[40-21] [60-41] [80-61] [100-81]
20. Good News For People Who Love Bad News, Modest Mouse (2004)
I kinda hated Modest Mouse before this album, mostly because I was in my “Oh, I hate hipsters!” phase of early-twenties hipsterdom, and they all liked this band a lot. But I was growing up a little, and this one leaked while I was locked in a PPD drug study, and so I downloaded it because when you’re locked up for weeks, the chance to get anything new, no matter what it is, just to prove that the outside world still exists, is exciting. And then, jesus. There I was, heartbroken over a girl and so fucking broke that I was taking experimental drugs to keep from getting evicted, ready to spend a whole bunch of the year driving around America and scratching away at my skin, and there’s this whole album on the theme of, “I know that starting over’s not what life’s about / but my thoughts were so loud I couldn’t hear my mouth”. I played the shit out of this record.
19. The Siren Song Called Us Home, Charlie Daniels Death Wish (2003)
None of my friends’ bands have ever meant more to me than the mighty Death Wish. This was Donner and Joseph’s band around the flip of the millennium, and nobody I knew had ever made music that hit me harder or pushed me farther. I was nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, during the brief period when Charlie Daniels Death Wish was the best band in – well, all of South Texas, unquestionably, but maybe the state and maybe everywhere else, too. And it for damn sure pushed me to do more, go harder. If this is what my friends were capable of, then I had to find some way to do impressive shit of my own. There were no excuses left. Even now, when screamo and metalcore and all those nonsense genres hit it big with the CDDW aesthetics, these songs hold up. I never knew anyone else to play with that passion. I couldn’t get them to reunite for my wedding, but maybe I’ll talk them into it before my funeral.
18. The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert, Bob Dylan (1998)
I love both discs to this recording. The first one is quiet, and you can really see how Bob Dylan in 1966 had the entire world at his disposal. He was a complete artist working at the height of his abilities, redefining an entire genre that consisted of just an acoustic guitar and a harmonica and doing it by pushing those things in ways no one had ever thought to do it before, writing songs that used them in entirely new ways. And then you flip to disc two, and holy shit! He’s already bored, so how about a fucking hard rock band that debuted before Cream? Dylan can be a cliche, and talking about how great he is can be really fucking boring, but what the fuck? I mean, really, what the fuck? He succeeded at everything he was trying at this point in his career, and what he was trying was shit that totally redefined popular music. I love that a single document exists that covers all of this so completely. I love that I can listen to it and be present in “Desolation Row” and then hear as he smirks through “Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat”, knowing that everyone in front of him was as confused as the kids at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance in Back To The Future when Marty McFly wah-wahs out the end of “Johnny B Goode”. But just like that one, man – it may have been a bit much for them, but speaking as one of their kids, we fucking love it. What it was, and what it became. Dylan, and everything after.
17. Recovering The Satellites, Counting Crows (1996)
Most Counting Crows fans – those of us who haven’t been cowed into submission by the scorn of our peers, anyway – start the clock at August and Everything After, and then note the diminishing returns from each subsequent album. Not me, though. I think Recovering The Satellites is their finest studio work, and that means it’s about as good as any other alt-rock era album by anyone. The first album’s great, and the songs may even be better, but I could never shake the fact that I was listening to coffeehouse rock, and whether I was a teenager or the vaguely grown-ass man that I am now, that never made me totally comfortable. August and Everything After sounds like it’s happening in a coffeehouse, and Recovering the Satellites sounds like it’s happening right in front of you. Duritz wrote a zillion lines that I would go on to rip off here - “All at once you look across a crowded room / and see the way that light attaches to a girl”? Jesus christ, people who make fun of this dude’s hair are missing out. “I will wait for you in Baton Rouge / I’ll miss you down in New Orleans / I’ll wait for you while she slips in something comfortable / and I’ll miss you when I’m slipping in between”? No one ever said what I wanted a record to say when I was sixteen, or ninteen, or twenty-four, better than this.
16. Astral Weeks, Van Morrison (1968)
I could always count on Astral Weeks. It’s not a love-and-loss album or anything, but I could listen to it like it was. And I did. Constantly. It’s so weird and ethereal – but not in the goth-y way – that you can kinda use it like Barack Obama, as a blank slate onto which you project what you want. It’s so loose and wracked with emotion without any meaning. Not many people were able to do that.
