a yawner of rhythm and blues speaks more to the direction of the industry than to any shortcoming of the artist’s. Skip track one and be rewarded with one of the great triumphs of any genre.

That’s my 250th-favorite album.

The book’s available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0578468220

Or, if you live in southern Maine, get me your address and I’ll deliver a signed copy to your door.

It’s on.

My family and I made a rest stop in Olympia on our way from Seattle to Portland last week. Aside from the capitol building, Olympia doesn’t look much different from any other mid-sized American city. Some chain stores and restaurants, a little local flavor, a delightful food co-op, a highway exit for Sleater-Kinney Road…

To fans of one of the most dynamic and disruptive bands in music history, it would be easy to believe that Sleater-Kinney Road is named after the band. Alas, the reverse is true, as the band took their name from the street where their garage rock took root.

To say that there’s never been a better all-female band is to sell Sleater-Kinney short by marking them. Had Kurt Cobain lived a few more decades an hour up I-5, Nirvana fans could dream of that band’s cumulative output living up to the standard Sleater-Kinney set with six consecutive masterpieces between 1996 and 2005. The Decemberists reign over the PNW music scene today, and they have reached similar highs, but they can’t compete with Sleater-Kinney’s consistency.

I suspect Sleater-Kinney fans are more divided as to which of the band’s albums is their favorite than fans of most other groups. “Dig Me Out” and “One Beat”, in particular, are of a similar caliber. But “The Woods” represents a pivotal point in the band’s career. It’s their first record on Sub Pop, the label that released “Nevermind”, and the last album before a ten-year hiatus that left fans wondering if their most raucous work yet was their swan song.

“The Woods” is perhaps the album that makes the best use of Corin Tucker’s banshee wail, most notably on opener “The Fox”. “Modern Girl” is the closest the band ever came to a successful ballad, though it may better qualify as an anthem. “Entertain” cleanses the palette after the softer interlude, reminding the listener that she’s in the presence of punk-rock royalty. “Let’s Call it Love” is the best example in the band’s oeuvre of the trio’s ability to feed off each other’s brilliance, stretching out over eleven minutes of chaotic exuberance.

Sleater-Kinney has been a force for more than two decades, standing out even among the deep field of indie rock giants. In 2005, they made their loudest claim that they were the best band in the world.

That’s my 326th-favorite album.

I don’t know what to do with Queen.

I made a conscious choice to subtitle the book “My 1,000 Favorite Albums”, rather than any allusion to greatness, because my thoughts about what albums are great are inherently less interesting than a list of albums that appeal to me personally. If I recognize the influence an album had on other music or I know that it sold millions of copies and won over the world, but I don’t particularly like it, including it in a book about my favorite albums doesn’t tell you anything about me and probably doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know about that album.

I’ve never particularly liked Queen. About a month before I sent the text of the book to my designer, I pulled “A Night at the Opera” off the list entirely and was prepared to submit a Queen-free list. A few weeks later, I gave it another listen. It’s sloppy. It’s overambitious. It’s eccentric to a fault. And it’s pretty great.

I had the opportunity to watch “Bohemian Rhapsody”, the 2018 biopic, on a plane this weekend. Like the band itself, the movie was a showcase for great talent with a compelling central narrative, but aside from a few entertaining moments, it was hard to watch. Bryan Singer never shows anything he can’t just have a character tell you. The sequence where Freddie Mercury is offered a solo record deal, kicks the record exec out of the limo in a rage, berates his band while telling them he’s taking the deal, and crawls back with an apology, is derivative and ham-fisted. Brian May doubles as a smiling lackey for Mercury and the Bach-caliber composer who invents the stomp-twice-and-clap intro to “We Will Rock You” behind Freddie’s back. Lord help us.

The movie soured me on a band I already don’t love. At the same time, it serves as a reminder that Queen were a supremely talented group who, perhaps more than any of their rock-n-roll peers, were willing to take chances. “A Night at the Opera” takes more chances than a tipsy gambler and, while many of those efforts fall flat, the band deserves credit for defying their label to make an album no one saw coming.

“Bohemian Rhapsody”, for all its quirks, is a tour de force. “Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon” is a reverent Kinks tribute. “Death on Two Legs” is a showcase for May’s virtuosity. For all its warts, “A Night at the Opera” is all the good Queen had to offer, stuffed into a characteristically idiosyncratic package. It’s nearly unaninmously remembered as a great album. While I don’t always agree with conventional opinion about Queen, the crowd is right in this case.

