This song is perfectly lovely… the sort of thing you want to listen to while swaying in a hammock on a breezy summer day.
All of Jack Johnson’s music is like that (or at least, all of the Jack Johnson music that I’ve heard). But despite my acknowledging just how sweetly mellow this stuff is, I can’t bring myself to listen to it. With one exception (the theme song to Curious George), I just can’t make it through a Jack Johnson song.
Morrissey’s seventh solo album, 2004’s You Are the Quarry, was released seven years after his sixth. Considering he released all six of those records over the course of nine years, that was a major hiatus.
I didn’t really take to You Are the Quarry the way I did to Morrissey’s previous efforts. Whether that’s due to me or him, I don’t know. It could be I just wasn’t in the same mood or mindframe that made me a huge fan a decade earlier. Or perhaps it’s simpler than that, and the songs just weren’t as good.
Elvis Costello makes his first appearance on this list at #11, but trust me, it won’t be his last. The 80s proved to be the man’s strongest decade by far.
Get Happy!!, Costello’s fourth album, typified the sort of stylistic shifts he had already made on his early records and continues to make to this day. Having explored punk and new wave (filtered, as always, through his own cerebral sensibility) on This Year’s Model and Armed Forces, he turned his attention to R&B.
As one YouTube poster commented just a week ago, the Traveling Wilburys were “The Avengers of classic rock.”
George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne make sense as friends but not necessarily as band mates. Each brings his own distinctive vocal and writing style to the mix… how could they possibly gel?
An album higher on this list (shouldn’t be difficult to guess which one) drew high praise for blending traditional pop music with African rhythms. But years earlier, as the decade began, Talking Heads went even farther in the same direction.
Three albums into their celebrated career, the band was on the verge of splitting. Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, the married couple who formed the group’s rhythm section, weren’t happy with the perception of David Byrne as the band’s main creative force.
