Many of my impulse digital music purchases are of artists considered cheesy or uncool. I guess you could call them guilty pleasures, though I’ve never felt guilty listening to a song I truly like.
One such purchase was Bryan Adams’ 1984 smash Reckless. Bryan Adams is decidedly uncool (and Canadian!) but there is no denying the appeal of this album’s hits: ‘Summer of ’69,’ ‘Somebody,’ ‘Heaven’ and ‘Run To You.’
The Cars are another band who passed me by in the 70s and 80s (to be fair, I was between 6-10 years old at the time). I’ve since picked up a couple of their albums, spurred on by $3.99 sales at Amazon.
One is their self-titled 1978 debut, which features such hits as ‘Good Times Roll,’ ‘My Best Friend’s Girl,’ ‘Just What I Needed’ and ‘You’re All I’ve Got Tonight.’ That’s one hell of a start.
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).
