Alas, I’m trying to let some of my affectations go, and I’ve ditched the brackets that previously surrounded every blog post title. I’m still using words like “alas”, though. You have to do these things slowly, you know.

Anyway. Adam Schragin linked to a friend of his recently who ran down his 100 favorite albums of all time on his blog. It was a neat list, and I decided I could use a project like that in my life. I’ll borrow that format, but probably do the updates less frequently than he did. It should help me keep regular content up here, though, at least for four posts in a row.

I set out some rules for myself when compiling my list. They’re pretty basic:

• Don’t fake it. I don’t need to try to impress Henry Rollins by pretending to know way more about jazz than I actually do. Almost without exception, all of the jazz on this list is from the early 60’s, and it’s stuff my dad introduced me to.
• Don’t be weighted down by rock and roll history. There’s not a single Led Zeppelin album on this list, and I love Led Zeppelin. But those aren’t the albums I listen to over and over again. This is a subjective personal list, not some attempt to quantify the greatness of the classics. Sorry, Beatles. Everyone else’s list has six of your albums in the top ten.
• Don’t be weighted down by personal history. My fourteen year old self will forgive me for not including The Crow soundtrack, or, I dunno, the second Tori Amos record. I compiled the list mostly by going through my iTunes library, and that means some albums that meant a lot to me at one point don’t make it because I haven’t cared to listen to them in about five years. If I’ve lived without Nevermind for the past five years, it’s probably not an album that means as much to me as I think it does.
• Own the new stuff. A lot of this list consists of albums from the past couple years, because these are albums that stuck at a point in my life when most new music has started to sound the same. I might not love Stay Positive by the Hold Steady right now as much as I loved the first Eve 6 record when I was seventeen, but I’ve been exposed to a hell of a lot more music in the twelve intervening years, and it’s more significant to me now to find new music that means a lot to me than it was then, so the list sometimes features really new stuff alongside classics.

That’s about it, I think.

100. Great Vengeance and Furious Fire, The Heavy (2007)

I think I found this one on NinjaTune’s website because I wanted to hear something with a little more soul to it, and the opening horn part to “That Kind of Man” made me feel like a bad-ass drug dealer from Houston driving a candy-colored Impala. This band’s so great, and I really can’t believe that they’re not famous yet.

99. Phrenology, The Roots (2002)

This is the first time I really got The Roots. I tried, like a good white dude who likes hip-hop, to get into their earlier stuff, but it always felt kinda far away from me. I mean, “You Got Me” is obviously a perfect song, but besides that, their pre-Phrenology records felt disjointed and a little bit too loose. This one had really catchy songs and some slicker production, which is usually a turn-off, but in this case helped me get what they were all about.

98. South of the South, David Dondero (2005)

This is one of those tour records for me. There are a couple others on the list. I probably listened to this album forty times in two weeks while touring by myself in 2006, and probably ten times since. But for those two weeks – man, David Dondero was reading my mail.

97. Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Charles Mingus (1963)

My dad actually didn’t get me into Mingus. I found him on my own a few years ago. Which is late, but whatever. I’m not trying to impress people with how jazzy I am. I love how accessible and funky he is on this record. “Better Git It In Your Soul” has a recurring melody that sounds like a chorus to me, and there’s so much life to this record.

96. Voodoo, D’Angelo (2000)

In 2000, I drove a fucked up old soccer mom minivan, and I dated a lot of girls for this weird six month period when they liked me. I was pretty lucky that Voodoo had just come out. You want to know how classy I was? I would pick girls up for dates listening to “How Does It Feel” in my minivan, feeling fuckin’ smooth. There is a reason this period of my life was a brief six months.

95. Remission, Mastodon (2002)

I caught Mastodon opening for the Dillinger Escape Plan at Emo’s right after Remission came out, and I swear to god, I have never seen an opener embarrass a headliner like that before or since. The timing is kinda suspect – this was when Mastodon was probably the best band in the world, and Dillinger was on the way out, but still. I kinda snoozed through Dillinger (which is crazy, if you know their music) and dreamt dreams of marching fire ants.

94. Troubadour, K’naan (2009)

Here’s a new one. I’ve listened to Troubadour probably four times a week since I first got it. There’s so much happening here, and he’s one of the most compelling and honest MC’s I’ve heard in a long time. The first three tracks are as great an opening salvo on a record as I can remember hearing.

