60. Hip Hop Is Dead, Nas (2006)

I wasn’t into hip hop when Illmatic came out, and so I always kinda tried to fake it. That album still sounds good to fresh ears, but it’s not as earth-shattering now as everybody says it was in ‘94. That’s what happens when you take something so influential that everyone else tried to copy it – invariably, some do a good job, and people who hear the copycats before the original lack the original context. I liked Nas’ records that came out after I was a little more aware of what was going on in music, though – Stillmatic is actually pretty great, and I was blown away by how ambitious Street’s Disciple was. But I don’t think he really released an album worthy of his reputation again until Hip Hop Is Dead. It’s forward-thinking and critical without being KRS-style cranky, and it’s a lot of fun to listen to.

59. Bubblegum, Mark Lanegan Band (2004)

Definitely Lanegan’s most complete solo album. He’s everything he ever tried to be on any of his other records here – bluesy and spooky and a little bit of a preacher, totally comfortable as a rock singer but never confined to that role. I love most of his solo work, but this one is so effective as a long-playing album, with short songs that run a minute or two sprinkled in among the epics and ballads creating a really complete-sounding product.

58. Terror Twilight, Pavement (1999)

Another party I got invited to late. Terror Twilight came out well after Pavement cemented their reputation, but most of that reputation-cementing occurred when I was in high school, and they’re not really a high school band, you know? I made up for missing out on their early stuff with how much I loved Terror Twilight, though, and I can still go through this whole album beginning to end and be constantly amazed at how effective it is at showcasing everything these dudes were great at.

57. Black Moses, Isaac Hayes (1971)

I don’t really remember how I got into this one. I’m aware that it’s a little out of place alongside Pavement and Regina Spektor. Anyway – Black Moses is an album that became a friend, in that way that certain albums are just straight-up comfort. Isaac Hayes’ voice is so thick and sincere and you just can’t help but feel like, no matter what’s going on with you, he’s had it worse. That’s a good thing to be reminded of when you’re heartbroken or worried or convinced you’ll spend your life alone or something. Bright Eyes doesn’t make you feel that way.

56. Sublime, Sublime (1996)

The magic thing about music is that, even though I’m kicking thirty’s door down, all I have to do is click that little arrow up there and I’ll be seventeen years old again and skipping school.

55. Begin To Hope, Regina Spektor (2006)

I stole this one from Kat. I think she read about this album in the New Yorker, and she doesn’t get into new music on her own very often. So I had to steal it, naturally. But how can you not? These are some really brilliant, really funny, really smart pop songs that breathed new life into the quirky-female-piano-songwriter genre that, sexist or not, I was pretty sure was entirely played out. I bit the staccato rhythm from a verse of “On The Radio” in things I wrote for the past few years – the tone of her lines that go “This is how it works: You’re young until you’re not / you love until you don’t / you try until you can’t” found their way into a couple of things. Don’t tell her, cool?

54. The Dreamer, Jose James (2008)

Another new record, and holy shit, is it everything I hoped that contemporary jazz could be. The song up there, the title track, is pretty traditional, though with a voice that owes a little bit of a debt to John Legend, as well as Johnny Hartmann. But while The Dreamer never becomes avant or free jazz or even really experimental, it’s not an homage to the classics. Check out “Park Bench People” and see how vocal jazz can check its hip-hop influence without looking like the old dude at the party wearing a trucker’s cap. Just a fucking perfect album.

53. Volume 4, Black Sabbath (1972)

Speaking of perfect, here’s Volume 4. Actually, that’s a lie – it’d be perfect if you could convince Tony Iommi not to be such a wanker, as I’m sure Ozzy said a hundred times during the making of this album. The ballads here are kinda silly - “Changes” doesn’t really hold up, and “Laguna Sunrise” was pretty much created solely so that kids in the 70’s could try to win arguments about how heavy metal was actually way smarter than their parents and teachers thought. But jesus - “Supernaut”? “Under the Sun”? “Snowblind”? Black Sabbath was totally unstoppable when they wanted to be at this point.

52. Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death), Marilyn Manson (2000)

Hey, check it out – now none of my metal friends will ever take me seriously ever again. But you know what? I’m not really bothered by it. Marilyn Manson kind of got the jump on Neurosis on Holy Wood, mixing the acoustic folk elements with (an admittedly poppier strain of) metal and focusing on quality songwriting in an attempt to make a semi-coherent concept album about America, celebrity, and responsibility in the wake of Columbine. It doesn’t succeed on every level, but I always thought it was significant that they tried to engage the way they did. And they came close to commenting on a tragedy that, the argument went, they helped create – and they did it quickly.

51. Satellite Rides, Old 97’s (2001)

When I was making this list, I kinda had a hard time narrowing down what Old 97’s albums to include. They’re one of my favorite bands, but I don’t think of them as an album band – probably because I’ve seen them live so many times, the songs feel more appropriate in that setting than on a beginning-to-end record. But Satellite Rides got me into them, and it has a lot of my favorite songs. It’s not their most cohesive album, but then, I’m only halfway through the list.

