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.

Torpedoes features the quintessential Petty classic rock sound and contains a laundry list of memorable tracks: ‘Refugee,’ ‘Even the Losers,’ ‘Here Comes My Girl,’ ‘What Are You Doing in My Life?’ and today’s SOTD, to name a few.

This isn’t a deep album. It didn’t push any boundaries or introduce any new sounds or techniques to the musical world. It’s just a straight-up brilliant rock-n-roll album that jump starts your head, heart and gut. It’s a night on the town the Friday after a tough week at work.

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.

12 Songs is an incredibly modest album, right down to its title. Most of the, yes, 12 songs on this record sound like demos, even as they skip around in style from Newman’s favored New Orleans jazz to country, blues and low-key rock-n-roll. Several of these tracks would go on to be recorded with fuller production by other artists, but I love them in this stripped-down state.

Newman is in peak songwriting form on this album, drawing powerful character sketches, putting himself in the shoes of stalkers, racists and the mentally disturbed. I find it hilarious when ignorant fools on the Web dismiss Newman as a Disney showtune hack, obviously unaware of the bone-chilling songs he’s dreamed up.

‘Mama Told Me Not to Come,’ Newman’s tale of a wide-eyed innocent overwhelmed by Los Angeles, became a big hit for Three Dog Night. Their rockier version is excellent but, as usual, it doesn’t get any better than hearing Newman’s work in his own voice.

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.

In addition to songs performed live, Running On Empty features tracks recorded during sound checks, in hotel rooms, on the tour bus — in the world of a traveling musician. The songs are all great, but it’s the feel of the songs that elevates the album to en even higher plane.

The closing track, ‘The Load Out,’ is the most direct contemplation of life on tour, and it’s the album’s masterpiece. Browne delivers a tribute to the roadies who make it all possible and paints a picture of the mundane and lonely existence that surrounds those electrifying three hours onstage.

As the song closes, Browne segues into the Zodiacs’ doo-wop classic ‘Stay,’ an inspired decision. It turns the album into a celebration — a lovely evocation of the connection between an artist and a live audience.

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.

Even the fun songs (‘Baby Driver,’ a live recording of ‘Bye Bye Love’) play a little sad, like echoes of better times.

This album also features a trio of songs I rank among the finest ever written: the title track, ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’ and ‘The Boxer.’ If it was a 3-song EP including only those tracks I’d still put it on this list.

Here’s another track from Elvis Costello, this time from the excellent Get Happy!!. Listening to it has me thinking I ranked this album too low on my list of favorite 80s records. Isn’t that always the case? Whatever you’re enjoying in the moment feels like the best thing ever, until you move on to the next thing.

That’s what makes lists kind of ridiculous. Of course it’s never stopped me from obsessively compiling them.

The liner notes of the Get Happy!! reissue are a fascinating read. Costello discusses at length the uproar caused over the drunken, racist comments about Ray Charles he made to provoke a bar fight. It’s been said that he recorded the R&B-infused Get Happy!! as a mea culpa — a tribute to the black musicians who’d inspired him. Here’s what he has to say about that:

With hindsight, it might be tempting to claim that I had some noble motive in basing this record on the music I had admired and learned from prior to my brush with infamy. But if I was trying to pay respects and make such amends, I doubt if pride would have allowed me to express that thought after I had made my rather contrived explanation to the jury of the seething and self-righteous. I simply went back to work and relied on instinct, curiosity, and enduring musical passions.

Indeed, in the liner notes for the reissue of Mighty Like a Rose, he admits that he forgot about this existence of today’s SOTD until it came up in a search of material from the recording sessions.

‘Just Another Mystery’ isn’t among Costello’s finest songs, by any means, but can you imagine creating something as fully realized as this and then just forgetting about it? He probably wrote three equally good songs the same day.

The Rhino reissues of Costello’s albums are worth getting not just for the wealth of bonus material (including both the studio version of this song and the demo, presented here) but for the voluminous liner notes. Costello goes into vivid detail about the recording of each album and the inspiration behind many of the songs.

Here’s what he has to say about ‘Just Another Mystery’:

The song sprang from a tiny newspaper article stating that the body of the composer Bela Bartok was to be returned to Hungary from the United States for burial. The odd footnote stated that the coffin would tour through Europe by train and that commemorative concerts would be staged along the way.
I seized on this last detail to write the story of the last journey of an unnamed exiled hero, one who had not exactly been feted and respected in his adopted country and one who was forgotten in his homeland. Clearly, it was not the true story of Bartok but it had more to do with the shifting sense of worth in years beyond 1989.

Pink Floyd is the quintessential 70s band but for me they will always represent the late 80s. That’s when I, along with my group of high school friends, obsessed over all of their albums the way teenage boys have for 40 years now.

