Bob Dylan’s late career resurgence is generally tied to the 1997 release of Time Out of Mind, which won Grammy’s Album of the Year award and kicked off a spate of original albums that number among his best.
But I would peg the start of that comeback to a modest release five years earlier — Dylan’s first covers album, 1992’s Good As I Been to You.
I’m not a big Indigo Girls fan — they’re too studied and too repetitive for my taste — but I have to give props to their 1992 album Rites of Passage.
On their fourth album, Emily Saliers and Amy Ray introduced a host of new sounds, including strings and exotic percussion, to add muscle to one of their strongest batches of songs.
My readers are clamoring for another installment of “In the Year of…” and who am I to deny them?
I started this series by looking at my birth year, 1972, highlighting my top five albums of the year and ten records (new to me) that received critical acclaim. I then jumped forward a decade and gave the same treatment to 1982, discovering a few gems along the way.
Now I’ll skip ahead another ten years and spend the next four weeks on 1992.
While New Wave was the defining sound of the early 80s, the #1 album of 1982 was the self-titled debut by prog-rock band Asia. Asia spent more than two months at the top of the U.S. album chart.
The band was created by former members of Yes, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer and their debut album outsold anything any of those other bands ever produced.
I own Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly, another critically-acclaimed 1982 album, but I can’t say I’ve ever listened to it in full.
I digitally borrowed this record from frequent commenter Dana, who counts it among his favorites. I expect we’ll get an illuminating treatise on the album from him sometime Thursday morning.
Meet Me In Montauk 