40. The Mob Rules, Black Sabbath (1982)

Dio’s contributions to Black Sabbath are sometimes maligned by Ozzy purists, but fuck that. The final few Ozzy records sounded pretty weak, and The Mob Rules is full of weird, crazy energy. It’s also heavy as fuck in ways that are the definition of Sabbath. "Falling Off the Edge of the World" and "Sign of the Southern Cross" are everything that’s great about that band, and the fact that Dio is so different from Ozzy makes for a neat dynamic - there’s a lot of growth, and it goes in new directions, but it still sounds just like Black Sabbath is supposed to. I love this record.

39. Blood On The Tracks, Bob Dylan (1975)

If I had made this list six or seven years ago, there’d have been no way Blood on the Tracks landed anywhere but in the top ten. Since then? I’ve kind of used it up. And then I got married. I’ve listened to this album probably as much as any ever, and I’ve had to constantly keep mining away at it to try to find something new. What’s impressive as hell about it is that the newness is there. "Tangled Up In Blue" and "Shelter From The Storm" were my favorite songs when I was nineteen and first heard it. When I was twenty-two and heartbroken, it was "If You See Her, Say Hello" and "Idiot Wind". More recently, it was "You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go". The fact that all of these songs were on the same record is still pretty mind-blowing. But the emotional punch of these songs is a lot less significant to me now than it was when I first discovered them. "If You See Her, Say Hello" felt like I was being punched in the stomach when I would listen to it after a live-in girlfriend left me under dubious circumstances. Now that I don’t give a fuck about that, the song’s pretty dry. Even Jeff Buckley’s version sounds like it’s being sung to someone else now.

38. Born In The USA, Bruce Springsteen (1984)

What’s funny about how much I love Born In The USA is the fact that I probably only listened to it all the way through two or three years ago. It’s Kat’s favorite album ever (though she’d have denied it fervently when I met her) and she declared the summer of 2007 the Summer of Springsteen. We had just bought a convertible and we drove around listening to it like we were teenagers in 1984. The songs are obviously classic, and this is a really just an airtight album. There’s not a song to skip on it.

37. Appetite For Destruction, Guns N Roses

Four classics in a row now. What’s left to say about Appetite? The Mob Rules and Blood on the Tracks are albums I was into since forever, but I was a grunge-era kid, and so I always thought Axl and GNR were kinda cheesy - it’s easy to think that when you’ve heard "Paradise City" and "Sweet Child O Mine" a thousand times before you’ve ever gotten to "Mr. Brownstone", but in the proper context, even those songs are pretty amazing.

36. These Are The Clothes We’ll Wear When We’re Old, David Israel (2005)

David’s a friend of mine, but not a super close friend. What’s interesting to me is that I relate to his songs more than ones written by people who are like family to me. This EP is just incredible, really - his songs are smart and catchy and sad and optimistic, with lyrics that really only work because he’s so deadpan in delivery that you can never doubt his sincerity. And it features some of the most interesting production I’ve ever heard, especially for a singer/songwriter record. David’s voice is - how you say - imperfect, but really expressive, and throughout the album, it features two takes overlapping just a little bit off-sync from one another. It takes what could be a distraction and instead makes it the very thing that sells the songs.

35. The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place, Explosions in the Sky (2003)

Explosions in the Sky were kind of a slow burn for me. I saw them during SXSW 2002 and was impressed, obviously, because everyone’s impressed by them live. But I had to get over the Mogwai thing were I wanted these bands to rock some. Because Explosions in the Sky don’t, not really. But once I found a place for this band – right after The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place came out – I really couldn’t live without them. I’ve probably listened to this album once a week since 2004, and probably fifteen or twenty times a week those first few years.

34. Danzig, Danzig (1988)

Just an indisputably perfect rock and roll album. Man. Every bit as good as the big-name classics. Danzig lives on alongside everything in the canon, and it kicks most of its ass. It’s funny that this is dismissed as a metal album by people who think metal albums aren’t worth paying attention to, but that rock-y, blues-y things are, because it’s better than anything The Doors ever released.

