I’m in the homestretch of the audio portion of Neil Young’s Archives Vol. III, a behemoth box set that chronicles his career from 1976 to ’87 over 17 compact discs and five Blu-Rays. He’s one of my favorite artists, as anyone who knows me can attest, and has been for more than four decades now. As a result, you might suspect I’d choose one of his 44 studio albums or 22 live releases as my all-time favorite. You’d be right—and wrong.
I sometimes joke that my Top 10 encompasses some 100 picks from an array of artists. What I usually leave unsaid: 100 could easily be 250. Depending on the day and my mood, Neil’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, On the Beach, Tonight’s the Night or Rust Never Sleeps could fill the top slot. Psychedelic Pill, his sprawling 2012 set, is another contender. But so, too, could numerous other albums, including Jackson Browne’s Late for the Sky, Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, and Maria McKee’s Life Is Sweet. Quite a few Beatles releases are also in the running, not to mention Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town. Unlikely choices include Tift Merritt’s Another Country, Rumer’s Seasons of My Soul, and two albums from last year, Mikaela Davis’s And Southern Star and Lillian Leadbetter’s State of Romance; each tops it whenever I listen to them. They take me there, wherever there is.
FYI, I’m kicking myself for leaving out my many other favorites. As I explained in my roundup of The Old Grey Cat’s top platters for 2023, “I am an emophiliac when it comes to music, forever falling in love with the next new release.” (Emophilia, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a psychological condition that finds people falling fast and hard for potential new partners again and again and again.) It’s difficult enough for me to choose one album as my favorite of a given year. Choosing one for life?! It’s impossible.
So I’ll end my indecision with this: I finished the Neil set while I writing this short essay and found myself listening to—and falling in love with—the Lillian Leadbetter album I mentioned above for what must be the millionth time since its release last fall. For this specific moment, in other words, it’s my favorite album….
The Old Grey Cat 