I just finished High Fidelity again for the trillionth time, and a funny thing happened somewhere in the last quarter. A Doc Marten-ed foot attached to a denim-ed leg came right out of the book and kicked me in the side of the head, and when I dropped it, it fell to the floor on its cover, it opened into a mouth. Then it started yelling at me which was weird. Ok weirder. But it was yelling at me in a British accent, which is cool. "So, you just started this blog, linked to your facebook page about music, and you haven't written a single word about your favorite music?! No 'favorite' or 'best of' lists?!! TOSSER! You're not fit to call yourself a musician!!" A couple things here. The book was written in 1995, but I imagine Rob and his mates would evolve with the times. I imagine Dick and Barry would have snobby blogs about the best music there is which you've likely never heard of, and how painfully stupid you are if you haven't (in Barry's case). And yes, Rob is John Cusack in the movie, and Marie LaSalle is Lisa Bonet, and Charlie is Katherine Zeta-Jones, and Laura is blonde. The casting is near-perfect. But the book takes place in England, Marie LaSalle is white with blonde hair, and Charlie has short blonde hair, and Laura has brown hair. Anyway, this weird hallucination led me here, to my multiple lists of favorite music. It's pretty long, as you might expect, and covers multiple genres. No breaking off into sub-genres or numbering, except in a few cases here or there where I may note something gets the #1 spot. Not all genres are covered, only a few. And I did the tacky thing of throwing opera and classical/neo-/post-classical into the same list. My theory and percussion professors would kill me if they knew, and if they could find me almost a decade later. Some titles have notes, some don't. These are my favorites, not yours, and they're probably not the same as yours. I take music seriously, but what's good is all opinion. Here it is.
The 5 Things In My Car Stereo This Week
Figured I'd start with something easy. Here are the discs that make up my driving soundtrack lately.
"American Songbook Vol.1" mix cd, made by me
You'd think this was full of standards and classics of American music. It's not. It's things that feel or sound decidedly American to me and are classics in my mind, even when they're new. Not every important thing is covered here obviously, but it's for me to listen to and enjoy, so who cares?
Tracks:
1. A Map of the World" - Pat Metheny
2. Alice - Tom Waits - First/title track from his concept album about, yes, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. More about this record in another list.
3. Jolene - Dolly Parton
4. Hellhound On My Trail - Robert Johnson
5. Strange Fruit - Cassandra Wilson - I really like this version. If anyone were to cover it, she's got the perfect voice. And the arrangement reflects the lyrics really well. I think I've listened to that live version of the original so many times I wanted something a little different.
6. Lost Highway - Hank Williams
7. Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis - Tom Waits - if this song doesn't make you feel something, I don't know about you.
8. Willow Weep for Me - Billie Holiday
9. New York, New York - Ryan Adams - no it's not a Sinatra cover. That's not a slight on you, it's a slight on me because that's what I thought when I got this album lol
10. Release the Stars - Rufus Wainwright - a modern torch singer, he reminds me a lot of Tom Waits. Of course the voice is very different, but the feel, the style, is similar. I like them for similar reasons.
11. I Left My Heart in San Francisco (live) - Tony Bennet - in just over 2 minutes, this guy tells you everything about himself. Sometimes quiet, introspective, and wistful, sometimes rafter-shaking powerful and aggressively grabbing onto what he loves, and a million other moods and facets pass from his lips to yours in the time it takes to make a cup of coffee. And he leaves you feeling like he's singing to you and no one else.
12. Big River - Johnny Cash
13. Steady As She Goes - The Raconteurs - I love, love, love the hook in this song, and I always love listening to Jack White's voice, and his songs. Because, let's face it, this is his project, start to finish.
14. Death Letter (live) - Cassandra Wilson - another cover, this time Son House. I really couldn't get enough of this when I first heard it.Seriously, I listened to it over and over again.
14. Ruby (Don't Take Your Love to Town) - Kenny Rogers - the thing I love so much about country music is in this song. You stop, and you think, and then you go "wooooah". Simple lyrics, I suppose, but dark. And not the kind of dark that's all ghosts or serial killers or something. It's that idea of the "dark night of the soul". It's about humanity, and just how terrible it can be sometimes.
15. Your Cheatin' Heart - Hank Williams - take my last comments and superimpose them here, and after "Lost Highway". What adds that extra edge, that acknowledgment of the chasm of melancholy at our feet, is that most of Hank's songs are auto-biographical. Damn.