50. Mule Variations, Tom Waits (1999)

This wasn’t the first Tom Waits album I got into – I had Frank’s Wild Years and Rain Dogs before this one was released, and I liked them both a lot. (“Hang Down Your Head”, “Yesterday Is Here”, “Tango Till You’re Sore” – what’s not to like?) So Mule Variations isn’t on this list because I came in late and have a sentimental attachment to it. It’s here because, seriously, I think it’s the best album the guy ever recorded.

49. London Calling, The Clash (1979)

Sometimes the classics are classic for a reason. London Calling has come and gone in my life, and it’s always meant very different things. It was about being fucked up and lonely and not knowing what to do with yourself, but knowing you wanted to go in a million different directions, when I was eighteen. It was about relating to people from very different walks of life when I was twenty-three and listened to it with my roommate all the time after moving to Austin. When I was twenty-eight, it was about how fucked up a city London can be, and how that doesn’t make it any less incredible. It’s funny – it became less and less abstract and much more literal as I got older. Most things work the other way around.

48. Black Love, Afghan Whigs (1996)

I didn’t cotton to Black Love the first few times I heard it. In fact, I really only bought it because I was a Whigs completist and I had a platinum card that Discover had foolishly sent me at eighteen. This was before piracy, kids. It’s not as accessible as 1965 or Gentlemen, because there’s a consistency to the songs that makes it hard to differentiate between them at early listens. But once it clicks – wow. The total fucked-upedness of Greg Dulli is on display here in ways that are played with a wry grin on 1965, and laid on a little too thick on Gentlemen. If a display of the fucked-up male psyche is what you’re after, this is the place for you, man.

47. After the Gold Rush, Neil Young (1970)

About three months after meeting the woman who would years later become my wife, and after a particularly emotionally volatile evening, my roommate walked in the door of my first Austin apartment to see me laying on the floor, lights out, listening to After the Gold Rush on repeat. I don’t know how long he sat on the couch while I pretended he wasn’t there – it may have been two iterations of the disc, it may have just been “Tell Me Why” – but that is what this album means, and what it is for. (He also told all of our friends about how pathetic it was in the days that followed, but that is what friends are for, too.)

46. From a Basement On a Hill, Elliott Smith (2004)

Elliott Smith made better albums, but I don’t think any of them mean to me what From a Basement On a Hill does. As much as anything, it was the fact that it was an entire new album from someone whose music I loved who was dead. (And it took me a long time to make my peace with the fact that he did himself in.) I played this record over and over again, knowing that there wouldn’t be another, that this one shouldn’t have even existed.

45. The Bends, Radiohead (1995)

The Bends is still surprisingly listenable given how many thousands of times I’ve heard it over the past fourteen(!!) years. I have to skip the singles these days, but “Street Spirit” and “Bones” and, oh geez, “Black Star” still work pretty amazingly well. Maybe this one should be higher on the list, but I can’t listen to “Fake Plastic Trees” or “My Iron Lung” ever again in my life, so maybe not.

44. An Unusual Move, Karrie Hopper (2007)

Karrie’s another friend, and An Unusual Move is about as elegant and pretty a record as any out there. Her voice is fucking magical – she sings like Willie Nelson does, which is to say entirely without affectation, just simple and sincere and unadorned. The songs are all mind-blowingly smart and literate (“I’ve tried to be the bearer that protects you / the feather you keep / in the place you hold all of your charms”). I haven’t spoken to her in a couple years, but I really hope she’s still making music.

43. Heartbreaker, Ryan Adams (2000)

42. Gold, Ryan Adams (1999)

Hard to pick between Heartbreaker and Gold for me – I got them both at the same time, right after a shitty break-up, and I like that there’s some more going on, production-wise, on Gold, but it’s neck and neck. Either way – these two albums are as significant a part of my young adult life as the break-up that led me to them, or the move to Austin that was inspired by the persona that Adams affected in his songs. These are songs that have some pretty deep grooves in my memory. He was never really this guy again after Gold, but I was never the guy who needed them again, either. I’m just glad our paths crossed when they did.

41. This Is Sometimes a Riverbed, Real Live Tigers (2007)

It hardly even seems fair to include Real Live Tigers on a list like this, and I wouldn’t have, if Tony hadn’t recorded This Is Sometimes a Riverbed. I saw every one of Tony’s first sixty or seventy shows as a musician, since we were on tour together for all of those months, and I haven’t always liked his music. I never really liked the way his records sounded. A few years ago, he learned how to really play and write songs, and a couple years after that, he decided to make a record that was worthy of those songs. This Is Sometimes a Riverbed is uniquely important to me, because so many of the songs were written in my living room – but a lot of Real Live Tigers songs were written in places I lived. This is the only real document of Tony’s music that sounds the way it should, and even though I’ve heard every song on it a couple hundred times, it still sounds good to me.