1001 Albums Summary

I'm a big Police fan so I come in with some "good feels" here. And it's good. You can hear the musicianship starting to really cook, three guys who are genuinely exceptional at what they do and starting to figure out how far they can push it. The reggae-pop thing works more than it probably should. Synchronicity is the peak though, and honestly everything before it feels like the band getting there. This one has some great deep cuts. The Bed's Too Big Without You is legitimately excellent. No Time This Time is a blast. Good record. Just not their best.

I prefer Highway 61 Revisited. Beginning to end it's just more consistent, basically perfect. Blonde on Blonde goes a little further outside the rails and I think it's slightly lesser for it, even if some of those detours are genuinely great. Blood on the Tracks is my other 5. If you haven't spent time with that one, Tangled Up in Blue is the entry point but the whole record is extraordinary. This one though is still Dylan at the height of his powers, that mid-60s electric blues thing firing on almost all cylinders. Not where I'd start but absolutely where you end up.

This record absolutely floored me. I knew it but it had been decades since I actually sat down and really listened to it. Let's start with the structure because it's insane. Four songs. 3 of them over 9 minutes. One is a lengthy spoken word monologue. 3 are covers, one of which was originally a country song. His debut had flopped and this was the follow-up, where he demanded complete creative control. None of that makes sense on paper and yet it is a complete and total masterpiece. Symphonic soul is the term I've seen and it's perfect. He took By the Time I Get to Phoenix and turned it into a twelve minute epic. Strings and dirty funky guitar. His backing band was a reformed Bar-Kays, four of the previous members having died in the plane crash that also killed Otis Redding. It went gold. Half a million copies. Nobody saw that coming.