My 4th favorite album of 1980 is one I didn’t hear until 36 years later — just a few months ago, in fact.
As I wrote in June while marching my way through half of Bowie’s catalog, Scary Monsters is widely considered the last great album he ever made. It capped off a remarkable run that spanned more than a dozen ground-breaking records in just over 10 years.
Get out your parachute pants, Members Only jackets and shoulder pads, because we’re heading to the 80s. Specifically, 1980, as I offer up another installment of my Decades series.
Last year I featured the albums of 1972, ’82, ’92 and 2002 (starting with ’72 because it’s my birth year) and earlier this year I rewound to look at the music of 1970. My plan is to cover 1980, 1990 and 2000 before the year is through.
I haven’t listened to the Hunger Games soundtrack very often in the five years since its release. I bought it for a couple of Taylor Swift songs and a track by Pistol Annies, and I’ve given short shrift to the rest.
My mistake, I’m discovering, as a few of these tunes pop up on Random iTunes Weekends and turn out to be quite good. Here, Alabama-born The Secret Sisters deliver a mournful track, the sad delivery of which runs counter to its message of hope.
Last week I defended Bob Dylan’s foray into the music of Frank Sinatra, but today’s random iTunes selection serves as a nice reminder that nobody sings a Sinatra song like Sinatra.
‘I Get a Kick Out of You’ is a Cole Porter tune originally written for the Broadway music Anything Goes. That was in the mid 1930s. Sinatra recorded two studio versions of the song, one in 1953 and one in 1962 (the latter is the version below). Funny that this song was already an oldie when Frank sang it for the first time.
My last new song of the week comes courtesy of Beck, who offers up his first release since the gorgeous, melancholy Morning Phase won a surprise Album of the Year Grammy.
‘Wow’ is a world away from the Beck of Morning Phase and Sea Change, a lot closer to Odelay and Midnite Vultures. The brilliance of Beck is that he seems equally comfortable in both modes. Not many artists can pull off both soulful balladeer and space-age DJ.
