If you could only choose a few albums to bring to the proverbial desert island, which ones would you choose? I set some rules for my list: 10 items, no compilations and only one album per artist. Feel free to follow the rules or not when making your list. Pick 10 KISS albums if you want.
These aren’t actually the albums I’d bring, since I can play them all in my head any time I want. These are a list of the albums that I’d try to convince you to bring, albums that had the greatest impact on me, when I first heard them or over time. In no particular order:
Entertainment! (1980) – Gang of Four
Fear of Music (1979) – Talking Heads (or Remain in Light)
The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society (1969) (though Muswell Hillbillies is worthy)
The Crane Wife (2006) – The Decemberists
The Modern Lovers (1976)
Reckoning (1984) – REM (or Murmur, Life’s Rich Pageant, Document)
Marquee Moon (1977) – Television
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002) – Wilco
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998) – Lucinda Williams (or World Without Tears)
Everybody Knows This is Nowhere (1969) – Neil Young (or After the Gold Rush, Rust Never Sleeps)
Others on the bubble:
Wish You Were Here (1975) – Pink Floyd
If I Should Fall From Grace With God (1988) – The Pogues
Doc at the Radar Station (1980) – Captain Beefheart
Faithless Street (1998) – Whiskeytown (the CD version)
Seconds of Pleasure (1980) – Rockpile
Indigo Girls (1989)
Zen Arcade (1984) – Husker Du
Duck Stab / Buster & Glen (1978) – The Residents
Arrival (1976) – ABBA
The Doors (1967) (or LA Woman)
The Madcap Laughs (1970) – Syd Barrett
Lipstick, Lies, and Gasoline (1997)- Fred Eaglesmith
Lady in Satin (1958) – Billie Holliday
Surfer Rosa/Come on Pilgrim (1988) – Pixies (it is on a single CD)
Woke on a Whaleheart (2007) – Bill Callahan (or A River Ain’t Too Much to Love)
The Partridge Family Album (1972)
I have this theory that if you have this list from someone (or a similar list of their favorite songs) you can make a good guess as to their age, based on the idea that a person’s favorite music is what they liked when they were college age. If I had actually graduated from college in four years (my mother would have been so proud!) it would have been in 1983. The average release date of my top ten is 1984. It drops to 1983 if you include the 15 albums on the bubble.
nice lists – would definitely include “the kinks are…” and “yankee hotel foxtrot,” with the pogues and rockpile being a possibility. I’d rather “harvest” by neil young, myself.
I would probably include The Black Crowes – “By Your Side” (1998) [which has one of the greatest running pump up songs of all time, ‘go faster’], Jet – “Shine On” (2006), and Dr. Dog – “We All Belong” (2007). But for a nice change of pace, I’d probably have to include Bill Cosby and Quincy Jones – The Original Jam Sessions 1969.