That’s my 773rd-favorite album.

#28: “Nevermind”, Nirvana, 1991

I’m writing this one from a family vacation in Seattle. It wouldn’t feel right to profile anything but Nirvana’s game-changing major-label debut.

I try to focus the rankings of these albums more on the quality of the music therein than on the influence the album had on future music. “Nevermind” is fantastic music. It’s defiant, but melodic. Apathetic, but inspired. “Come As You Are” is built for a coffeehouse and “Breed” is built for a mosh pit, but both have the credibility to be welcomed into the other’s venue.

The music alone makes “Nevermind” one of the great albums of its era, but it’s the album’s impact on its era (and not just the music of the era) that makes it a universally-renowned classic. To write about “Nevermind” without writing about what it spawned- and what it stopped- would be incomplete.

In the early nineties, the narrative around Nirvana was that they’d changed rock music overnight. Gone were hair bands and eighties excess; apathy was the new zeitgeist.

Contemporaries like The Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam were likely influenced by Nirvana and certainly benefitted from their genre’s unlikely move to the mainstream. I hear Nirvana in favorites like …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead a decade later and Car Seat Headrest another decade out.

It’s also true that much of what Nirvana wrought was… well, overwrought. Stone Temple Pilots borrowed the attitude but brought back some of the excess in complex guitar work and dramaticized angst. Bush made millions by copying Nirvana’s sound and then repeating “This Cloud” or “Zen” for two minutes at the end of each song, misinterpreting Nirvana’s emoting-without-emotion. Later spawn like Lifehouse and Marcy Playground begged so hard for Kurt Cobain’s posthumous approval that they offered exactly nothing to the larger conversation. Much of the great music made in the wake of Nirvana was by hip-hop artists and more technology-oriented bands.

It may be that Nirvana is important more for trends they ended. Poison and Whitesnake appealed to a generation that tried to mimic their parents’ hippie rebellion with big hair and big emotions, but Nirvana’s Seattle-inspired, don’t-get-too-excited-it’s-gonna-rain-again-tomorrow grunge exposed the folly of the prior generation’s pay-attention-to-me-I’m-different-like-all-my-friends charade. The same bucket of cold water Ramones had dumped on prog rock fifteen years earlier reset not just a music culture, but fashion and conduct standards as well.

Whether or not the music that came after Nirvana was better than the music that came before, Nirvana was critical in shaping the culture of a generation that was a little embarrassed by their older siblings. More importantly, they made music strong enough to shape that cultural shift, much of which came on “Nevermind”.

That’s my 28th-favorite album.

Basslines matter.

I’ll hazard a guess that if you’ve got a song in your head right now, it’s a sung melody that you’re hearing, but it’s the bassline that trapped the song there in the first place.

A decade into The Roots’ career, “Phrenology” was a key milestone in their evolution from underground jazz-rap act to world-renowned NBC house band. In my estimation, sublime basslines played the biggest role in getting them there.

The prototype for a hip-hop act before The Roots was an emcee or a tag team of emcees skilled at one or both of two things: rapping and building backing beats by sampling other music. The Roots largely defy that prototype. Not only do they play their music live in the studio (or on stage), but they exist as a concept larger than a band. Talib Kweli, Jill Scott, Musiq, Nelly Furtado, and Cody Chestnutt are here to supplement Black Thought’s vocals. Poets stop by for spoken-word interludes. Ten-minute sound experiments push the boundaries of mainstream hip-hop.

None of this is to say that “Phrenology” is not a hip-hop album. Samples abound, from The Beatles to Slick Rick. Black Thought rivals vintage Nas with his smooth-but-authoratative raps. And those basslines…

The bassline that sticks in my head more than any other from this album is from “Quills”, whose chorus is an adaptation of Swing Out Sister’s “Breakout”. The Roots don’t rest on other artists’ music to build a foundation for their lyrics. Rather, “Phrenology” seems equally devoted to music’s past, present, and a future whose vocabulary they intend to influence.

Before Quills, “Phrenology” hits the listener with the rap showcase “Thought @ Work”, irresistable earworm “The Seed (2.0)”, the deft, drum-and-bass-driven “Break You Off”, and the epic biography “Water” in succession, all starting seven tracks into the record. Over 70 minutes, this album delivers everything a fan might have expected from The Roots in 2002 and far more. But it’s the basslines that keep it in my head 17 years later.

That’s my 230th-favorite album.

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.