I’ve never really gotten Brian Eno.
I like his work as a producer (including memorable albums by U2, Talking Heads, Sinead O’Connor, Paul Simon and Coldplay) but the few times I’ve heard him step out from behind the boards he puts me to sleep.
Eno goes for that whole ambient soundscape thing and while I’m sure his version of it is deeper and more meaningful than most, it still reminds me of those stand-up CD stands you see at Target hawking titles like Tranquility and A Spring Morning.
Almost every album on this list was recorded by a group or artist that shows up frequently in my music collection. In fact, some artists on this list have more than one album on this list.
But Van Morrison’s Moondance sits alone on my CD shelf, despite the fact that the Irish bard has released more than 40 albums, some of them considered classics.
The best albums are always greater than the sum of their parts. Sometimes that’s just a matter of putting certain songs in a certain order and tying it together with the right title and right cover and — bam! — you have a consistent, unified experience that works as an album.
But other times an album serves as a document of its creation. Listening to it puts you in the room with the musicians, delivers not just the sounds but the sights, smells and tastes of its creation. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street is such an album.
Considering I was five when it was released, I’ve never known Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours as anything but a classic, record-breaking album. It is the 9th best-selling album in the United States and 10th in the world.
How great must it have been when this was just the new Fleetwood Mac album? When songs like ‘Dreams,’ ‘Go Your Own Way’ and ‘Don’t Stop’ emerged from your speakers for the first time, did they already sound like classics?
Best Albums of the 70s – #9
Watertown – Frank Sinatra (1970)
Frank Sinatra’s broken-heart concept album Watertown is one of only two albums that I’ve represented in their entirety on this blog. You can read my track-by-track analysis of the project here.
I wrote more about the lasting emotional power of Watertown in those 11 posts than I could hope to convey again here, so suffice it to say that the record may be the last transcendent moment Sinatra committed to tape and it works both for that reason and because it is a marvelous bit of theatrical storytelling.
