Funeral to Finish

  What are you doing all the way down here, Heart Like a Wheel?  You can’t hear this today without thinking about how it shows up in all the Phoebe Bridgers and Lana del Reys of the world.  Linda Ronstadt has such a heartbreaking and beautiful voice.   A couple of interesting things about this album.  As far as I can tell, every song on this album is a cover.  "You're No Good," probably the best known song on the album, was first performed by Betty Everett.  "When Will I Be Loved" is, of course, an old Everly Brothers track.  And "Willin'," a great pro-crank trucker ballad, is a Little Feat song and I hope "Waiting for Columbus," Little Feat's truly awesome live album, is somewhere on this list.  I can't imagine someone releasing an all-covers album now and it being a huge #1 hit for years.   The second interesting thing is that this album is #34 on CMT's list of the 40 greatest country albums of all time and I didn't eve...

  First we have to grapple with the idea of an album that came out in December 2019 found its way onto this 2020 list.   I mean, maybe it’s really good, maybe it’s not, but won’t it take some time to sit with it, reflect on it, think about it, before deciding it’s one of the Best 500 albums ever made? It’s probably not.  Look, I like meaningless bubblegum pop just as much as the next guy, and this is certainly well-executed pop, but it just left me feeling nothing.  I guess some of the songs are kinda catchy and I’m sure there are legions of people who love this album with all their hearts but for me there’s just no core here, nothing to believe in.  I do think it’s interesting how Harry genre-hops with fierce abandon, going from shimmery silver boy-pop to plinky acoustic faux-English-folk.  I appreciate that, but it still seems sort of forced and scripted.

  I know this record sold a bajillion copies and was inescapable on the radio in 1989, but I can’t love it.   The production is way too slick for me.   I mean, it sounds so polished and just right that all the interesting edges have been sanded off.   Some of the songs are really good; I just wish they had the chance to be themselves without being worked over until they’re limp.  This is the kind of album I can imagine being played in the background at a wine mom get-together.

  As you will learn from this fantastic and exhaustive article about this album from, of all places, Pitchfork, this is a divorce album Marvin Gaye made to satisfy a judgment owed to his ex-wife.  It’s pretty amazing that what is essentially a fuck you record is still better than most records that people will try to do a really good job on.  Marvin Gaye was a magician.  (Obviously, we're going to see Marvin Gaye again and again.)

  One of those albums you’ve (or I guess I should say I’ve) never sat down and listened to all the way through but know every song, or at least the idea of every song.  Produced by Phil Spector, who would go on to become a legend and then go to prison for shooting an actress in his house in 2003.  It’s very Wall of Soundy!  (As far as I can tell, that means “lots and lots of reverb and strings in the background," but I’m sure there’s more to it than that.)   Everybody knows "Be My Baby," of course.  Do you know "(The Best Part Of) Breakin' Up"?    What do you think it is?  "Finally being free of that manipulative asshole"?  "Getting to go out with my friends again without having to explain where I am"?  "Feeling an enormous weight lifted and being able to breathe again"?  No, it's none of those! That the best part of breakin' up is when you're making up Best part of breakin' up is when you're making up But, ...

  Another album I’ve never heard all the way through!   Of course I know some of the songs just through cultural seepage but most of it is brand new to me.   More ‘90s!   Lots of ‘90s in the early going here.    This is great!   I should have been listening to this all along.   The vocals are, of course, the star of the show and they are so smooth a child could push a refrigerator over them but there’s some great, catchy songwriting here.   I haven’t looked it up but I bet this was a monster smash hit.   (I just looked it up and “The album debuted at No. 1 in the Billboard 200 with 350,000 copies sold.   It spent a total of five weeks at No. 1 and was the third best-selling album in 1995 in the United States and sold 12 million copies in the United States.” Thanks Wiki. )   Anyway, yet another pleasant surprise.   I’m sure there will be a ton.

  This is the pre-big-in-America, all-in-Spanish Shakira, and I was surprised by, given the fact that I could understand maybe 3 words on the album (corazon, probably, and a few more) how familiar it sounds.  This came out in ’98, and often sounds a lot like the girl pop I knew and loved.  Anyway, it’s fine.  I liked it more than I expected to. 

  Obviously the touchstone for white Americans with this is that “wow, Paul Simon really lifted this for Graceland,” but let me reiterate that Paul Simon really lifted this for Graceland.  Like you can hear riffs, little melody parts, bits of song that ended up in Graceland (which is #46, btw).  Now, I understand that Simon collaborated with South African musicians and all that but it just seems bad somehow.  Anyway, back to this album.  If I had to think of one word to describe it, it would be “exuberant.”  It’s like bursting out of the grooves with energy.  Just joyful and amazing.

  This is some weird shit for 1977.  Hell, this is some weird shit for today.  Like somebody in 1977 was thinking “What if we did drone Velvet Underground but made it weird.”  How did this even get made?  It’s certainly interesting, and I’m sure there is a cult following that thinks it’s the Best Thing Ever Made but I can’t see throwing this on for a pleasure listen. That being said, Suicide was very influential!  According to Wiki, bands that have described them as an influence include The Jesus and Mary Chain, Bauhaus, Henry Rollins, Joy Division, Nine Inch Nails, Spiritualized, on and on and on.  I mean, damn!   Henry Rollins said the song "Frankie Teardrop" was " the most intense thing I ever heard ."  Imagine Henry Rollins saying your song was the most intense thing he ever heard.

  Never heard this album before in my life!  I will happily admit I’ve got all kinds of musical blind spots, and mid-70’s funk is definitely one of them.  Anyway, this album slaps.  Chaka Khan, what a voice, man.  There’s only one real dance track on here – the first song, “At Midnight (My Love Will Lift You Up)” but the whole album is so smooth and rich. I think everybody has certain musical blind spots, some more than others, of course.  I rather embarrassingly have to admit that (as will be seen) I am missing big chunks of music that was EXTREMELY POPULAR, like a lot of R&B, soul, jazz, and so on.  I never listened to the radio a lot once I got to college so I wasn't exposed to things that are blindingly obvious to some people (as we will see in just a few posts).  Part of what I'm looking forward to in this project is plugging some of the gaps in my music knowledge base.

  Oh hey!  Look at me, back on my blogging again.  Last time, as you might recall, it was lots of rambling and Bachelor/ette recaps .  This time, I'm OLDER and MORE FOCUSED and ON MEDICATION so this time around, we're blogging with a singular focus and the focus is this: I am going to attempt to listen to every album on Rolling Stone's recently released Top 500 list, from 500 to 1, and write something, however small and/or grand, about each one.   I foresee this taking about the rest of my natural life  maybe 2 or 3 years.  I've been wanting to get back into regular writing and fuck it, this is how I'm going to do it. So we're starting with "Funeral," by Arcade Fire.  I know this album really well, because it was omnipresent among my clique of music nerds in the early aughts.  This album was just so strange compared to the other stuff going on that year.  I just remember how everybody immediately embraced it and loved it.  The ...