16. Girl From the North Country - Johnny Cash & Bob Dylan
17. Answering Bell - Ryan Adams
18. Seven Nation Army - The White Stripes
This American Life
- "Scenes From a Recession" (episode 399, I think?) - I love this show, and when I get tired of listening to music, and I don't have a good audiobook handy, I go to the podcasts of this show. Every week there's a theme, and a really interesting take on that theme, with 3-4 stories related to it each week. You can download podcasts for free on Itunes, and I believe from their website.
Shooter Jennings & Hierophant - "Black Ribbons" - more on this under "favorite concept albums".
Kurt Vonnegut - A Man Without a Country (audiobook)
Black Crowes - Amorica
My Top Metal Albums
You'll notice here that I'm very much old-school. Not at all to say I don't like anything else. I love some of the newer stuff, by which I mean things released in the last 10-15 years haha (not really up on the new, new stuff, though I should really fix that. Help?), it's just that my formative years were spent listening to metal and classic rock, so those are the albums that feature prominently here.
Ozzy - "Diary of a Madman"
- "Bl'izzard of Oz"
- "No Rest for the Wicked"
- "Tribute"
- "Speak of the Devil"
- "The Ultimate Sin"
- "No More Tears"
- "Live & Loud"
Slayer - "Reign In Blood"
- "Decade of Aggression"
- "Seasons in the Abyss"
- "South of Heaven"
"Rust in Peace" - Megadeth
"Spiritual Healing" - Death
"Pierced from Within" - Suffocation
"Ghost Reveries" - Opeth
"Aenima" - Tool
Metallica -"Ride the Lightning"
"Master of Puppets"
"...And Justice for All"
"Practice What You Preach" - Testament
"Necrotism - Descanting the Insalubrious" - Carcass
"Humanure" - Cattle Decapitation
"La Sexorcisto: Devil Music, Vol.1" - White Zombie
Cradle of Filth - "Dusk...and Her Embrace"
"Cruelty and the Beast"
"Damnation and a Day"
"Live Bait for the Dead"
"Alive or Just Breathing" - Killswitch Engage
Black Sabbath - s/t
- "Paranoid"
- "Master of Reality"
- "Vol. 4"
- "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath"
- "Sabotage"
- "Technical Ecstasy"
- "Never Say Die"
Pantera - "Cowboys from Hell"
- "Vulgar Display of Power"
- "Far Beyond Driven"
- "The Great Southern Trendkill"
- "Live: 101 Proof"
"Leviathan" - Mastodon
"Operation: Mindcrime" - Queensryche - more about this under my top concept albums
I'm going to stop here. Because I could go on, and on, and on, and on. I reserve the right to add to it later as I'm sure I've missed some glaring examples of albums that are or were incredibly important to me. But when you're doing a list from memory, and you've been listening to music seriously for almost 3 decades, who can remember every single thing?
My Top Jazz Albums
1. "A Love Supreme" - John Coltrane Quartet - this is my number one of all-time. Arguments can be made but frankly I don't care what they are. This is the album I come back to over and over, the one that broke my ears open in one of the most profound ways I've ever experienced and my life would be different without it. Not metaphorically. My life would literally be different if a very wise and incredible old friend hadn't introduced me to this many years ago. It changed everything. My life would be sadder, more miserable, less had I never heard it. Again, literally. I'm not going to bother to describe what it means to me, or even the music itself. I can't.
"Kind of Blue" - Miles Davis
John Coltrane - and now for the rest:
- "Giant Steps"
- "My Favorite Things"
- "Blue Train"
- "Africa/Brass"
"Mingus Ah-um" - Charles Mingus
"Out to Lunch" - Eric Dolphy
"Anatomy of a Murder" - Duke Ellington
"Blues and the Abstract Truth" - Oliver Nelson
"The Art of the Trio, volume III - Songs" - Brad Mehldau
"The Art of the Trio, volume IV - Back at the Village Vanguard" - Brad Mehldau
"Underground" - Thelonious Monk
"Sun Song" - Sun Ra
Considering how very long this has taken me to get just this far, I've decided to stop the insanity for today, make this a multi-part series of posts, publish this one, and come back to it. Hope you're enjoying so far. Cheers.
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