1001 Albums - Day 9
James Brown - Live at The Apollo
I've decided to try out the 1001 Albums Generator, because I want to listen to everything in the world.
Day 9 gives us one of the greatest live albums of all time.
I am never happier than when I am on stage, and sometimes I wonder what that says about me. Maybe it's the rush of working with a like-minded group of talented musicians, feeling the spirit of music rushing through us to a common goal. Or maybe I'm just a show off. Either way, that's the place I feel most at home.
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Jesus Christ, this is a work of art. This is one of the greatest, if not the greatest live album of all time. James Brown and The Famous Flames and their backing band make a work of art that still stands to this day. The energy coming off of the crowd is something I am chasing every single time I step on stage. You can even count the crowd at the Harlem Apollo as an additional member of the band. There's a woman who screams on one of the tracks that is CRUCIAL to this track. This album will stand as a record of one of the greatest performances of all time.
I've decided to try out the 1001 Albums Generator, because I want to listen to everything in the world.
Day 8 gives us the breakout album from the princes of Pop Punk.
I've been writing too much, and I should probably start keeping it simple. So, in the spirit of this album, here's simple:
I like this album. It's groundbreaking, it spawned essentially a whole new genre. It's polished and still sounds fresh now. I love Billie Joe's voice, and Mike Dirnt is an amazing bass player. Tré Cool is one of the coolest drummers in the genre. Some of these songs are the base layer of what pop-punk should be. It's influential, and still rocks.
1001 Albums - Day 7
Hüsker Dü - Warehouse: Songs And Stories
I've decided to try out the 1001 Albums Generator, because I want to listen to everything in the world.
Day 7 gives us an album by a band I've never listened to.
I remember sitting in the car outside my school with my brother. He was picking me up from a long day in 2013, and he had BBC Radio 1 playing. They were playing a song that I'd never heard before, but immediately loved it. I was such a music snob back then, and anything outside of The Beatles meant nothing to me. Mainstream pop music especially was crass and not high art, and therefore, crap. But this song was talking to me somehow. The vocalist sounded beautiful, she had such an amazing voice, and her delivery was so emotional - believable. I asked my brother "What is this song?". He tells me, "Wait for the chorus.".
"I CAME IN LIKE A WRECKING BALL."
And suddenly I was wrong about everything.
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Hüsker Dü is band that I've heard was extremely influential on so many bands coming out of the States. Whether it was from their hardcore records, or their softer alternative sound, this band has wormed it's way into all of your favourite band's music. And I really enjoyed this album! Bob Mould is a brilliant songwriter, as has been noted by so many contemporaries, and the riffs all over this album are stellar. It's a wonderful album. I can't talk about how much I liked it.
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I immediately stopped being a snob, and started devouring everything. Every sound, every pop song, every charting track, every hidden gem. And yes, some of them weren't that great. Some of them were dross. But my god, opening my mind to the world of pop music has opened so many doors in my life. There's so much more I love. Hip-hop, rap, singer-songwriters that I never would have listened to! How exciting it is to have so much to discover! It's so wonderful to hear something for the first time outside of your formative years, that you just KNOW would have changed your life back in your teen years.
I've decided to try out the 1001 Albums Generator, because I want to listen to everything in the world.
Day 6 gives us an album by a very confusing man.
When I was 16, I watched a lot of my heroes fall. It was 2014, and I was heavily invested in the work of the British YouTube community. I'd gone to a few meet and greets, and learned how to play the ukulele because of Charlotte McDonnell. This was the place where I figured out that you didn't have to wait for someone to let you make things - you could just make them. There were so many musicians and creators that I looked up to, and by the end of 2014, they were facing consequences for their reprehensible actions.
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Moondance is the third album by Van Morrison. Van Morrison, up until 2020, had been considered one of the all time greats of popular music. Whether it was from his time in Them, to Brown Eyed Girl during the Summer of Love, and the rediscovery and reappraisal of Astral Weeks, Van Morrison has inspired millions of first dances at weddings and gotten thousands of Northern Irish kids to pick up the guitar. By all accounts, a nice fellow and a wonderfully talented songwriter. His years of goodwill had quickly been dashed by his Covid denialism in 2020, and his rallying against the lockdowns.
