Last week I counted down my five favorite albums of 1970, and while it was an excellent group of albums, the truth is I didn’t have many runners-up. I have a very cursory knowledge of that year’s music.
So over the next three weeks I’ll feature songs from other 1970 albums that received widespread acclaim. Could some of these crack my own top five if given the chance?
I owned my first CD player in the late 80s. It was a large black boom box with a cassette deck on the front and the CD unit on top. Something like this, but not quite as slick.
The first three CDs I bought were albums I had owned on vinyl but wanted to experience in this new, sonically superior format (I guess vinyl enthusiasts would quibble with the “sonically superior” part). One was U2’s The Joshua Tree, another was Paul Simon’s Graceland and the third was Peter Gabriel’s So.
The Random iTunes Fairy has a knack for serving up songs I’ve never heard. That’s a neat trick given that the source of these songs is my own music collection, and you’d assume I’ve heard most of that.
But over the years I have, through one way or another, come into possession of a number of albums or singles that I’ve never played. And if Random Weekends are the way to remedy that, so be it.
Famous music critic Robert Christgau called Randy Newman’s 12 Songs “a perfect album,” and I can’t disagree. That’s why it was an easy pick as my best album of 1970.
I consider this record and Newman’s follow-up, 1972’s Sail Away, his very best albums and that makes them two of my very favorite albums of all-time. This one is as simple a distillation of Newman’s songwriting as you can imagine. Nothing fancy, just a brilliant lyricist and musician spinning tales both acidic and sweet.
My second favorite album of 1970 is Frank Sinatra’s little-known but no less classic concept album Watertown.
The album tells the tale of a man picking up the pieces after being left by his wife. He raises his two children, earns the sympathy of his neighbors, and quietly tries to win her back. The record ends with him waiting in the rain at a train station, the wife having gone back on her promise to return.
Meet Me In Montauk 
