Another album I’ve come close to covering in full is Paul Simon’s 1986 masterpiece Graceland. This is an album that will never leave my shortlist of the greatest ever recorded, so it makes sense that it has shown up so often on the site.
I’ve given the Song of the Day treatment to all but two of Graceland‘s 11 tracks, and while several of those posts were more about the album as a whole than the specific song, that still counts for these purposes.
Concluding a countdown of my favorite albums of 1986…
#1 – Graceland – Paul Simon
Like The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead, Paul Simon’s Graceland is one of my all-time favorite albums, and it’s pretty damn high on that list.
My love for Simon’s best-selling and most-lauded album is due to its impeccable music content, of course, but it’s also rooted in nostalgia. This is the one album on my 1986 list that I listened to the year it came out. It was a staple of my childhood, an album my family learned and loved together.
Continuing a countdown of my favorite albums of 1976…
Oops.
I’ve made the mistake a few times in the Decades series of trusting an online source for the release dates of certain albums. Usually I catch it in time and adjust my posts accordingly before anybody knows any different.
Not this time. I failed to double-check the date of the album I had slated as my #2 of 1976 — Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years.
Continuing my look at 1975, first by counting down my own top albums of that year.
#4 – Paul Simon – Still Crazy After All These Years
Paul Simon’s fourth solo album, and third since the breakup of Simon & Garfunkel, was the highpoint of the 15 years following the duo’s split.
Coming on the heels of 1973’s excellent There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, Still Crazy gave Simon his first (and only) #1 album as a soloist and produced two of his most enduring classics: the title track and ’50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.’
In recent months, I’ve found myself declaring a couple of times that one song or another was officially among my all-time favorites.
That got me interested, during these pandemic times, in creating a definitive playlist of my favorite songs. This is an exercise fraught with peril and subject to repeated second-guessing, but that’s also what makes it fun.
Narrowing such a list to ten songs proved impossible, so I kept at it until I had close to 30, then pared back to 25, which feels like a good number.
