I’m not sure how big a milestone 1,400 songs of the day represents, but everybody loves a nice even number so… yay, me!
This weekend’s first randomly selected artist is Seal, who has never before graced the blog, or even been mentioned on it.
I own two Seal albums because my wife owned two Seal albums when we met. I have listened to them exactly zero times.
ELvis Costello’s King of America was the second album I received from my sister and her future husband for my high school graduation (the first, you may recall, was Michael Penn’s March).
Talk about a gift that kept on giving.
Here’s the second album I purchased on CD after receiving my first CD player (a boombox style contraption that I think I might still have sitting around somewhere).
I had fallen in love with The Joshua Tree on vinyl during my sophomore year of high school, playing it endlessly in my bedroom while reading and playing video games (I wasn’t a very exciting child).
In the late 80s, after I bought my first CD player, I immediately purchased three albums that I knew I had to own in this new digital format. Two of them are still to come on this list. The third was Peter Gabriel’s So.
That purchase was in part due to the album’s sonic qualities, which I knew would be well served on CD, but mostly because it was one of the best records I owned of any sort.
Lucinda Williams’ 1988 self-titled album feels like a debut but was actually her third album. She released her first record, a collection of covers, in 1979 and her second, the minor Happy Woman Blues, in 1980 before taking a lengthy hiatus.
It was a full eight years before this album came out and launched her career critically if not commercially. At least three songs on Lucinda Williams became hits for other artists but the album itself has sold only 100,000 copies to date.
