Three artists placed two albums on my list of the top 20 records of the decade so far, and Lana Del Rey nearly joined their ranks.
Both her debut Born to Die and this year’s Ultraviolence made a strong case for landing on the list, but in the end I went only with the moodier sophomore effort.
In counting down my top 20 albums of the decade so far, I’m considering only albums that are meaningful to me. That might seem obvious, but I want to be clear that I’m not necessarily looking to capture the most important, ground-breaking or ambitious records of the past five years — just the ones I like the most.
In other words, you won’t find any Kanye West or Radiohead here.
As hard as it is to believe, we’re just a couple of months away from the end of the first half of this decade.
What are these, the tens? The teens? Did we ever even decide on the best way to describe the last decade? I could never get on board with “the aughts.”
I don’t anticipate any earth-shattering record releases the rest of this year, so this is as good a time as any to look back on the past five and write about my favorite albums of the decade so far.
The Random iTunes Fairy has a nice sense of symmetry. A week after serving up Credence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Proud Mary,’ she has let the needle drop on the band’s classic protest song ‘Run Through the Jungle.’
Given John Fogerty’s opposition to the war in Vietnam, and the song’s title, many listeners believed this track was about the war. Fogerty says it is actually about the proliferation of guns in America.
The reaction to Brad Paisley’s 2013 album Wheelhouse was overwhelmed, probably deservedly so, by commentary on the ill-conceived and downright awful ‘Accidental Racist.’
Unfortunately, quite a few decent songs were overlooked amidst the outrage. Among them was ‘Pressing On a Bruise,’ a track co-written by Paisley and Mat Kearney. Kearney contributes a spoken-word verse toward the end of the song as well.