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While these two things aren't closely comparable, it's strange to watch people you respect and look up to become pariahs. This is usually for good reason, but it still hurts. I'm so grateful and proud of those women for standing up and speaking out against their abusers, because where I stand now, I would never want to support someone like that. But it hurts to watch someone you admire to be revealed to be a serial abuser. What does that say about you that you didn't know? Are you a fan? Did your money support them in doing that? The answer is no, they would have hurt someone regardless. And we do not know what the people on our screens do when the camera is off.
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Moondance is a nice album, and I want to talk about it objectively. It's a nice and sweet album. The title track is a song I hold very dearly, after my brother showed it to me around 15 years ago. There's also some fantastic moments on Caravan and Everyone. They're beautifully written songs, and the instrumental backing is truly joyful. It's a wonderful piece of work. Van Morrison's legend status would have probably been cemented if he'd made this album and nothing else. I like this album a lot, but at the back of my mind - there's that thought that maybe I shouldn't be listening to music by such a weirdo.
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Charlotte McDonnell is doing really well. I'm really, truly happy for her.
I've decided to try out the 1001 Albums Generator, because I want to listen to everything in the world.
Day 5 gives us the debut and somehow, the return of Nick Drake.
I think I probably wanted to be Nick Drake when I was a kid - that mysterious singer who'd gone too soon and left a dearth of work that meant so much to everyone. I loved folk music, always have and always will. But the other side of Nick Drake's coin was Syd Barrett, and soon I was obsessed with Pink Floyd's early experimental work. I do wonder if this would be my downfall, but there are too many men with guitars in DADGAD trying to be Mr. Drake.
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Nick Drake was 20 years old when he started recording his debut album Five Leaves Left, but he already sounded old beyond his years at this point. At this point in his life, he was studying English Literature at Cambridge University, and disregarding his studies - preferring to experiment with Open Tunings and marijuana. He would skip lectures to get the train up to London and record his album, recorded with his college friend Robert Kirby providing the majority of the beautiful orchestration. After listening to this album again and again, I think his decision to skip lectures was for the best.
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When I was 20 years old, I started work on my debut album. And I wanted it to sound huge. It was a collection of songs I'd spent the past five years writing and honing with my band. I say this as if it was an ambitious project, and not my desperate attempt to make something of my life and my music degree. It was supposed to be finished by March of 2019, and it just wasn't. There was never the sound I wanted, and that was purely because none of us had worked long enough at it. The instrumentalists were great for the most part, but we hadn't been in the studio long enough - we hadn't learned the tricks of the trade. The multitracking, the way to maximise the use of our spaces. We hadn't come to learn to mix properly.
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There are so many beautiful cuts on this album, but River Man stands out as a centrepiece. It feels like a play on Stevie Smith's 1950 poem The River God - a personification piece, using the River Mimram as a lecherous God of his domain - killing a bathing woman to keep her next to his river bed. It's also inspired by the German novel Siddartha by Herman Hesse, which in turn was inspired by the teachings of Vedic texts and Buddhism. There's an obvious link between reincarnation and the flowing of the river. In this case, it's almost definitely the River Cam - a river in Cambridge that Nick would cross every day on his way to classes. The river reincarnates.
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I spent the first four years of adulthood by the Cornish Sea. I wonder if I should have let it influence me more. There's always something in water that draws poets in, gives them something to write about. The flowing nature of running water that shows the changes of the worlds - you eventually see yourself in a body of water. Whether it's the roaring tides, or the gentle running of a stream, the universal need and appreciation of water has given the world some of it's most enduring songs. From shanties, to When The Levee Breaks, to River Man. We find ourselves bathing.
1001 Albums - Day 4
Stevie Wonder - Songs In The Key Of Life
I've decided to try out the 1001 Albums Generator, because I want to listen to everything in the world.
Day 4 is a strong contender for the greatest album of all time.
I'm envious of a lot of people. I'm envious of people who understood things about themselves earlier. I'm envious of people who take to new skills like a duck to water. I'm envious of people who have managed to accomplish amazing things despite the odds being stacked against them, while I have managed to achieve very little with every hand up in the world.
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Stevie Wonder is one of the greatest writers and musicians of all time. His voice is one of the most recognisable voices in popular music, and he has revolutionised what music could be. All the way through his career, he has been a fountain of creativity and ingenuity. His keyboard playing is instantly recognisable - I can tell Stevie's playing from a 20 paces. His command of the manual is superhuman, and with it, he has crafted some the most enduring music of the 20th century.
