Talking is Hard, the third album by Ohio-based alternative rock band Walk the Moon, is one of the great pop albums of the last decade or more. I spent a lot of time listening to this album in the years after its release, and I’m always thrilled to come across it in a playlist or on a Random iTunes Weekend.
Every track on this album is a winner. ‘Shut Up and Dance’ was a top five single that pushed the album into the top 20, but the band has managed to land only one song in the Hot 100 since.
Today is the second day of the final month of the decade. How fast the 2010s flew by! I clearly remember compiling my ‘Best of the 00s’ album list, which went live on New Year’s Day 2010.
Looking back on that list now, I see a lot of the same artists who will appear on this one. Makes sense. I also see some albums I haven’t revisited as often as their rankings suggest, and some that would be much higher or lower if I were to revisit that decade’s music today. For one example, I now consider Josh Rouse’s Nashville one of my favorite albums of all-time, yet it came it at #8 on that list.
The other day, my daughters and I were talking about one-hit wonders, specifically the idea that some one-hit wonders must have started out with a lot of long-term potential.
When A-Ha had a huge hit with ‘Take On Me,’ their fans probably thought the band would enjoy international success for years to come. And in Europe, they did have a strong run of several Gold albums. But 33 years later, can anybody reading this blog name another A-Ha song without using Google?
After a month-long hiatus, please welcome back Random iTunes Weekends! Now that I’ve switched to a streaming service, the idea of randomly pulling from my meager iTunes library seems a bit quaint, but we’re still looking at more than 13,000 songs.
Even if I could figure out how to pull a random song from the millions accessible through Amazon Music, I don’t think I’d be happy with the results. And I like that Random iTunes Weekends give a little glimpse of where my interests lie.
While this year’s new releases have been a bit underwhelming, I did manage to discover one album I really love — a record released in mid-2014 that has picked up steam this summer due to its infectious lead single.
That album is WALK THE MOON’s Talking is Hard, a modern pop juggernaut packed with 12 inventive, hummable gems. The one you’ve no doubt heard is ‘Shut Up and Dance’ but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
