Bruce Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad, released in 1995, was a return to the style and themes of the haunting Nebraska. Recorded mostly on acoustic guitar, the somber album drew inspiration (and its title character) from Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Springsteen has always been a populist songwriter though he tends to not get overly political in his songs. Instead he gets his point across by weaving the hard-luck tales of men and women who are society’s victims.
Following the release of The Rhythm of the Saints, my family would debate whether this or Graceland was his greatest album.
Initially I sided with Rhythm, citing its earthy, exotic flavors and the way it turned world music into gorgeous pop. Eventually I came back around to Graceland‘s unique tour of South Africa via the Upper West Side. But there is no loser in that battle.
It’s hard to imagine a tougher act to follow than Paul Simon’s Graceland, but four years after that album’s release, he put out an album that can reasonably be called its equal.
1990’s The Rhythm of the Saints doubled down on the exotic rhythms of its predecessor, with Simon looking to South America rather than Africa for the rich percussion over which he spun his melodies. The album sounds as if it were recorded in the crowded streets of a Brazilian town (and in the case of some songs, it was).
I’ve discovered the mega-talented Donald Glover twice in the past year. First, as the hilarious college student Troy on NBC’s Community, and more recently as the superb rapper Childish Gambino.
Glover adopted his rap name after using the Wu-Tang Name Generator and after releasing a few digital mixtapes and EPs put out his first studio album, Camp in November.
I’m against retrospective box sets on principle. If I’m a big fan of an artist, I own everything he or she has released and probably a few odds and ends picked up on the Web along the way as well. Invariably, the contents of a career-spanning release will be 90% redundant with what I already have.
For that reason, I initially decided not to buy Ben Folds’ 3-disc set, The Best Imitation of Myself: A Retrospective.
