Continuing a countdown of my favorite albums of 1986…
#7 – The Bridge – Billy Joel
Billy Joel’s 10th studio album was his last truly great one. I find a lot to love on 1989’s Storm Front and 1993’s River of Dreams, but this album is special from start to finish.
OK, maybe ‘This is the Time’ is a bit of a speed bump among the album’s nine tracks, but you can’t beat up on the guy for writing a prom theme.
Continuing a countdown of my favorite albums of 1986…
#8 – Especially For You – The Smithereens
I didn’t hear The Smithereens’ debut studio album until several years later when the band played a free concert during my freshman year at the University of Florida. I liked what I heard at that show so much I picked up this CD the next day.
Especially For You is an alternative pop rock masterpiece, featuring one absolute banger after another. Lead singer/songwriter Pat DiNizio called the album “a greatest hits collection from a band nobody’s heard of” because they’d been writing and playing for five years before recording the album.
Continuing a countdown of my favorite albums of 1986…
#9 – Lyle Lovett – Lyle Lovett
I was 14 in 1986 and not quite a “music guy” yet. It was a year or two later that I caught the bug and started digging into Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, and other oldies, and then turning my attention to new artists. So my list of favorite 1986 albums is almost entirely made up of records I heard years later.
That’s certainly the case for Lyle Lovett’s self-titled debut. I wasn’t turned on to Lovett until college, when …And His Large Band had come out recently and Joshua Judges Ruth was on the horizon. Those two albums cemented my fandom and sent me back into his catalog.
My last installment of the Decades series came back in April, when I wrote about the albums of 1976. I had a hard time coming up with a list of my personal favorites from that year.
Today I’m jumping ahead a decade, diving into the releases of 1986, and I have the opposite problem. I had a hard time narrowing my list of personal faves down to ten, and my top five are all-time classics.
Concluding my look at the albums of 1976…
The final 1976 album I listened to was Marvin Gaye’s I Want You, the singer-songwriter’s 13th studio album. This record followed 1971’s What’s Going On and 1973’s Let’s Get It On, two of Gaye’s most successful albums, and was viewed at the time as a letdown.
I Want You, co-written and co-produced by Gaye with Leon Ware, shifted his sound a little more toward disco. It also doubled down on the sexual themes of Let’s Get It On — this is an excessively horny album.
Meet Me In Montauk 