Grab your tie-dye and bell bottoms because we’ll be spending the next month exploring the albums of 1975, in the latest installment of the Decades series. I’ve covered the first five years of the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s and now I’m wrapping back around to focus on the middle year of each decade.
As usual, I’ll start by counting down my personal favorite albums from the year then highlight some of the critically and commercially popular releases with which I’m less familiar.
Today we throw back to the week of May 4, 2013, the most recent year I’ll cover in Throwback Weekends (at least until we hit 2024). Next week I’ll loop back around to 1963.
Pink’s ‘Just Give Me a Reason’ was the third single from The Truth About Love, one of the best albums of that year. The song was initially planned as a solo performance, with Nate Ruess of the band fun. as a co-songwriter, but Pink felt the track would work better as a conversation between two performers.
Today’s Throwback Weekend installment has us throwing back to the week of May 3, 2003, when 50 Cent’s ‘In Da Club’ occupied the top spot of Billboard’s Hot 100.
This song spent 17 weeks on the Hot 100 and nine weeks at #1. It was the first single on 50 Cent’s well-received debut studio album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’.
Add one more title to the list of upcoming June releases by my favorite artists. I just learned that Jason Isbell, accompanied by his band the 400 Unit, will release an album titled Weathervanes on June 9.
Isbell first grabbed my attention with 2017’s The Nashville Sound, after which I quickly gobbled up the rest of his catalog. He delivers a rich blend of folk, Americana, and southern rock filtered through his fierce intellect and eagerness for merciless self-reflection. I discovered him around the same time I first heard Brandi Carlile and I think of them as flip sides of the same brilliant coin.
June 2 is a big day for releases by favorite artists of mine whom I haven’t heard from in awhile. In addition to the Ben Folds album I wrote about on Monday, Rufus Wainwright is dropping his latest studio album.
Wainwright has been more prolific than Folds, though three of his releases over the past decade were the sort of side projects I don’t get very excited about (an opera, a collection of Shakespearean sonnets set to music, and his second recreation of a Judy Garland live performance). I never got into the 2020 pop album Unfollow the Rules, though, which should have been right up my alley. I owe that one another listen.
Meet Me In Montauk 