My exploration of the year 2000 in music continues with two weeks of songs from some of the year’s most celebrated albums. To come up with this list, I cross-referenced a bunch of year-end top ten lists and looked for titles that popped up multiple times.
While I’m focusing on the year’s most critically-acclaimed albums, not necessarily the most popular, I will throw a bone next week to one of the best sellers of 2000.
Today’s post sets a record for the longest period of time between songs from the same album. I first posted a track from Talking Heads’ 1979 Fear of Music on July 27, 2008, nearly 10 years ago. It was song number three in my Song of the Day series.
It took me 277 days to revisit Ryan Adams’ Heartbreaker, the album on which Song of the Day #2 appeared. And 365 days between tracks from The Smiths’ Strangeways, Here We Come, home of Song of the Day #1.
When today’s Random Weekend song popped up on iTunes, my first thought was that I would at long last get to hear something other than ‘Stay (I Missed You)’ from Lisa Loeb’s 1995 album Tails.
But a few bars into ‘Taffy’ I realized that I know this song pretty well. And a quick sample of some other Tails tracks revealed the same. So I guess I gave this album enough of a listen back in the day to stick deep in my subconscious 23 years later.
The best album of 2000 comes courtesy of Aimee Mann and her third solo album, Bachelor No. 2 (subtitled The Last Remains of the Dodo).
This pop rock masterpiece almost went unheard, as the record label didn’t hear a hit and held up its release. Mann bought back the rights and released it herself online, making it one of the first ever albums to find success with strictly digital distribution. Eventually she expanded the release to retail stores (how quaint that seems now) and the album went on to sell more than 200,000 copies.
My second favorite album of 2000 is the last record Elliott Smith released before his 2003 suicide. Figure 8 was Smith’s fifth album and possibly his best (though I have an even softer spot for 1997’s Either/Or).
Figure 8 was Smith’s second album with major label Dreamworks, and the baroque instrumentation on much of the record stands in stark contrast to his ultra lo-fi beginnings.
Meet Me In Montauk 