I was obsessed with this album when I was twenty-three, the same age Van Morrison was when he recorded it, and I felt like I had to prove myself to him. It’s a ridiculous thing to feel, something that probably only happens to a very particular kind of young man, but that’s the kind of young man that I am and have been, so I wrote a novel before I turned twenty-four because I wanted to be able to say that I was on pace with him. It’s funny – up until maybe just a year or two ago, I was still pacing myself against Van Morrison. Now – hell. I’m on a different clock, and I don’t listen to this much anymore. (But you better believe I just loaded it onto my iPhone while I was typing this.) Still, weird as it sounds, I don’t know if I’d have strived to do half of the stuff that I’ve done in my life if I hadn’t felt like I had to compete with the Van Morrison who made Astral Weeks.
15. Electro-Shock Blues, Eels (1998)
After my friend Marisa died, I was listening to “Last Stop This Town” and trying to decide if I was going to propose to Kat. This is an album that accompanies the biggest decisions a person can make in his life, if that person is the sort to need an album to soundtrack his biggest life decisions. I had just begun to be friends with Marisa again – we’d been pretty close in high school, and then lost touch. We found each other again as I was living in Chicago, and I had kept meaning to make time to go back to Indiana to hang out with her – she’d been diagnosed with cancer, and seemed to be beating it, could have used a new old friend – but I didn’t get around to it until her wake. And then, despite the fact that I’ve listened to this album constantly since it came out, a line I’d never really noticed much before really struck me – and it was so on-the-nose I didn’t really know what to do: “I was at a funeral / the day I realized / I wanted to spend my life with you”. It all felt like serendipity. I asked her to marry me within hours. I still wish I had caught up with Marisa one afternoon before she died. All of that is so messy, and all of it is what E never shied away from on this album. It takes real courage to write about the big things in such a plain way.
13. Grace, Jeff Buckley (1994)
I liked to tell the story that my ex-girlfriend stole all of my CD’s when she moved out except for this one, which Jim had given me but which I had never bothered to listen to, but that’s not entirely true – she just stole my copy of Diary by Sunny Day Real Estate, but coming out of that breakup, that was the only album I wanted. I listened to this the day I realized she wouldn’t be coming back instead. I put it in my car and drove the entirety of loop 1604 in San Antonio – about four hours, all around the city – with it on, and lord, it was an experience. I probably played “Lover, You Should Have Come Over” twenty-five times in a row on repeat, but I did the whole thing a whole bunch. There’s a – I don’t know how to put this except by using words I hate – but there’s a holiness to Jeff Buckley’s voice, something that feels like it comes from another planet, another plane of existence. I needed it, needed to hear something that made everything else, everything I wanted to get away from and stop believing in, seem small and stupid. It did.
I could never really talk to most other people about Jeff Buckley, because either they thought he was just a really good rock star, and that missed the point, or they thought that he was Jesus Christ himself, and it grated on my nerves. In the end, it’s never been about what his music means to anyone else – just what it means to me. I don’t even really like to write about it.
12. The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem (1999)
Uh-oh, another record that means no one will ever take me seriously again. I’ve lost metal by ranking Marilyn Manson ahead of Mastodon and Neurosis, and I’m losing hip-hop by putting Eminem ahead of Jay-Z. It’s a hard thing to admit, but it’s time to be honest. I love the shit out of The Marshall Mathers LP. I love all of his albums, actually, except maybe Relapse, but I’m also not totally convinced that Relapse won’t get to me eventually. Either way – The Marshall Mathers LP came out when I was nineteen, almost twenty, and that was a good year for me. At least half the good memories of that year involve driving around that fucked up van I had in the Valley and listening to it, because that’s about all there is to do in the Valley. It’s not exactly meaningful – I don’t listen to it and think, yeah, man, I totally relate to wanting to rape my grandmother and overdose on valium. But I love how totally unleashed and free he is.
