I didn’t know back in 1993 when I bought Billy Joel’s River of Dreams that it would be the last album of pop songs he’d ever release. Maybe Joel has a surprise in store 27 years later, but it sure seems like this was his swan song.
This is far from my favorite Billy Joel album — a quick glance at his discography suggests I’d rank it at #11 of 12 — but it’s plenty good enough to be my #8 album of 1993.
When U2 released Zooropa, its eighth studio album and my #9 album of 1993, the band was coming off a run of blockbuster albums that sold 10+ million units apiece. The Joshua Tree, Rattle and Hum and Achtung Baby had cemented the Irish rockers as the world’s biggest band.
So this album’s left turn in the direction of electronic dance music was unexpected and risky. But it paid off, both creatively and commercially. Zooropa didn’t sell as well as its predecessors, but it did move 7 million copies and it won a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album.
It’s time for the next installment of my Decades series, wherein I dive into the albums from a certain year across four decades. Currently I’m on the 3’s, having covered 1973 and 1983. That brings us to 1993, the year I turned 21.
I generally have a pretty low opinion of the 90s as a musical decade, at least in terms of what dominated the radio and the charts. But I hope to unearth some gems.
As always, I will start by counting down my own favorite albums of 1993 before highlighting ten albums new to me that received critical/commercial acclaim.
We have reached the end of a five-week dive into the albums of 1983, and I am more convinced than ever that this was one of the great years for popular music.
So many excellent artists and albums, so many important debuts. And I didn’t get to a host of other albums I considered for this series. Here’s a sampling of some of those titles: Jackson Browne’s Lawyers in Love, Ozzy Osbourne’s Bark At the Moon, Depeche Mode’s Construction Time Again, Tears For Fears’ The Hurting, New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies, Duran Duran’s Seven and the Ragged Tiger.
Whew.
I covered Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, and now you can add Annie Lennox to the list of remarkable women who helped define pop music in 1983. Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) was not Eurythmics’ debut album (it was their second), but it was the one that catapulted them into popularity.
The duo (Dave Stewart and Lennox) had a string of successful albums through the 80s before going on hiatus in 1989. They recorded a final album in 1999.
Meet Me In Montauk 