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Song of the Day #3,979: ‘Darker With the Day’ – Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

After counting down my own favorite albums of 2001, I now turn my attention to ten albums from that year that I don’t know well. This is the part of the Decades series that is usually both reassuring and disappointing for me.

The fact is, I almost never unearth any albums in this process that break into my regular rotation. So that tells me I must be doing a pretty good job rooting out the things I like in the first place. But on the flip side, I’d really like to find some new gem that has a real chance of cracking my own list of favorites.

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Song of the Day #3,978: ‘Volcano’ – U2

U2’s 2014 album Songs of Innocence is best remembered as the record Apple uploaded for free to every iTunes user, a move Tim Cook described as “the largest album release of all time.”

It was also a move that revealed just how little relevance U2 had to the new generation, as the predominant reaction by millions of young people was “What the hell is a U2 and why is it on my phone all of a sudden?”

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Song of the Day #3,977: ‘The Day and the Time’ – Shakira

‘The Day and the Time’ is a track from Shakira’s 2005 album Oral Fixation, Vol. 2, an English-language record that was released five months after Fijación Oral, Vol. 1, a Spanish-language counterpart.

Most of the songs on each album are unique, but two overlap. Today’s track is the English-language version of a song called ‘Dia Especial.’ The same music is used but Shakira’s vocal track is replaced.

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Song of the Day #3,976: ‘High Water (for Charley Patton)’ – Bob Dylan

I toyed with some other titles, but I was never in any real danger of not listing Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft as my #1 album of 2001.

This was the Bard’s 29th studio album, in his fifth decade of recording, and it’s as vital and playful as anything he put out in the 60s. He released his meditation on death and aging, Time Out of Mind, a couple of years earlier, and people might have easily mistaken it for a swan song. Instead, Love and Theft suggested it was a rebirth.

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Song of the Day #3,975: ‘Back to You’ – John Mayer

I find it hard to believe that through almost 4,000 Songs of the Day I have yet to do a theme week or two on ‘Best Debut Albums.’ It seems like such an obvious and rewarding topic. I’ll put it on the list for later this year. Plus, it would lead nicely into ‘Best Sophomore Albums’ — I can get a whole month out of this.

At any rate, without question John Mayer’s Room For Squares would rank highly on that list of best debuts. Over 14 tracks and nearly an hour, he leaps out of the gate with a winning collection of pop-rock gems and doesn’t take a wrong step. That’s enough to make it #2 on my list of 2001 albums.

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