33. Stay Positive, The Hold Steady (2008)

For an album that just came out last year, Stay Positive really wormed itself into my life in a lot of ways. I think what really spoke to me here is that this is grown folks music. It’s not something I’d have gotten if it had come out a few years earlier – probably because Craig Finn wouldn’t have written it then, either – but it found me at the right time. I was twenty-eight and worried about what I was doing with my life a little, living in London and sad, and I suddenly had a song that said, “Getting older makes it harder to remember / we are our only savior,” and I remembered what it was like to be sixteen and have every song on the radio sound like it contained nothing but no-bullshit truth. But as a grown-up. That shit doesn’t happen very often.

32. Laid, James (1993)

This was my favorite album, hands-down, all throughout high school. It’s held up really well, too. (The Barenaked Ladies, not so much.) I don’t listen to it very much these days, but not because I don’t like it – it’s just that I can play “Out To Get You” or “Everybody Knows” even now and be taken back to that point. I didn’t want to suck all the juice out of this one like with Blood on the Tracks, and I’ve managed to avoid it. If I spent more time with it, I’d probably bump it up a ways, but it might go the other way, too. I’d rather not risk it.

31. Streetcore, Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros (2003)

Streetcore came out just after Joe Strummer died, and it was like he created an instruction manual for how to deal with it, if you were the sort of person who would need instructions for how to deal with Joe Strummer’s death. I was that sort of person. It’s weird, but this one means more to me than any of the Clash albums at this point, because it’s just such a succinct look at his life. There’s punk rock here, with “Coma Girl” and “All In A Day”, and some “looking back at a life” songs – especially “Long Shadow”, which he wrote for Johnny Cash. And there’s the reggae he always loved, with a cover of “Redemption Song”. There are callbacks to the clash both indirect and direct – like “Midnight Jam”, which opens with the words, “This is London calling… This is London calling…” On Stay Positive, Craig Finn drops the line, “Raise a glass to Saint Joe Strummer / I think he might have been our only decent teacher”. And that’s true of the young man he’s probably referring to with that line, but it’s also true here, with the lessons on an album that seems to make peace with the idea of going before your time.

30. American III: Solitary Man, Johnny Cash (1999)

It’s almost arbitrary – aside from the first one and Unchained, all of the Johnny Cash/Rick Rubin albums are kind of just differentiated by the songs they chose, since they were recorded either in the same sessions or in the same exact style. I love all of them, but I hadn’t yet gotten into Johnny Cash when the first two were released. But I’d just discovered the guy (how hilarious is it to have “discovered” Johnny Cash in 1999?) when American III came out, and it really hit me how lucky I was to be around for this period in his career. He was making a new legend for himself, and I was able to enjoy it in real-time. Awesome.

29. Unknown Pleasures, Joy Divison (1977)

Ian Curtis loomed pretty large over me as a teenager. I first found Joy Division thanks to Trent Reznor covering “Dead Souls” on The Crow soundtrack, and Trent was my man, but I kinda thought the lyrics were cheesy – when he went on and on about, “They keep calling me”, I didn’t really buy it. But I knew it was a cover of a 70’s kinda-goth band, and I was a kinda-goth kid who wanted to trace the roots, so I got Unknown Pleasures for Christmas, and – holy shit. The same lines that Trent made sound cheesy sounded totally fucking urgent from Ian Curtis. “They keep calling me”? Hell, yeah, apparently they do. They were my favorite band from then on. I wrote papers in English class about Curtis, took trips into Chicago with my friends to seek out bootlegs, got really annoyed whenever I met someone else who was into them. Um, that’s all mellowed now, but they’ve never gotten old or felt used up to me. Atmosphere is kind of over-the-top, especially now that I’m way older than Ian Curtis was when he died – I can see through some of the cracks now. But Unknown Pleasures is still unbelievable to me.

28. College Dropout, Kanye West (2003)

I love College Dropout for the same reason a lot of white hipster kids loved it – we could get into an authentic, mainstream hip-hop record on our own terms. Kanye’s relatable and funny and so fucking catchy. I haven’t loved each subsequent record as much as this one, which is weird because he’s only gotten more famous.