It’s a bold statement, too, because he never tried to give people the same things he gave them on his first record, never settled into a role. Eminem circa 1999 was the definition of the hungry artist. It was like, now that he had the world’s attention, he was determined to show them how he was so much better than they thought he was. He did. Some of this shit is just plain showing off – like on “Criminal”, where he switches to seven different characters with totally different voices and rhythms, sometimes within the same verse. Or with “The Way I Am”, where he maintains this three-syllables-per-line rule that makes all of the paranoia and tension he’s rhyming about totally palpable. Anyone given a chance to take their work to a bigger stage should take a lesson from Eminem. When the whole world’s watching, that’s the time to double your efforts, not rest on your laurels.
11. New American Language, Dan Bern (2001)
I always wanted to be friends with Dan Bern. I did get him to write the cover blurb for Sometimes You Gotta Fight The Bear, which has been one of the purest and truest highlights of my writing career – which is funny, because it all came out of a MySpace message. But I wanted a friend who got it the way that he did. His songs are funny, and they’re down-to-earth, and they just ache with all of the things that I love about good writing and good songs. He gets that a line about being lonely on tour and knowing that you’ve put yourself in a position where you’ll never find what you want as long as you keep looking is way more effectively communicated through a silly rhyme like, “I could do tonight with something soft and warm and furry / but that ain’t likely to occur in south-central Missouri”, and that’s such an important thing to learn – that our own trouble and pain is only really interesting to others if it entertains them. Dan Bern, who sings in a nasal voice that invited frequent Dylan comparisons, once dismissed them by saying, “Bob Dylan? Oh, yeah, he was sort of the Dan Bern of the 60’s.” New American Language is every bit as powerful and smart as the Dylan records from that era are, in its own way. The writing’s revolutionary, and the sound – just those same folk instruments, for the most part – is re-shaped so that it best communicates these personal points with humor and a little bit of elegant sadness.
10. Black On Both Sides, Mos Def (1999)
This album was a total revelation to me when it came out. You know those kids in high school who, when you ask them what kind of music they like, say, “Everything except rap and country”, which basically means “just alternative rock (it was the 90’s) and maybe some classic rock, too”? I was one of those for a long time. I had my eyes opened when I was seventeen and started working in an “urban” record store in Calumet City, Illinois, and heard stuff that really challenged all of my very shallow preconceptions. By the time I was nineteen and Mos Def was releasing Black On Both Sides, I was consuming hip-hop voraciously, but it wasn’t until I heard this one that I really understand how fucking limitless it was. Because there are absolutely no rules on Black On Both Sides. A soft, atmospheric ballad like “Umi Says” fits in right alongside a track with Busta Rhymes, and there’s still room to bring half the goddamn Bad Brains out to rock the fuck out of the ending of “Rock And Roll”. I don’t think anyone has made a record that’s been simultaneously this concise and this ambitious since. There are lots of innovators, and lots of artists who are great at making a singular statement, but few who can do both.
9. City And Eastern Songs, Jeffrey and Jack Lewis (2005)
I didn’t hear this album until last year, when I was living in London. Jeffrey Lewis plays house shows here still, but in England he’s kind of a star. I had always held against him the fact that, years ago, my friend Cindy (whose many charms include a sometimes-refreshing tactlessness), who once lived in a West Campus co-op with him in Austin, was explaining his work to me, and, when describing his comics, said, “Oh, they’re so much better than the ones you do”. So I never bothered with his music, until I was living in a country where he’s kind of a big deal, and it’s easier to hear it without seeking him out.
So, anyway, I was at – I think I was at Rough Trade, the record store in Shoreditch – and “Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror” came on, and it fucked me up pretty good. I mean, I was really just kind of incapacitated by it. I was dealing with a pretty fucking specific set of issues at that point in my life, sitting on a major stack of rejection letters from literary agents who hadn’t even read the novel I’d written, realizing that I was twenty-seven years old and all of the things I assumed would have happened already weren’t really happening… And then there’s a song that asks, “How long should an artist struggle / before he realizes it isn’t worth the hassle”. And about a zillion other questions that I honestly never expected to hear addressed in a song.
Honestly, when I first heard City and Eastern Songs, I was pretty sure I was past the point in my life where songs could speak to me so specifically anymore. It’s real fucking easy to relate to “I love you” or “why don’t you love me” or all of those sentiments. But “I don’t know if I’m wasting my time by trying to live the goals I set out for myself years ago because the response hasn’t been anything like I expected it would be by the time I got to be the age I am” is kind of a bit more obscure, you know?