Songs In The Key Of Life was recorded during a pivotal moment in Wonder's life. After a string of award winning albums, he considered retiring from music entirely, and moving to Ghana to help disabled children. He changed his mind, and instead gave us this masterpiece.
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A big regret in my life is that as a child I could never practice. I don't know why, maybe I just wanted to play the songs I loved, rather than the songs that would have made me better at the instruments I seem to have devoted my adult life to. It took me too long to learn a scale, and chords seemed to have come to me very late in my guitar career. Malcolm Gladwell's 2008 book Outliers states that it takes 10,000 hours to become world class at something. I am roughly 250,920 hours old, and very little time of that was spent sat running through modes on the piano. I wish it had been now.
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Songs In The Key of Life was a very delayed project. Stevie Wonder is a perfectionist at heart, and spent hours and hours recording, re-recording, mixing, and remixing. Motown started advertising the album by printing t-shirts with "We're almost finished!" on the front. It's undeniable that it was worth the wait. From the opening vocal harmonies on Love's In Need Of Love Today, to the modal intricacies on Contusion, the vivid imagery of childhood on I Wish, to Sir Duke, whose bassline has troubled many an aspiring funk player. Every single note on this album drips with attention, and everyone who has heard a note of it is better for it.
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It is bad for me to wish for more time, because I had that time! I used it. And without knowing what I know now, I would have just done what I did with it the last time. A lot of it was serene and unproductive, but a lot of it was deeply personal and I wouldn't be who I was without it. All I have in front of me now is time, and the drive and love to use it to chase what I want. I will practice, I will keep trying, I will book shows, I will keep playing music. I've got nothing else to do but love what I love.
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I'm willing to bet that 90% of people who have heard Western Popular Music in the last 60 years have heard a song from this album. If it's not Sir Duke, it's the beautifully devoted Isn't She Lovely, and if it isn't that, it's the synth part from Pastime Paradise. This album encroaches on everything, and there is a clear line on music made before Songs In The Key Of Life was released, and music after it.
I've decided to try out the 1001 Albums Generator, because I want to listen to everything in the world.
Day 3 features one of my all time favourite albums.
I'd always heard of Simon and Garfunkel. My mother had a copy of one of their Greatest Hits collections in her Mini Cooper, and would play it on long drives. By the time I was 6, I would have heard Scarborough Fair upwards of 100 times. At The Zoo was on a compilation CD bought for her 40th birthday, and I would listen to that CD like it was a religion. It wasn't until my dad turned to me during his habitual viewing of random BBC4 music documentaries and said "I think Simon and Garfunkel might be my favourites.". Dad doesn't have favourites. I immediately bought him a box set of their albums for Christmas, and subsequently ripped the CD's to my MP3 player.
That was me, changed forever.
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Following the dissolution of Simon and Garfunkel's partnership in 1970, Paul Simon took a little time away from recording - taking a teaching position at NYU, and collaborating with Leonard Bernstein on (my favourite) verses on his Mass. In 1972, he returned with a beautiful and personal album. I think about this album about three times a day. One of the melodies or one of his turns of phrase will knock about in my brain. If it's not the slide guitar on Paranoia Blues, it's "Peg, you better look around!" from Run That Body Down. I take so much from this record, that quite frankly I should be sued.
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Car rides with my Dad changed a lot of after he quit his job and became a counsellor. We were close, and loved each other very much, but he wasn't open. I didn't know a lot about his childhood, I didn't even know he had a brother until his mother passed away. But we were driving through the countryside once, I can't remember where we were going - maybe we were just driving, and we were talking about childhood. This was after he started his psychology training, and I think he must have wanted to know he'd done a good job. I was about 20 at the time, and to his credit, he had, and so had my Mum. One of the things I am most grateful for in my life is that I had a lovely childhood. And in the midst of the talk, he quoted Philip Larkin. This was my dad! A man who loved fixing his cars, and mowing the lawn, and just fixing that last spot of paint so the house would finally be complete. And here he was quoting This Be The Verse in the West Midlands countryside.
That was me, changed forever.
