Dashboard!
Eventually I am going to run out of stupid gimmicks to group albums together for listening purposes, but it won't be this week. This one came together pretty organically (again, planning things ahead of time is antithetical to my process) and originated with a flat tyre on Catherine's bike. Where she works is only a ten minute drive from our front door, and because we maintain a single car household, if for some reason or another I need the car, she occasionally enjoys cycling to work which is about 30 or so minutes of clean air and exercise. This week was one of those weeks, and her outbound journey was uninterrupted, but I did get a call from her later that evening when it became apparent her tyre had burst and she couldn't cycle home. As a result, I also had to drive her in the next morning, and sometimes I just need to snap-pick something to listen to in the car without thinking too hard about it. We had gone through a period of listening to The National in the car a few years ago, and I know it's a safe pick, so as she was walking to the car from our front door, I just threw on
High Violet knowing I hadn't listened to it yet.
I was also conscious of two other things coming up - one, the transition to March, meaning I would be allowed once again to listen to a Taylor Swift album in keeping with my one-per-month schedule; and two, I was about to hit my 300th album listened to since January 1st. Since I had listened to a Taylor Swift record for my 200th album, it made sense in my head to listen to one for my 300th. But which one? Well, I was listening to High Violet, realised I could listen to Red and that I knew a bunch of other albums I wanted to listen to with colour titles, and so a theme was born. Note for this, all of these albums I summoned from memory instead of googling, and I couldn't think of an album with Orange in the title, so technically this isn't a rainbow despite what the title of the article says. Sorry if this deception has ruined your trust in me.
While there's not much holistically to link these albums together apart from the colour theme, I am surprised there aren't more albums out there with a single name of a colour as a title; I've touched on
my feelings on selecting a good album title in my rant about self-titled albums, and I think picking a colour, something which already have a bunch of emotional and real world associations you can piggy back off, seems like easy-mode for album naming if you don't have any other inspiration. Based on the critical reputation of several of the titles above, it's also a pretty good indicator that it might also be an incredible and career-defining part of your discography. Maybe that's why more bands don't do it - it's too much of a Babe Ruth called shot to name your album
British Racing Green and know you are going head to head with
Red and
Blue by comparison.
I came to The National through Catherine. She has her own discoverability process for new music, and sometimes I will walk into her office where the Amazon Alexa she uses for a bluetooth speaker monitors our every word and I ask her what she's listening to. I'm not sure what first put The National on her radar, but there was definitely a period where I stopped asking her what she was listening to, because the answer was always The National, and they have a pretty distinctive sound. Anything Catherine thinks is worth listening to for multiple months straight is certainly worth giving an honest listen to, and I am pretty certain I picked High Violet because it contained the only The National song I was familiar with, Bloodbuzz, Ohio because, you guessed it, its on a Rock Band videogame track list somewhere. I didn't stop there, though, because I found something deeply enjoyable in their music - I like the prominent rhythm section, staccato drum phrasing and the low rumble of Matt Beminger's languid vocals. They exist as a kind of opposite coin face to Interpol - same intricate drums, same poetic phrasing - but where Interpol are the audio equivalent of an amphetamine-fuelled evening of bad decisions in a red-lit nightclub, The National are being languidly stoned in velvet curtained coffee shop and watching the lights move around the ceiling.
In an ironic inversion, I have remained a fan of their music whereas Catherine more recently has had something of a falling out with them. Numerous are the times where we have talked together about what we think a particular song means or is about, and Catherine enjoyed puzzling out her interpretations of their lyrics. After one particularly back-and-forth discussion, she found an interview with Matt Beminger which basically said he just picks words that sound nice and there's no greater meaning. This destroyed the mystique of The National for her, and while she still likes their sound, the love is not there like it once was.
Until I listened to The Music of Tori and The Muses last week, I would have told you that Scarlet's Walk is the last Tori Amos album I enjoyed in it's entirety before her output became more hit-and-miss in the records that followed. While this is not young, angry Tori working through violence and trauma in confrontationally direct piano-rock arias, 2002 Tori Amos instead comes to terms with not having all, or any, of the answers to life's questions once you hit your thirties and feel like you should have stuff together. There's nothing as iconic as Cornflake Girl or Precious Things on here, but I've a real love for don't make me come to Vegas (infuriating grammar, no leading capital letter BUT capitalised proper noun 'Vegas') and I Can't See New York (all intercapped) off this album. Never the album I would recommend for first time listeners, but it does have a gentler demeanour which makes it feel more accessible than something like Boys For Pele or Under The Pink (yes, I could have done that for this but I had a different Pink album I wanted to do and I can save it for when I talk about early Tori).
