Some albums become difficult to write about because the conversation around them has hardened. Everyone knows the context and the superlatives. Eventually, even a great record can disappear behind the language people use to praise it. Carrie & Lowell has been written about extensively since its release, and for obvious reasons. It is an album…
After my Best Books About Musicians post, I got to thinking about albums about musicians that feel almost like books. Some albums are great because the songs are great. A record does not need a cast list, a tragic backstory, and a symbolic talisman in track seven to justify its existence. Sometimes twelve strong songs…
People often say Joni Mitchell’s Blue is “poetic,” which is true but also a little lazy. Lots of albums get called poetic. Usually that just means the lyrics are pretty, the mood is serious, or somebody played an acoustic instrument while feeling complicated. None of that really explains why Blue feels so complete, or why…
There are moments in Hounds of Love when Kate Bush’s voice seems to split the air, at once intimate and immense. Few albums contain so many emotional dimensions, and fewer still feel as though they’ve been written as much as composed. Released in 1985, Hounds of Love is like a two-part epic poem, a self-contained…
Some albums are collections of songs, others feel like whole sound worlds. Rarely does music feel like a novel set to music. Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks (1975) is one of those rare records that plays less like a sequence of singles and more like a novel (albeit a modernist, fractured one). Listening straight…