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One thing Paul Simon is very good at is finding the universal in the minute details. He'll make a broad statement, or phrase something in a specific way, and it'll make you feel like you're the only one who's ever experienced what he's talking about. We've all heard a couple in the next room trying to win a prize, but suddenly it's a moment that only you and Paul have ever found yourselves in. It does make you think of that James Baldwin quote about finding out that Dostoyevsky feeling the same thing you did 100 years ago. There are so many tracks on this album I could talk about forever, including his instrumental jam with Stéphane Grappelli on Hobo's Blues, but I think the thing that stands out so much to me is how eclectic this album is. His exploration of other musical cultures preparing us for the worlds of Graceland and The Running of The Saints.
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My Dad practices as a counsellor, and every Father's Day I make a point to tell him how proud of him I am. It's so lovely to watch him become who he's meant to be as someone who helps people, and not just his three kids and his wife. Last Christmas, he made a point to tell me over lunch that he loved me, he was proud of me, and that raising the three of us was the greatest thing he's ever done. I do wonder if he likes my music, but that's not the point. He's proud of me. He looked at me with the same broken eyes that I have, and I knew he meant it. I cried at lunch. It was delightful.
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While not as celebrated as some of his later albums, it's a key building block of not just Simon's career, but of folk pop and singer-songwriter music as genres. It's a showcase of a man on his own, and doing his own thing, not restrained by his past - however wonderful it was. It's a keystone in my life, and should be a keystone in yours. It's a beautiful piece of work, and shows how good things were going to go for Paul later on down the line.
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When I hear Paul Simon's voice, I think about my Dad.
1001 Albums - Day 2
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication
I've decided to try out the 1001 Albums Generator, because I want to listen to everything in the world.
Day 2 is an album from a band I've never liked.
When I was in high school, I was in a band with a girl whose nickname featured the prefix "Racist" before her first name. I was the bass player, and she lent me her Flea Bass in order for us to actually play shows. A garish blue and orange thing that could never give me the low-end I was looking for, it was nicer than anything I'd ever owned. She was bought it on whim by her parents. Upon meeting her father, I could tell how she gained her nickname.
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Flea is probably one of the most talented musicians working today, arguably one of the greatest bass guitarists of all time. His lines on this album are considered and graceful, yet aggressive and calling back to the punk movement of the 1970's. You can hear James Jamerson, Jaco Pastorius, and Tina Weymouth in all of his grooves. He's a student of the classics, and his adaptations of their quirks are easily the highlight of this album. Likewise, John Frusciante is one of the most inventive guitarists of his generation. It would have been easy for him to stick to power chords and pentatonic solos, but even next to Flea, his performances stand out.
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I was given an Epiphone EB-3 bass guitar as a celebratory gift for getting a place at art school. It's an absolute weapon of an instrument, you could wield it in battle if you don't mind not being able to hold a shield at the same time. I'd always had a fascination with the bass guitar, and a deeply held love for Paul McCartney, so getting a bass guitar of my own was wonderful. I must have played more than 200 gigs with that bass, and I still play it to this day. The Epiphone EB-3 had a retail price of roughly £260.00 in 2016, and was bought with a credit card that my mother paid off in 2024. The Fleabass cost more than double that, and was quickly forgotten about.
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Anthony Kiedis kind of sucks. His childhood sounded incredibly traumatic, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. But then, it must be kind of grating to be the weakest link in a chain made of a virtuous, an innovator, and a rock solid core. He hasn't done a whole lot to garner sympathies for it. He's a perfectly good writer, and his range is pretty nice - it suits the lyrics he's written, but I can't see him fronting a group other than the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And while no one else could have done it in the 80's and 90's, I know at least three people who could do it now.
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The EB-3 is one of my most prized possessions, and features on so many of my own songs. It reminds me that I am my own person, and I have pride of place in my own life. An instrument of my own, my first as an adult. It's beautiful; chipped in places, and could be in better condition - but it works. Like me. It works hard. It went through a tour with me, and six house moves. Somehow, so did I. It's preparing for a seventh. So am I.
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Anthony Kiedis is 63 years old.
I could have attended school with his girlfriend.
I've decided to try out the 1001 Albums Generator, because I want to listen to everything in the world.
Day 1 presented me with Nick Drake's Bryter Layter album - I think I heard this once upon a time, but I'm more familiar with his third album, Pink Moon. I'm sure Pink Moon will pop up later.
I think I'm going through a bit of a rough patch at the moment, not least because I'm quite ill. I can't see out of my right eye at the moment, and I think I'm getting depressed again. When I'm depressed, the phrase "Black Dog" always jumps into my head, which is what Drake used to refer to his bouts with depression as. As I take my paroxetine every morning, I think of him. There's only so much heavy lifting a little pill can do, when everything else seems to bring you do that much.