Dark Side of the Moon is the band’s signature album, one that remained on the Billboard charts for a record 741 weeks. Its iconic cover art is familiar even to those who’ve never heard a note. And those who’ve heard it have likely fallen under its spell.

Two quick anecdotes come to mind when I think of Dark Side of the Moon.

First: During my senior year of high school, I once set the clock on my CD player to play today’s SOTD, ‘Time,’ at 6 a.m. as my alarm. The volume was cranked and the idea was that the cacophony of alarm clocks in the song would wake me. I so anticipated the moment that I wound up waking up naturally a few minutes before six. To this day, I invariably wake up just before my alarm clock goes off, and I trace that ability/curse back to Dark Side of the Moon.

And second: When Radiohead’s OK Computer was dominating the critical landscape and pouring through the headphones of music fans the world over, it was often compared to Dark Side of the Moon — for its thematic unity, its use of the studio, its groundbreaking status. I remember one YouTube comment by a kid who must have been in his teens, saying that he’s picked up the Pink Floyd album based on those recommendations and was BLOWN AWAY by how awesome it was. Forget Radiohead, this was the real deal!

I loved seeing another young man fall under the spell of this album (and this band) the way I did at the same age. Other bands will claim the throne of the brand of progressive, mind-expanding rock that Floyd pioneered, but they’re all just pretenders. This is the real deal — it’s timeless.

Elvis Costello landed three albums on my 80s list, two in the top six. That was definitely his defining decade. But He made a pretty strong impression in the last few years of the 70s as well.

While his second and third albums, This Year’s Model and Armed Forces, won’t appear on this list, they contain some excellent work. But I’m most drawn to Costello’s debut album, My Aim is True, which announced his singular talent through a megaphone.

Costello spent most of the 70s playing clubs, recording demos and working a day job as a computer operator. In ’76, he was paired up with a rock band called Clover to record an album’s worth of material that was to be shopped around to other performers. The label recognized his songwriting talent but didn’t buy him as a front man.

The resulting album, recorded over six four-hour sessions, became My Aim is True. Clover became Huey Lewis & the News (though Lewis himself was not in on Costello’s sessions). And everybody who heard the record became an instant fan of Elvis Costello.

I’ve seen this described as a punk record (probably due to Costello’s pigeon-toed stance on the cover as much as anything) but it’s certainly the first punk record to feature a ballad that could make Burt Bacharach jealous. The gorgeous ballad ‘Alison,’ one of the album’s first singles, signaled the depth and breadth of Costello’s influences and talent.

He also toyed with rockabilly and Phil Spector-style bombast, as well as the avant-garde ‘Watching the Detectives’ (released on only the U.S. version, one of the few times I’m OK with the repackaging of an album across the pond).

‘(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes’ is one of my favorite early Costello tracks. With its playful call-and-answer second verse and two immortal lines that sum up Costello’s early romantic worldview (“I said ‘I’m so happy, I could die.’ She said ‘Drop dead,’ then left with another guy”), this is ear candy of the finest sort.

I’ve never understood why Billy Joel gets such a bad rap. Just the other day I happened upon a Slate article titled ‘The Worst Pop Singer Ever: Why, Exactly is Bill Joel So Bad?’

That’s the sort of garbage that only gets written about artists who are beloved by “the masses” and therefore un-hip.

I can’t imagine any serious music fan listening to Joel’s 1970s output and dismissing it as awful. Granted, his last four albums before inexplicably retiring in 1993 were largely weak, but don’t judge the man by ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire.’

But 52nd Street? Friggin’ genius. Joel named the album after a famous jazz music spot in New York City and he introduced those jazz elements to his trademark piano pop with spectacular results. The horn parts on songs like ‘Stiletto’ and ‘Zanzibar’ (listen from the 3-minute mark) are brilliant flourishes that elevate the material.

Admittedly, ‘Honesty’ serves as a bit of a drag on the first side of 52nd Street but every other track is pure gold. Haters, take note.

Most of the artists on this 70s list have successfully released music in the decades since. Cat Stevens is an exception. Nine of the 11 albums he released under this name (setting aside his work as Yusuf in the 90s and 00s) came out in the 70s. He couldn’t really belong to any other decade.

Of course it wasn’t a decrease in popularity that took him out of the studio but a religious conversion. Stevens converted to Islam and changed his name to Yusuf Islam in 1978. He didn’t record another studio album for 18 years.

The two Cat Stevens albums I own are 1970′s Tea For the Tillerman and today’s featured record, Teaser and the Firecat. This one in particular made a huge impression on me. It features ten simple songs, each more lovely than the last. Beauties like ‘The Wind,’ ‘If I Laugh,’ ‘How Can I Tell You’ and ‘Morning Has Broken’ — such delicate and heartfelt songs.

As with so many of the songs I feature on the blog, hearing today’s SOTD reminds me that I should listen to this album more often. So much music, so little time.