27. Kind of Blue, Miles Davis (1959)

When I was eighteen, my dad and I drove around for an afternoon and he explained jazz to me by playing me Kind Of Blue. It’s still pretty much the definition of the genre for me.

26. Cure For Pain, Morphine (1993)

Morphine was such a cool band. They’re so moody and atmospheric, and there’s so much style to this band, but on Cure For Pain, there’s more to them than just being cool and moody. They retain all of that, but they also kept a real emotional core to the songs – and not just the weepy ones like “In Spite Of Me”. These are funky, soulful, jazzy songs that are actually about things. There aren’t two bands just like them, and they were never better than on this one.

25. Let Love In, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (1994)

Nick Cave has been my favorite singer since I was fourteen and all of my friends came back from Lollapalooza ‘94 telling me how great he was. This is the album that came out then. Each subsequent one – even the kind of crappy ones like Nocturama – has made a lasting impression. But few of them still hold up like this. Even Murder Ballads and The Boatman’s Call, which are supposed to have come during some golden period, don’t have the same punch that Let Love In does. And not just for the spooky movie trailer perennial “Red Right Hand”. The album’s all over the map – it’s got funny, hyperbole-laden stuff like “Lay Me Low”, which sounded totally sincere to me at fourteen, and it’s got Birthday Party-style rockers like “Thirsty Dog”. But it’s bookended by “Do You Love Me” part one and part two, and those are a pretty perfect combination of songs. “Do You Love Me (Part One)” is more of a mood piece, about a crazy night and a girl, but no one ever wrote a more terrifying and real song about being molested as a child than “Do You Love Me (Part Two)”. I loved the moodiness and the spookiness of this record when I was fourteen, and how Nick Cave sounded like an evil preacher. Now – I don’t even know what I love about it. Everything.

24. Too Far To Care, Old 97’s (1997)

Another air-tight album by a band that means a lot to me. I don’t know what to write about Too Far To Care because, like I wrote earlier about The Satellite Rides, I never quite followed this band for their albums. The experience of listening to the Old 97’s for me is halfway a live thing – I’ve probably seen them 20 times – and a lot of the songs on this one had previously appeared in their earlier lo-fi recordings. But this is the first time they sounded right, and these are the songs that sound best when they play ‘em live.

23. Pablo Honey, Radiohead (1993)

We all know that Radiohead did greater things than Pablo Honey in an objective, quantifiable sense. OK Computer and Kid A and In Rainbows are all, on a scientific level, more incredible and progressive and exciting and new. Pablo Honey is just an early-90’s pop album. But, man, it’s a pretty great one. Some of these songs are as good as anything they’d go on to write – “Lurgee”, “Stop Whispering”, “Anyone Can Play Guitar” – and they feel more honest. A line like, “I wanna be / wanna be / wanna be / Jim Morrison” isn’t exactly poetry, but I’m not sure that “Yesterday I woke up sucking on a lemon” is either, and at least the first one makes sense.

22. The Shape of Punk To Come, Refused (1998)

What’s funny is that they seemed really arrogant and cocky to both reference Ornette Coleman and declare their sound the future of punk rock back in 1998. Now, eleven years later, no one making punk music has still come anywhere close to catching up. The Shape Of Punk To Come is, hands-down, my favorite punk rock record. I also think it’s the best one ever recorded. Objectively speaking, motherfucker.

21. Red Headed Stranger, Willie Nelson (1975)

Until Bob bought this record, I kinda thought that Willie Nelson was sort of a joke. (I’m not a native Texan, despite the tattoos.) I just didn’t know that he was still relevant, because I knew him more from the Taco Bell commercials than from the songs he recorded. So Red Headed Stranger really and truly blew my mind. It’s so fucking vivid – there’s a terrible movie version of it with Willie in the title role – and it makes sense because it’s a straight-up cinematic Western about loss and betrayal and revenge. I remember driving around in Bob’s van and listening to the title track and, when the yellow-haired lady makes a move for the dancing bay pony and he shoots her, and then gets acquitted with the line, “You can’t hang a man for shooting a woman / who’s trying to steal your horse”, both of us saying, our voices choked with emotion, “Kill her, Willie. Kill her!” Yeah.