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Nick Drake with full orchestration is kind of magical. That's the first thing I noticed. I'm so used to hearing him with just his acoustic guitar behind him, invariably in some tuning I haven't tried out myself. The strings and the horns work perfectly with his voice, it's like listening to a more mature Van Morrison. It's odd to hear such a young voice with such a fully realised project (Nick Drake was 22 years old when Bryter Layter was released), but it's fantastic to hear something so enrapturing from such an old soul. The flute parts dotted about this album in particular are wonderful - it's almost a call back to the parochial songs that Molly Drake would have raised him on.
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When I was 22 years old, I had recorded an album called Action Figures, and I had been waiting for years to release it. Mixing takes time, but not as much time as I was expecting. It was 2020, the year everything was covered in a thick film of fear and the stench of alcohol. I was working in a supermarket, I was going running four times a week, I was moving away from the coast to a sad little town in the Midlands. We thought it would save us money, but with nothing to spend money on, we still managed to waste it. I thought it would have happened to me by then, and it still hasn't happened to me now. I was scared of dying, and reticent to download TikTok. Crucially, I was away from everyone I had spent the past four years playing music with, and no venues were open, not even an open mic night. I felt stuck. I am stuck.
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I wonder who Hazey Jane was. Who inspired these two wonderful songs? Was she real? Did Nick read about her? Was she him? One of my favourite things musicians do is write to themselves, or a part of themselves - epistolaries especially. A card or a letter to a fraction of their brain, awaiting a response. One wonders if Jane ever wrote Nick back. Maybe that's what the rest of the album is. One Of These Things First is a true stand out on this album; it allows his acoustic guitar to shine through everything, even with a truly miraculous piano part going wild in the background. And it's bristling with possibilities. I wish Nick Drake had had the time to be anything he wanted to be.
One of my favourite albums for a long time was Bargainville by Moxy Früvous - obviously long before I knew that Ghomeshi was a violent offender. I came back to it for the first time in a long time, after getting the melody for Gulf War Song stuck in my head admist the current world situation.
I remember being really moved by the song when I was younger, the chorus goes "And history seems to agree / That I would fight you for me / That us would fight them for we" - when you're a little younger, that seems to make sense, and seems to be a damning indictment of the pointlessness of war.
But you get older and understand a little more about the world, get a little more caring as your skin gets thicker, and the lyrics suddenly stick your skin, with a cloying smell of peak 90's Liberalism. It stops being an indictment of war, and just becomes an applause break for the status quo.
That's the one thing that always has bothered me about Liberalism - that unwillingness to rock the boat, and shift things. I'm reminded of Colbert and Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear", which will probably go down in history as the most pathetic and milquetoast march to decend on Washington. Even as a fan of those two, I can't help but look back at it with the same regard as a disapproving parent watching their child embarrass themselves at a talent show - Yes, you've made a very big noise in front of a lot of people, but couldn't you have at least practiced the violin a little more? Eventually, Jon Stewart would find himself on TV saying that the rally wasn't about Left and Right, but was in fact about "corruption versus not-corruption" - not taking a few moments to check whether or not that might have been a Leftist talking point.
As I find myself watching my friends get more and more battered by right wing reforms, I find myself arguing with liberals more and more, even as I shout back at those on the Right, liberals and centrists seem to crop up more and more, praying for that Obama-era sense of security. But it never existed in the first place - the party ended in 2001, and we were still dancing to a dead radio.
The center is a stupid and dangerous place to be, less so than the overt evil of the right wing, but the banality of placation - comfortable with gay marriage, as long as my taxes don't go up, and I can still make it to brunch on time. Happy to settle for crumbs, provided the trash still gets collected on Thursday mornings.
And now I find myself thinking about Gulf War Song again and again.
"That us would fight them for we / Is that how it always will be?"
As long as there are those who will hurt my LGBTQ+ friends, my immigrant friends, my friends who believe in a different God to you, us will fight them for we. There is nothing I would not do to make life better for those who need it.
Pick a side, at least that way we know who we're aiming for.
it's quite funny being an independant musician because I get to spend quite a bit of money on rehearsal rooms and travel to gigs to have eleven poly couples tell me they really dug my set and then not listen to any of songs or buy merchandise
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