Catherine and I saw her at Manchester Apollo in 2009 - from that gig I remember two things. 1) they ran out of XL shirts so I did not buy a shirt for that gig; 2) when she played Precious Things I got genuine for-real goosebumps and that doesn't happen often. Talking of people who take a laissez faire approach to lyric writing, R.E.M.s Michael Stipe exists as potentially the most infuriating incarnation of this, switching effortlessly between direct lyrical narrative content, poetic allegory with specific meaning, and abstract words-that-fit-the-music lyricism, sometimes in the same song. Existing as the centre-point for me of the best 3-album run in their career (it's Document - Green - Out Of Time, for the record), this album is everything I love about the R.E.M. experience. Energy coupled with introspection, songs which feel like their are about something with lyrics which are patently about nothing (unless they are) Stand is an almost throwaway pop song with an upbeat theme; following it, World Leader Pretend is not only one of my favourite R.E.M. songs of all time, but its minor key despair and isolation feels like a lost track from Pink Floyd's The Wall, performed by another band. If you were ever curious about where to start with R.E.M, I would start here.
By covering Stone Temple Pilot's Purple here, having already covered Core previously, I am running out of road to talk about a band that I love. I covered a bit on my personal attachment to them as the band I 'discovered' before my friends in an earlier post. Here, I'll say there are a bunch of people who I wish I could sing like and Scott Weiland from Stone Temple Pilots features on that list of a handful of names. STP's generalised position as grunge's also-rans always felt unfair; much bigger in the US than they were here in the UK (this album sold 6m copies in the US and 60,000 over here), this is where the band go from 'We want to sound like Nirvana' in 1992 to finding their own sound in 1994. There are still some quiet verse/loud chorus/high attack guitar songs on here for sure, but there's blues and country tones sprinkled throughout which suit Weiland's vocal range much better; The DeLeo brothers write interesting and complex instrumentation (all the drum tracks of this album are far more intricate than you might think) and I think it's hard to argue against this being their peak as a band.
Proof that I am one of the 5 people on earth who own Scott Weiland's solo side project on CD
Stone Temple Pilots were record number 298 I listened to this year. As I said at the top, my plan was to listen to Taylor Swift's Red as number 300. But then I remembered I also needed to listen to Joni Mitchell, one of the most influential albums of my entire musical history, so Taylor Swift had to make some space for those which came before, and Red (Taylor's Version) became album 299 instead.
The original version of Red is the first Taylor Swift album I listened to all the way through and with purpose. She wasn't then the phenomenon she would grow to be. As hard as it is to believe now, prior to the success of 1989 two years later, she existed only as an up-and-coming country-pop singer crossing over to the mainstream; but people in the music industry even then described her as talented and hard working and her work full of emotion. I heard I Knew You Were Trouble somewhere and it ended up stuck in my head so I listened to Red out of a kind of scientific curiosity, and instead of getting I Knew You Were Trouble dislodged from my head, it just invited over I Almost Do and The Last Time and then All Too Well and 22 and Holy Ground to have a sleepover in my brain. I wasn't a megafan, but there was a place for this album in my rotation. I didn't work back through the albums which had come before, just enjoyed it for what it was. When 1989 came out and had several hit singles, I listened to that as well, but eventually these albums became just entries in a long list of albums I'd internalised, enjoyed, but ultimately moved on from. Evermore would shatter that perception and give me a full blown case of the Swifties, but that's a story for a different time.
If you don't know the provenance and purpose of the Taylor's Version rereleases, the internet can fill you in - but outside of legal and financial benefits, each TV rerelease acts as an opportunity for Taylor to layer in a host of additional (mostly new) music, turning each rerelease into basically a double-album - one disc what you thought you were getting, and a second disc of all new songs. The second half/From The Vault tracks on Red are really worth the price of admission - a release of her duet with Chris Stapleton I Bet You Think About Me which is one of my favourite Taylor songs in her entire portfolio (with an incredibly fun video), a second duet with Phoebe Bridgers, and ending with the Swiftie rosetta stone All Too Well (10 Minute Version), a painstaking breakdown of her failed relationship with Jake Gyllenhal where there was just too much material for a 4 minute pop song, so it was edited down for release. Restored to its complete, final form, exists as a kind of epic poem, Gilgamesh for young women in shitty relationship. When I listened to this album I actually skipped All Too Well at track 5, because I find the edits jarring now I am so familiar with the 10 minute version. This album is an absolute crossover monster, the only way you would not find something on here to love would be if you were predisposed to dislike Taylor for personal or ideological reasons. It's a great record.
It's no Blue though. I couldn't not make this my 300th record when I realised I had the opportunity. If my mother loved Roberta Flack's Killing Me Softly so much she was offended when people covered her songs, her devotion to this album surpasses that so much that it's hard to find a point of comparison. I'm certain this is my mother's favourite album of all time; It's one of mine as well. I've been told (though in a Big Fish kind of way, its hard to know whether any of these parental stories resemble the truth as there are several different versions throughout the years) that the reason my name is Richard is because the last track on this album is called The Last Time I saw Richard. It's timeless in its perfection - it's emotionally honest diary-entries as songs, what Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker and Haim aspire to, but 50 years before them. It's an utterly perfect album and everyone should listen to it; when it's raining outside your window on a Sunday afternoon, open a bottle of wine, listen to this album and stare out of the window at the rain.
