I like when the Decades posts give me a chance to listen to an artist I’ve never heard before, and frankly will likely never hear again. Kylie Minogue is such an artist.
The 52-year-old dance-pop star is the all-time top-selling Australian artist, with more than 70 million albums sold worldwide. I don’t think I’d ever heard a note of hers until this week.
My awareness of Warren Zevon begins and ends with his classic ‘Werewolves of London,’ released on the 1978 album Excitable Boy. That song got a lot of airplay when I was young, and really got a boost when Martin Scorsese had Tom Cruise peacock around a pool table to it in 1986’s The Color of Money.
That was Zevon’s third of 12 studio albums, in a career that spanned 24 years and saw him collaborate with the likes of Linda Ronstadt, David Letterman and R.E.M.
I’m continuing my Decades series over the next two weeks, writing about some of the 2003 albums that didn’t crack my top ten. Most of these records are completely new to me. A few are in my music library but neglected enough that I’m treating them as new.
Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below falls into the latter category. I know the big songs from this album very well (‘Hey Ya,’ ‘The Rooster,’ ‘The Way You Move‘) but the rest haven’t stuck with me. And listening to it again this week, that didn’t really change.
When I was at the height of my Rufus Wainwright mania, in the mid-2000s, my go-to answer for “favorite album ever” was Wainwright’s Want One. So it’s kind of a no-brainer as my #1 album of 2003.
Wainwright has released only two pop albums in the last 13 years, detouring into opera and piano instrumentals, so my devotion has waned. I couldn’t really get into the album he released this year, Unfollow the Rules.
I discovered Josh Rouse after the release of his 2005 album Nashville, a record I count among one of my all-time top ten. I quickly gobbled up his previous four albums, all great, and especially loved 1972.
Titled after Rouse’s birth year (and mine), 1972 blends sounds and styles of the 70s with Rouse’s alt-pop sensibility, dabbling in a little Carole King here, a little Marvin Gaye there. Though it’s a concept album in the strictest sense, it doesn’t feel fussed over. He’s too good a songwriter for it to feel anything but authentic.
Meet Me In Montauk 