My niece turns 21 this week. Hard to believe. A few years back, I wrote about how times had changed since her birth. In the three years since, change continues unabated – Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, Spotify and Apple Music, among other services, are upending the long-accepted order of how we listen to and enjoy TV, movies and music. Think about it: Where once we had to own the DVDs to binge on a show, now one just has to sign into the service that has what we’re in the mood to absorb. And for music – is there even a need, anymore, for CDs? Everyone seems to use a streaming service of some kind. Even me. I’m listening to the Bangles’ classic Different Light via Apple Music as I type.
Well, I certainly hope that CDs are still in demand; I still buy them, at any rate, and hopefully one newly minted 21 year old still listens to them. The titles I sent her include yesteryear classics that have influenced just about every generation since their long-ago releases; and a few newer albums by relatively new artists that are, to my ears, modern-day classics.
Today’s Top 5: Classic Trax, however, isn’t drawn from the CDs I picked for her. They’re more of an addendum – tracks that hail from classic albums that, if there was justice in this universe, would be in everyone’s collection or playlist.
1) Rickie Lee Jones – “We Belong Together.” Rickie Lee Jones’ 1979 self-titled debut was a stone-cold classic. Pirates, her 1981 follow-up, actually improved upon it – a hard feat. This song, the lead track, is a riveting, romantic street opera.
2) Gladys Knight & the Pips – “Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me.” Imagination, released in the fall of ’73, is a five-star set that features such songs as “Midnight Train to Georgia” and this one, which hit No. 3 on the singles chart in April ’74.
3) Neil Young & Crazy Horse – “Down by the River.” This song hails from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969), one of my Top 5 Albums of All Time – a list that, now that I think about it, I need to put together and share. One of my joys in 2015: taking my nephew, who was 19 at the time, to see Neil & Promise of the Real in concert. (He was already a fan, I should mention.) It was, as I wrote here, an incredible show; and this epic performance blew us both away.
4) Lone Justice – “Shelter.” The title track to the second Lone Justice album, released in 1986, is one of those songs – as I used to write (too often) on my old website, “it takes you there, wherever there is.”
5) The Bangles – “September Gurls.” Different Light, the Bangles’ 1986 album, is as perfect a pop record ever released, I think. It featured two Top 5 singles (“Manic Monday,” which hit No. 2, and “Walk Like an Egyptian,” which hit No. 1) and a wealth of classic songs, including this cover of the Big Star tune. (This performance, by the way, is from the World Cafe Live in 2014, which I wrote about here.)
The Old Grey Cat 