Yesterday I confessed to buying greatest hits albums by some artists whose work I’ve overlooked. I’m not ashamed to admit it.
But I’m still an album guy at heart. So the rest of this week I’ll feature songs from albums — not greatest hits compilations — that I bought to fill in holes in my music collection.
I’ve always been very much against greatest hits collections, put off by the way they cast aside deep tracks just as worthy of attention. I’d rather own the two or three best albums by a given artist than a single collection of their “best” singles.
But I’ve softened on that stance over the years as the digital era made it increasingly easy to buy exactly the songs I want, from artists whose full-length albums might not be the best way to appreciate their work.
Here’s a beautiful song from 2007’s Grammy-winning Raising Sand, a collaboration between Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.
This is the sort of safe, adult contemporary album that Grammy loves to award with its top prize (think Norah Jones, Steely Dan, Adele, Ray Charles, Celine Dion, Santana, Herbie Hancock, Dixie Chicks and the O Brother Where Art Thou? performers in just the last 20 years).
When today’s random iTunes song — the title track from Shelby Lynne’s 2008 album of Dusty Springfield covers — popped up, I was prepared to write a “whatever happened to?” post. Often these Random Weekend selections serve as reminders of artists who recorded their last albums years ago and then fell off the map.
But to my surprise, Lynne has stayed quite busy since this record. She started her own label and released four well-reviewed albums between 2010 and 2015.
My exploration of David Bowie’s catalog comes to an end with a 33-year leap to his final album, Blackstar, released on his 69th birthday, just two days before he died.
It’s hard to view Blackstar without the lens of Bowie’s death, especially when it seems he was very much aware that this would be his final artistic statement. Lyrics such as “Something happened on the day he died,” “look up here, I’m in heaven” and “I’m trying to, I’m dying to” are powerful and bittersweet because he recorded and released them so close to his death.
Meet Me In Montauk 