Here’s an album I’ve been listening to, quite literally, since I was born.
Carly Simon’s No Secrets was released in the fall of 1972, a few months before I entered the world. And while I’m not sure my parents were the sort to buy a record on or around its release date, I’m not going to nitpick.
Few artists can put out an album on which every song sounds like a billboard hit (whether it was or not). Tom Petty has done it twice.
I ranked his Full Moon Fever high on my 80s list, but a decade earlier he pulled off the same feat on Damn the Torpedoes, his third album with The Heartbreakers.
Randy Newman has released just 10 studio albums over the past 44 years, and half of those were produced in the 70s. In subsequent decades he turned his attention to film scores (with 20 Oscar nominations to show for it) while putting out a brilliant, acerbic record every seven or eight years.
But his most lasting work comes from his most prolific decade as a singer-songwriter. And 12 Songs, his second album, is a resonant, understated glimpse of his genius at work.
An interesting sub-genre is the album of new material that’s recorded live. Joe Jackson’s Big World is an example, as well as Stew’s The Naked Dutch Painter and Other Songs. These recordings lend an intimacy to the material that can be diminished in the studio.
The best example of this sort of album that I know of is Jackson Browne’s Running On Empty. This is an album about life as a musician recorded in a way that puts you in that musician’s shoes. It’s a beautiful marriage of form and content.
Simon & Garfunkel’s final album was their finest, in large part because it feels like a swan song.
There was plenty of tension between the duo during the writing and recording of the album — some of which found its way into the songs — and an undercurrent of melancholy to the project that serves it well.