93. Let Go, Nada Surf (2002)

This is one of those records that I loved, loved, loved when it came out, and don’t listen to much anymore. But it’s weird – every time I put it on, I find that there’s more than just nostalgia at work. These songs – especially “Killian’s Red” and “Hi-Speed Soul” – sort of imprinted themselves as a template for what I love about post-90’s indie rock (I didn’t latch on to the Strokes or the White Stripes so much), and I find echoes of them in a lot of what I listen to.

92. The Gentle Side of John Coltrane, John Coltrane (1961)

When I was more pretentious about jazz, I used to get really annoyed when people would talk about it being rainy day or late-night music, like it was relegated as the soundtrack to a certain emotion instead of being able to stand on its own. But now that I don’t care so much, I get their point. Especially with this album. It’s gentle, like the title suggests, without ever being cheesy. The Johnny Hartman songs break things up really well, and there are some production tricks on some of the songs that really show you how ahead of his time Coltrane was.

91. Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Black Sabbath (1973)

I feel like I kinda have to justify putting a first-six Sabbath record this low, but Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was always one of the Ozzy albums that worked better for me as a collection of songs than as an album. I mean, those songs are amazing, for sure - "Sabra Cadabra”, “Killing Yourself to Live”, the title track… But it’s not as consistent as Paranoid or Volume 4.

90. We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, Bruce Springsteen (2006)

Probably not one of the Boss’s major works, but it’s so much fun to listen to. He really keeps these songs feeling new and vital, even though he’s using all pre-WWII instruments throughout. I wish I’d been able to see him on this tour.

89. A Sun That Never Sets, Neurosis (2001)

Metal dudes surely disagree with the idea of putting a late-period Neurosis album on a list and not Times of Grace, but this shit blew me away. The build from slow-and-acoustic (and scary) to thunderous-and-loud (and scary) is really the exact kind of intensity I love in rock and roll.

88. It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Public Enemy (1988)

I started with Fear of a Black Planet, and I was about a decade late to that party. I didn’t hear this one until probably 1999. I think I only connected with this one after hearing Chuck D do “Black Steel” with Rage Against the Machine on a live import, but once it hit, I really got how unbelievable this must have sounded in ‘88, because it still sounded so unlike everything else going on.

87. Get Lifted, John Legend (2004)

I’ve been kinda disappointed with John Legend since this album, because this one’s so much fun, and has so much weird energy to it. “Used To Love U” is a fuckin’ blast of a rock song, and “Alright” is the coolest tough-guy posturing song I can think of. The ballads get a little sappy after the album wears on, but the first half is damn near perfect. And “Ordinary People” is still goddamn untouchable for contemporary piano ballads.

86. Be, Common (2005)

If Kanye West retired to just be Common’s producer after this album, that’d have been all right by me. And I love Kanye West. Common’s always been good at supressing his ego in the name of making great music, and he really nails it here. “Faithful”, where John Legend and Bilal spend the last verse riffing on the hook while Common gets out of the way, is a perfect example of that Walter Payton-style “act like you’ve been there before” attitude from an MC.

85. Beautiful Freak, Eels (1996)

You know, I didn’t even like this album when it came out. I thought the “Life is hard / so am I” song was, like, really immature when I was sixteen. I was way less mature a few years later, though, and anyway I got past some of E’s weird jokes to find the really simple, pretty, and powerful songs behind them.

84. Porgy & Bess, Miles Davis (1958)

Totally a my-dad thing. This is probably his favorite Miles Davis album, because he made it a point to introduce it to me ahead of anything other than Kind of Blue. This is a really subtle album, even when they’re doing major pop smashes like “Summertime” and Gil Evans’ orchestra is in full swing. It’s understated in ways that a lot of Miles Davis albums from the same era aren’t, and I think that’s why I like it.

83. Summerteeth, Wilco (1999)

Man, Jeff Tweedy was so good once. Maybe this album should be way higher, but I never listened to it as much as I did Being There or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. But I just clicked over to it and played “She’s A Jar”, and I know that “Shot in the Arm” is next, and maybe I could skip “We’re Just Friends”, but then “I’m Always In Love” will be on, and I kinda think I’ll be listening to Summerteeth for the next forty-five minutes.

82. Paul’s Boutique, The Beastie Boys (1989)

Hey, it’s high school! Still fun, and still majorly impressive. I’m pretty sure I could rap this whole album, beginning to end, without missing a single verse. Maybe a single line.

81. The Soft Bulletin, The Flaming Lips (1999)

Every time I hear that opening guitar sound on “Race for the Prize”, I’m nineteen again. I love that every song on this album is about superheroes. I love that it’s really sad while still being about superheroes, and being generally optimistic. I don’t think anyone’s written a better song about major, traumatic loss than “Suddenly Everything Has Changed” ever.