And then there’s this whole album with songs that speak to all of these things. “Don’t Be Upset” was a song I lived pretty much that whole year. “New Old Friends”, too. Even the punk-y stuff, like, “Artland” and “Posters”, came from a place that I could relate to. City and Eastern Songs isn’t just a great album, it’s one that made me believe in music again.
8. Paranoid, Black Sabbath (1971)
I can’t even remember how many years I spent where, the first thing I would do when I woke up every morning, would be to listen to Paranoid from beginning to end. It was a little bit affectation and a little bit ritual, but it made me feel good, like I could take on the world. Every song on this album is etched pretty firmly on my brain. I’m damn sure I could sing every word a capella right now, even though I haven’t actually listened to it in about three years, and I could probably play every song on guitar, and I’ve barely ever touched a string in my life. There are some records that have meant so much to me for so long that I really don’t need to listen to them ever again, but not in a bad way – I just can hear “Fairies Wear Boots” on the mixtape in my head anytime I want to. They become almost mythical objects, these weird totems that exist outside of the context of the songs and the music and become touchstones to a certain point in my life, or certain ideas that I have about myself. Paranoid is shorthand for a whole bunch of things at this point.
7. Purple Rain, Prince (1984)
It’s hard to separate Purple Rain the album from Purple Rain the movie, but it’s important to do it. The movie’s still a lot of fun, even if its “Karate Kid-in-a-rock-club” plot is kinda hard to take seriously. But the record – hot damn. It’s fun, too, and funky and moving and catchy and powerful and all of the things we look for in music. In my performances, I used to introduce “The Killer” by talking about Purple Rain, and the idea of using everything you had to make one big, direct statement that says everything you have to say, and putting yourself in a position to say it to the exact right people at the exact right time. At this point, the whole spiel sort of sounds rote to me. What’s amazing is that, even though it’s twenty-five years old (people who conceived their children listening to “The Beautiful Ones” are now grandparents), Purple Rain doesn’t.
6. Gentlemen, Afghan Whigs (1994)
When I first started posting this list, my friend Jim commented a few times, “Oh, I bet I know what number one is”, and he was referring to Gentlemen. It would have been, for a lot of years, but it isn’t anymore. It’s not because the album’s any less great – it holds up so well, and the songs are still so sad and raw and angry. It might be that I’m not sad and raw and angry anymore, and so I relate to it just a little bit less. Not a lot less, but just a little. I don’t hear it as the soundtrack to how volatile life has to feel in order to feel true and real anymore.
I tried to relate to Gentlemen before I was ready to get it, and I think it kind of shaped a lot of what I looked for in a relationship. Which is weird and fucked up and High Fidelity of me, I guess, but whatever. It’s an album about tortured relationships and addiction and the sort of heartbreak I wasn’t anywhere near capable of understanding when I was fourteen and checked a cassette version of it out from the Highland Public Library because they were on the list of bands I saw on 120 Minutes that sounded good. (The others were Soundgarden, the Spin Doctors, the Lemonheads, and the Meat Puppets.) “I Keep Coming Back” doesn’t really work as a paean to the fact that I spent a whole summer with a big crush on Dana Miller, but I desperately wanted to. When I broke up with my first serious girlfriend, after I was out of high school, I would play “When We Two Parted” over and over again, trying to make the line about “I should have seen this shit coming down the hall / every night we spent in that bed with you facing the wall” fit, when really all I needed was a song about, “I kinda liked you, but not that much, and I was pretty lonely so our relationship got serious when really I just wanted to start having sex” – which brings up the line from “Be Sweet” about how “She wants love / and I still wanna fuck” – but I didn’t have the self-awareness to relate to it at the time. So I just tried to make the other lines, the big, sweeping ones, fit. It’s hard not to want that, when they sound like this.
5. Across A Wire, Counting Crows (1998)
This is a double album, but the second disc isn’t really all that important. There are some good versions of the songs on it, and it’s a pretty fun rock concert album. But it’s the first disc, recorded as part of the band’s VH1 Storytellers appearance, that’s such a revelation.
