Celebration Rock

Steve decided to take the podcast out of hibernation for this special one-off episode on the best albums of the 2010's, with special guest Ian Cohen.

Every year of my professional life as a music critic, I've made year-end lists. Sometimes it was because I simply had to do it, but more often (especially when I was younger) I did it because I thought it was fun. Making a year-end list was like saying, "Here I am, this is what I think, and here's why I believe you should actually care." But now that I'm a little older and wiser, list-making feels more like work. In 2018, it was practically a job. 

I don't know if that has to do with my age or the fact that, to me, 2018 felt like a "good, not great" year for music. As always, there were scores of albums that I really enjoyed. But in terms of records that felt like instant classics, or at least inspired me to get obsessed for a good week or two, 2018 seemed a little fallow. 

Nevertheless, the 10 albums on my year-end list did manage to strike a chord with me, and I was excited to talk about them with my friend Ian Cohen, who shared his own top 10 list. Surprisingly, there's not a ton of overlap on our lists –- listen to us debate the merits of the 1975, Arctic Monkeys, Boygenius, Father John Misty, and Kacey Musgraves in this special "best of 2018" episode. 

This week we return with another installment of Contrarian's Canon, our semi-regular series with Ryley Walker where we talk about great albums that for some reason have been maligned or forgotten about in the course of music history. This time, we explore an under-appreciated should-be classic by one of the greatest singer-songwriters ever, Joni Mitchell.

While Mitchell is rightly celebrated for landmark '70s albums like Blue, Court & Spark, and The Hissing of Summer Lawns, she continued to put out excellent albums as she entered her 40s. After a fallow period in the '80s, Mitchell forged a comeback with 1991's Night Ride Home, an album that nodded to the jazzy folk sound of 1976's masterpiece Hejira while also reflecting on the changes in her life as a middle-aged artist. 

For Walker, Night Ride Home is one of the best albums that Mitchell ever made, and for him the highlight "Come In From The Cold" is one of her best ever songs, with a sophisticated musical and lyrical structure that is communicated with simple, straight-forward grace. We both also confess our love of other early '90s albums by boomer-era rockers, including Jackson Browne's I'm Alive and Van Morrison's Hymns to the Silence. Are these late-career landmarks worth revisiting, or have Ryley and I slipped into an adult-contemporary coma? Step into the smoothness with us!

Last month, we started a new game called Fantasy A&R, where we take a classic album and attempt to improve/mutilate it by making our own stupid suggestions, such as adding or subtracting songs, swapping in alternate versions, and other probably ill-advised ideas. The first time we played Fantasy A&R, it was with the Beatles' "White Album." This time, we decided to play with a band who's even bigger than the Beatles, at least in their own minds: Oasis. Between 1994 and 1996, Oasis put out two classic albums, Definitely Maybe and (What's the Story) Morning Glory, along with a series of classic singles that included scores of B-sides beloved by fans and later compiled on The Masterplan. But what if Oasis' record company decided instead to take the best songs from the albums and singles to create a 14-track super album? What it would look like? How painful would it be to cut songs out of two '90s masterpieces in order to make it happen?  In this episode, I'm joined by fellow music critic and Oasis fan Stuart Berman to come up with our own "ultimate" mid-'90s Oasis album. Naturally, we intensely disagreed when it came to our choices, particularly when it came to which Morning Glory deep cuts to include.