Check out the admirable sense of symmetry by the random iTunes man. Last Saturday he served up a track from Eminem’s worst album, 2004’s Encore, and a week later he delivers a song from the rapper’s comeback album, 2010’s Recovery.
Listening to those albums back-to-back, it’s striking to note the difference sobriety makes. Eminem recorded Encore while hopped up on pain pills and Recovery after taking a couple of years to get clean.
This pick will come as no surprise to regular readers of the blog. I’ve gone on record calling this my favorite album and even featured it in its entirety a year and a half ago.
In fact, I’ve had to cheat in order to post a song today. This recording of ‘Alice Childress’ isn’t from the album itself but from a live radio performance by the band on KCRW. Fittingly, given yesterday’s featured album, Folds writes in the liner notes that he sang this song “absolutely intimidated by Fiona Apple’s performance on the same show.”
The highest ranking sophomore album on this list, Fiona Apple’s When the Pawn… (the full title is a 90-word poem) totally caught me by surprise. I was a fan of Apple’s debut record, and had even seen her in concert opening for Counting Crows, but nothing on the first album prepared me for this one.
On her debut, Tidal, Apple’s voice was rich with a depth and maturity that belied her age, but many of her actual songs revealed her as the 19-year-old girl she was. She was tentative and prone to languid ballads that put her and her piano at center stage.
I’ve written so often about Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels On a Gravel Road that I feel like I should just post a collection of links to those other posts rather than rehash all of those points again. (I won’t, though) Put simply, this album is the best evocation of a time, place and mindset that I’ve ever heard.
I’ve long been a fan of movies that immerse me in a new place — whether it’s a Maori tribe in New Zealand or an inner city neighborhood in New York. When a movie can capture the sights, sounds and smells — the complete experience — of someplace new, it becomes something transcendent, a sort of teleportation device.
R.E.M.’s Automatic For the People earns its high spot on this list for a couple of reasons.
First, the obvious: it is the richest, most rewarding album recorded by one of the all-time great alternative bands. R.E.M. put out a lot of great music in the mid- to late-90s right through to their final album a year ago, but nothing that approached the majesty of this record. And the only earlier album in the band’s discography that I’d put on this level is Fables of the Reconstruction.