It’s just a real quiet, acoustic rendition of about half of the songs from August And Everything After and a handful from Recovering The Satellites. Mostly they have guitar, accordion, banjo – real stripped down folk instruments. And Duritz’s voice, which can sometimes be a little over-the-top, is really simple and pure here.
But it’s the songs. These really are some of the best songs anybody ever wrote. I’ve written about how people need to get over their Duritz hate in the past, and I’m not going to defend a statement like that by making fun of his hair again –“Mr. Jones”, with the sha-la-la-la’s stripped down and “Catapult” with the accordion replacing the electric guitar, and all of the other songs, “Round Here” as a two-piece – they’re just perfect examples of what pop songwriting should be. They’re as literate and smart as Dylan, forward-thinking and pushing the envelope of what you can do in a pop song.
4. Out Of Tune, Mojave 3 (1994)
It’s hard to even know what to write about Out Of Tune. It’s like I was saying about Grace and Paranoid, how they become touchstones, or talismans, or something. Out Of Tune is a little different from those, though, because I didn’t find it until ten years after it came out, and I didn’t have a lot of room for new “touchstone” albums in my life at that point. Just one, I guess.
I think Tony bought this record when he was driving through the Mojave desert with a girlfriend, and he brought it back with him. He was pretty into it, and while I can be pretty contrary about things like that sometimes for no reason, I grabbed a copy of it.
At this point, Neil Halstead’s voice, on every song on this record, is as comforting a presence as I know. I can listen to it in any mood, and it enhances what I’d like to be feeling. It’s like the aural equivalent of “this too shall pass”, true and appropriate (and a little bit sad) in every situation. I have memories of driving all night into New Orleans and through the badlands of North Dakota and the opening guitar strum of “Who Do You Love” playing as the sun began to rise. I know that I spent countless nights pining over girls and listening to it. I remember hearing it and thinking, this is what i want life to sound like at its best. I’ve let it tie itself to some of the best memories I’ve had over the past five years. It still sounds great.
Post-script – I saw Mojave 3 on a very brief tour they did in 2006 at the Park West in Chicago. I wasn’t really aware that they were still making music, honestly, but they’d released a (kind of underwhelming) record that year, and opted to tour behind it. For some reason, in addition to playing a handful of songs off that new record, they opted to do most of Out Of Tune in their set. I thought I’d gotten into them a decade too late, but it turned out I was right on time. I hadn’t realized that live music could still impact me like that until that night. I thought I’d gotten jaded – turns out I’d just gotten bored.
3. The End Of Silence, Rollins Band (1992)
I’ve always loved intense, aggressive music, but I was never a metal dude, as this list testifies to. There were bands, and there were moments, but I’m lost in my head a lot, and while I love to listen to Pig Destroyer or something, I don’t connect to bands that aren’t trying to make a certain emotional appeal.
The Rollins Band in 1992 were the best rock band in the world, without question. They might have been the best rock band to ever walk the earth. Outside of maybe 1972 Black Sabbath or Prince and the Revolution in the mid-80’s, I don’t know who else would challenge them for that title. People harp on the fact that Rollins can’t sing, but that’s what makes the band for me: Andrew Weiss is easily the best bassist in rock and roll at this point, and Sim Cain is among the finest drummers. Chris Haskett gels with those guys so well – there’s not really anywhere for them to go, and there’s no chance that they’ll find a singer who can keep up. They’re stuck either doing the Dream Theatre thing and going instrumental, or taking on some Ronnie James Dio / Josh Groban-style classically trained belter, and both of those choices are pretty boring. Instead, they took this fucked-up ex-punk rocker and let him just shout. He didn’t even scream, because it didn’t come from his lungs, it’s not a metal growl or anything. It’s just shouting over the band. It sounds perfect.
Rollins isn’t a great lyricist – his talents with words were better directed at writing jokes, as he eventually seemed to realize – but he’s good. He writes songs that speak to a very real element of a certain type of young-male experience, and appeals to that same type to aim higher, to live more singularly. Dudes who are really influenced by Rollins, we wear that really close to our vests, even if we’ve grown past it. We still call him “Hank” when we talk about him with one another.
