I didn’t know back in 1993 when I bought Billy Joel’s River of Dreams that it would be the last album of pop songs he’d ever release. Maybe Joel has a surprise in store 27 years later, but it sure seems like this was his swan song.
This is far from my favorite Billy Joel album — a quick glance at his discography suggests I’d rank it at #11 of 12 — but it’s plenty good enough to be my #8 album of 1993.
When U2 released Zooropa, its eighth studio album and my #9 album of 1993, the band was coming off a run of blockbuster albums that sold 10+ million units apiece. The Joshua Tree, Rattle and Hum and Achtung Baby had cemented the Irish rockers as the world’s biggest band.
So this album’s left turn in the direction of electronic dance music was unexpected and risky. But it paid off, both creatively and commercially. Zooropa didn’t sell as well as its predecessors, but it did move 7 million copies and it won a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album.
It’s time for the next installment of my Decades series, wherein I dive into the albums from a certain year across four decades. Currently I’m on the 3’s, having covered 1973 and 1983. That brings us to 1993, the year I turned 21.
I generally have a pretty low opinion of the 90s as a musical decade, at least in terms of what dominated the radio and the charts. But I hope to unearth some gems.
As always, I will start by counting down my own favorite albums of 1993 before highlighting ten albums new to me that received critical/commercial acclaim.
We have another chance for the Random iTunes Fairy to match a song to a milestone. Today is frequent commenter Dana’s birthday — Happy Birthday, Dana! — so he will have the chance to comment on a song chosen (randomly) just for him.
Let’s spin the dial…
Well, this is a rather funny outcome. This is a remixed version of a cut on Ron Sexsmith’s sixth studio album, 2002’s Cobblestone Runway. And I happen to have featured the original version already, so we have Dana’s first reaction on record.
This song appears toward the end of Disc One of Miranda Lambert’s 2016 The Weight of These Wings. It’s one of only two tracks on the double album not written by Lambert.
‘Covered Wagon’ is a cover of one of singer-songwriter Danny O’Keefe’s earliest songs. O’Keefe is a Seattle-based folk-rock performer whose work has been covered by a host of artists over the past 50 years. The one readers of this blog might know best is ‘The Road,’ performed by Jackson Browne on his Running on Empty album.
Meet Me In Montauk 