My appreciation and affection for Mandy Moore makes me loathe to spend blog time on Ryan Adams, the man who badly mistreated her during their 6-year marriage, even though he released some truly great music before his career was derailed by numerous accusations of misconduct.
So, while presenting a lovely track from Adams’ excellent 2000 album Heartbreaker, I will use this space to advocate for an Emmy nomination for Moore honoring her amazing work in the ABC show This is Us.
When a Foo Fighters song came up as today’s random iTunes selection, I just assumed it would be loud. I’m a big fan of Dave Grohl, but only an occasional fan of his band because of the heaviness of their sound.
But ‘Home,’ the final track on the band’s 2007 album Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, turned out to be something very different, a delicate piano ballad about the longing for a place to be at peace.
I’m wrapping up the latest installment of my Decades series with a track from Britpop band Blur’s Parklife, a well-regarded 1994 album that became the band’s best-selling release in their native UK.
My only real exposure to Blur is through 1997’s ‘Song 2‘ (the “woohoo” song; you’ll know it when you hear it), so I was anticipating this album as an opportunity to discover something great.
When I saw that Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell came out in 1994, I couldn’t resist making it one of my featured albums.
Like most high school boys of my generation, I was a huge Pink Floyd fan. I knew most of their albums by heart, especially the run between 1971’s Meddle and 1983’s The Final Cut. By muscle memory alone, I can still sing or air guitar along to every note of Wish You Were Here, Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall.
When I do these Decades series, I’m always surprised by how many copies albums sold two or three decades ago. Most of the albums I’m featuring as part of this look at 1994 went at least three or four times platinum. A few made it to diamond status (10 million units).
Among those is Green Day’s Dookie, the band’s third album and first for a major label. The album went diamond in the U.S. and sold 20 million copies worldwide, making it their top-selling album by far (eclipsing 2001’s American Idiot by several million).
Meet Me In Montauk 