On The End Of Silence, he seemed to be writing around the band. They would come up with a riff – like, oh man, the one on “Obscene”, which could trap a person for days – and he’d write something that made you feel trapped. If they went funkier, he’d drop “Low Self Opinion Man” and offer a motivational speech that you can (slam)dance to. It’s the best band in rock and roll history with the unlikeliest frontman imaginable turning in a hard rock record that speaks to everything I struggled with as a teenager, and that had a depth to it that meant that it wasn’t rendered irrelevant when I grew up enough to stop struggling.
2. No More Shall We Part, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (2001)
If I were to write one of those 33 1/3 series books about an album, this is the one I’d pick. Nick Cave is my favorite singer, but on No More Shall We Part, he’s also my favorite writer. He drops lines about writer’s block like, “My piano crouched in the corner of the room with all its teeth bared” and lines about a dying relationship like, “I turn to my sorrowful wife / who is counting the days on her…” before giving up on the line alltogether and exploding into a fury of grief and rage, and anyone who’s felt the difficulty in keeping it together in a relationship with problems can understand that sometimes you don’t want to articulate it. It’s a particular kind of writing he’s doing here that I’ve never seen matched.
This is an album about a breakup, but it’s not like the others. This is grown-folks music. The documentation of a dying relationship isn’t the sort that’s easy to romanticize – it’s the sort that exposes exactly how awful it is. It’s honest in ways that few records are – that few artists are. It tells a lot of truth, buried in imagery and also totally naked, and it’s utterly fearless. He doesn’t make himself out to be a hero in these songs, which isn’t entirely unique, but he doesn’t even play a protagonist – he’s not a wounded man unable to give up on his pride, or a hardass who lives on regret, or any other easily romanticized stereotype. He’s weak, and old, and vulnerable, and petty, and insecure. It’s a confession. Even someone as admired as a cult hero as Nick Cave is a total fuck-up.
The album is vaguely conceptual, but not in the rock opera sense. It’s what they mean when they call it a song cycle, I guess. It opens with the admissions of “As I Sat Sadly By Her Side”, goes darker and darker, and ends, at best, with a slight redemption in the form of “Darker With The Day”, which isn’t so much redemptive as resigned, an exhausted throwing-up-of-the-hands that whimpers out. It’s a record about real life, but it doesn’t ever make that something to be bored with or ashamed of. Nick Cave is one of our finest living storytellers – he’s chosen his medium, and he tells his stories perfectly within it.
1. Blackberry Belle, Twilight Singers (2003)
2003, and I thought Greg Dulli was done with music. The first Twilight Singers album was done three and a half years earlier, and it was just a release of a bunch of old tracks that found a new producer. His best friend had died and I knew that he’d bought a bar in Los Angeles and stopped playing. Then Blackberry Belle.
More than anything, when this album came out, I needed a new record from Greg Dulli. I needed one that spoke to growing up. Because that’s the point of all of this, don’t you get it yet? All of these records are just a chronicle of growing up, first as a boy who didn’t know how to relate to himself without first relating to songs, and then as a man who had learned how to skip that middleman and relate to himself on his own. People listen to music for a lot of reasons, and the ones who do it because they like Elvis or the Beatles or Lil Wayne or whatever, and don’t get why some of us take it so seriously, make the Nick Hornby stereotype jokes – that’s cool, they have their reasons, and they’re valid. But some of us – we listen to these records because we’re looking for something that we can’t find within ourselves. We’re looking for someone to connect with us in the simplest possible terms – a few words, some chord and key changes that make those words seem so much more meaningful than they are on paper.
With Blackberry Belle, I found what I needed when I needed it more than anything. I was twenty-three, living by myself for the first time ever, still hung up on a girl I didn’t believe for a seocnd I’d actually end up marrying four years later, without a job and with limitless possibilities and totally overwhelmed and excited and terrified and not sure what my place was anymore, because I wasn’t the kid waiting for things to happen – I had declared myself a man of action!, and it’s scary when people believe that sort of thing about you. And then my favorite songwriter, who’d given up and retired, surprises me with an album of songs not just about self-reinvention, but about the fact that it was mandatory.
Blackberry Belle isn’t the best record on this list, but I’m totally uninterested in its flaws. It’s the record that impacted me the most, and it’s one I don’t expect to ever get tired of. If I could only take one with me on the proverbial desert island, this is the one I’d take.
