Interior World of Music

I expect a lot out of the music I listen to. I want emotional honesty balanced by a smart or funny or poetic (or all three) sensibility; I want a commitment to excellence (in whatever particular way an album is trying to be excellent), and I want there to be something I can fall for in the voice of whoever’s singing - I want their voice to be as unique as a fingerprint.

There are many songs I know that have achieved all my requirements for greatness, but fewer entire albums. The albums that have done it are those I’ve had pretty intense relationships with (listening binges, total memorization, something new every time I listen, etc.) It’s hard to describe without falling into melodrama, but these are the albums that bring up the big poetic emotions: elation, grief, reverence, acute awareness of love and beauty, etc., etc. You know the ones. That a bunch of people playing instruments and singing stuff they’ve written and doing it unbelievably well can produce this kind of a reaction in even one person is just more evidence of the magical and mystical power and gift that is music.

Anyway, I’ve wanted to think about the albums that are a big part of my little interior universe for a long time, and I finally got a chance to do it. Here is my constellation of albums in no particular order. It didn’t really seem like enough to just write the list, so I’ve included a line or two of lyrics to give a sense of why I think they’re so special.


Car Wheels on a Gravel Road/Lucinda Williams
“Give me some love to fill me up/Give me some time give me some stuff/Give me a sign/Give me some kind of reason…” (I Lost It)

Whereabouts/Ron Sexsmith
“And the more I see/the more I feel/the more I need/to know for sure what is real…” (Every Passing Day)

Wrecking Ball/Emmylou Harris
“I remember your leather boots, pointing up into the sky…” (Blackhawk - written by Daniel Lanois)

Summerteeth/Wilco
“You know it's all beginning/to feel like pretending/No love's as random/as my love/I can't stand it/I can't stand it…” (Can’t Stand It)

Achtung Baby/U2
“I disappeared in you/You disappeared from me/I gave you everything you ever wanted/It wasn't what you wanted…” (So Cruel)

Is This Desire?/P.J. Harvey
“There was trouble/taking place…” (The Garden)

Scar/Joe Henry
“As if I don’t remember/How we passed the time/As if I don’t remember how/your face fell into mine/Oh, you’re the meanest flower…” (Mean Flower)

Satellite Rides/Old 97s
“Rollerskate skinny and the terrible twos, how can you have everything and nothing to lose?” (Roller Skate Skinny)

Man Under the Influence/Alejandro Escovedo
“She plays castanets/she works without a net/I like her better when she walks away…” (Castanets)

Bob Dylan Live 1975 - The Rolling Thunder Revue
“I was thinkin' about turquoise, I was thinkin' about gold/I was thinkin' about diamonds and the world's biggest necklace/As we rode through the canyons, through the devilish cold/I was thinkin' about Isis, how she thought I was so reckless…” (Isis)

Love & Theft/Bob Dylan
“Walking through the leaves/falling from the trees/Feeling like a stranger nobody sees/So many things that we never will undo/I know you're sorry, I'm sorry too…” (Mississippi)

Time Out of Mind/Bob Dylan
“Well the winds in Chicago have torn me to shreds/Reality has always had too many heads/Some things last longer than you think they will/Some kind of things you can never kill…” (Cold Irons Bound)

Look Into the Eyeball/David Byrne
“He's drunk and he's insistent/Shy but he's persistent/Boisterous and jumpy/Disorganized and funky/Every day he wonders/what the hell she sees in him…” (Great Intoxication)

Graceland/Paul Simon
“And I see losing love/is like a window in your heart/Everybody sees you're blown apart/everybody sees the wind blow…” (Graceland)

And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out/Yo La Tengo
“Maybe I'm out of my mind, maybe I'm blocking out the truth/But it seems like just a little thing/like you don't want to listen/and I can't shut up…” (The Crying of Lot G )

Carbon Glacier/Laura Veirs
“Watch/I can flash across the sky/a lightning bolt from up on high/and I can crash into myself…” (Icebound Stream)

Mule Variations/Tom Waits
“Well the moon is broken/and the sky is cracked/come on up to the house/the only thing that you can see/is all that you lack/come on up to the house…” (Come On Up to the House)

Wildflowers/Tom Petty
“Broken skyline/which way to love land/Which way to something better/Which way to forgiveness/Which way do I go…” (Time to Move On)

Befriended/Innocence Mission
“Nobody knows, darling/nobody knows how they are loved…” (When Mac Was Swimming)

Up/R.E.M.
“I cried the other night/I can't even say why/Fluorescent flat caffeine lights/it’s furious balancing…” (Daysleeper)

Gone Just Like a Train/Bill Frisell
Instrumental, but Bill does speak to you with his guitar. (The album cover didn’t make it into the mosaic - this is number 21, and you can’t make 7 rows. Sorry about that.)