And with that, I'd covered 300 albums in 64 days. But I wasn't done with my colours, because by now you should know I love a 3x3 grid of album art, and that was only 6.
So Taylor Swift was album 200 and 299; in a nice bit of unplanned symmetry, The Band were album 100 and 301. Music From Big Pink is, as many of these are, the definitive work in their discography. While my personal preference is for their self-titled album, there's no denying this is a country-blues tour de force anchored by The Weight as their most well-known song (though it exists as one of the many songs subsequently corrupted for me by being included as a sample on a Girl Talk track). There's nothing I can say about this album I haven't already said about them before - The Band are great, less well known or regarded than they should be, and this record is a triumph. As a sidenote, even though I love this record, and know that their version of This Wheel's On Fire is jointly the original with the Dylan version, Absolutely Fabulous has ruined that song for me and this version feels strangely alien and out of place.
For the final colour album, I was going to do Yellow Submarine, but honestly it felt weird doing that as the first Beatles album for this year and having to talk about them in that context. Fortunately I had a backup Yellow album I could call on. Elton John becomes the latest in a list of what I'm going to start calling Greatest Hits Artists; A band or performer who's back catalogue is incredibly well known in general, but only through the hits, and not the deeper discography (like with ABBA all the way back in the first article of the year). But fortunately for Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, I can once again invoke the My Parents Were Hippies card and tell you that this album (and strangely I think only this album - as an example, the first time I heard Tiny Dancer was when I watched the film Almost Famous) was amongst the many that got repeat airtime in my childhood household.
This album functions almost as a greatest hits on its own, featuring at least four different songs which must be on every Elton John collection going. I've got a lot of time for Elton John as a person - he obviously exists as a flamboyant caricature at times, but his willingness to lend his voice and piano to people across the modern music industry (because he can say "Tell (X)'s people Elton John would like to play with them" and no-one is going to turn him down) always felt like he never stopped listening to new music, never stopped being excited by the possibilities of it. I think if I was incredibly omega-rich and talented, I'd like to think I would do the same things.
I might also buy even more board games than I currently have, it's impossible to say unless someone would like to make me omega-rich to test this hypothesis.
To put a thematic bow on this selection of albums, I had True Colours* in mind as soon as I figured out this was what I was going to be doing. It's a fine album, it has a very weird and unnecessary cover of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On and Iko Iko which I had forgotten about until just now, but I'm on record as being generally in favour of the 80's female power ballad as a format, and Cyndi Lauper exists as a foremost proponent of that school of music. Nothing more to see here. Except I have a story about this album.
Back in the late 90s, my father was a diplomat and we were posted overseas into Cold War eastern Europe for a time, pre-wall coming down, back when there were two different Germanys. History stuff. I was 11/12 at the time, my sister four years younger. My family have a pathological interest in Christmas as a concept for reasons which are too deep-seated and complex to go into, but for the purposes of this anecdote, know that the art of gift-giving was given paramount importance inside our family unit. Buying someone as well thought out, unexpected, excellent gift was the expected goal. Something boring, mundane, or even worse something they asked for, or a voucher was understood to mean you held that person in no more regard than a slug. Did I mention my upbringing left me with a bunch of weird hangups? Anyway.
When we were overseas, gift-giving opportunities were few and far between. We could not exactly wander onto the streets of communist Poland with our pocket money and secure gifts for my beloved parents, unless what they really wanted were poverty, lines for bread, and endless calendars of Pope John Paul II. So our Christmas Shopping opportunities were reserved for our infrequent visits to West Berlin, where the Post Exchange shop on the US military base there provided a cornucopia of western delights. This year - 1988, probably - on our Christmas shopping trip it was decided that my sister and I would be given money, and for the first time we would select presents for our parents, keep them secret until Christmas day, wrap them ourselves, and present them as part of the gift giving. Reminder here that I was 11 years old, my sister 7. We were given an amount of money ($50 perhaps), and let loose for 45 minutes. Here's what we purchased:-
- A bike lock (no-one in the family had a bike, not sure what we were thinking)
- A metal colander (why? had I internalised some need for the draining of cooked goods? Was it just because it was like a dish with holes in it? [it was definitely that last one])
- A copy of True Colours by Cyndi Lauper on CD.
At least there was some logic behind the last one - on a previous trip, my Dad had bought himself a CD player for the first time, and some CDs, and while we still listened to tapes in the car, CD's were the new thing at home (though his true love of vinyl never left, and would resurge with a passion when we returned to the UK). I'm almost certain I picked this CD entirely at random, drawn perhaps to the album cover, but my father dutifully listened to it at least a handful of times in my presence to show his appreciation. I can't imagine it was his favourite, or remotely what he was into, but my sister and I had purchased it, so in keeping with the unspoken family code, he graciously showed willing.
I have no memories of the bike lock or colander getting such respectful treatment, however.
*Look, the album title is spelled in the American style with the missing u in 'Colours' but I will not submit to something being wrong just because it is commonly accepted.
