The Who's Studio Catalogue

MORE than any other band, The Who at their best seemed like four perfect points of the compass, each as important and vital as the other. Pete Townshend played the guitar and wrote the songs; he gave the interviews and seemed like the in-house theoretician. But appearances notwithstanding, he was never the band's leader - that was always the little tough guy with the blond curls swinging the microphone. Roger Daltrey was a hard nut, so accustomed to settling matters with his fists that the others had to kick him out of the band unless he promised to stop beating them up. It was a life-changing moment for him - "It was no choice whatsoever. The band meant everything to me."

The Who had a rhythm section, just like other bands did - but the actual rhythm in their music, the heart of the beat, was held down by the guitar player. And he was playing the biggest, most powerful chords heard anywhere since the last few measures of Beethoven's 5th symphony. The actual rhythm section players were soloing non-stop around that mighty foundation. And while John Entwistle and Keith Moon may not have been the best rock players on their respective instruments - though that is a position I'll willingly entertain - they were, and still are, the most distinctive. By an order of magnitude. 

In their finest moments each of the four band members was somehow pulling with equal and maximum force in all directions at once. They were always some rough beast completely out of control. There was, and there has never been, anything like them. "I Can See For Miles." "Anytime Anyhow Anywhere." "Won't Get Fooled Again." And any time they ever stepped on a stage.

But there was always more to the band than that. What distinguishes the Who from a band like Led Zeppelin - who could arguably be said to match them in terms of having four equally powerful and distinct musical personalities - is the range and quality of the songwriting. When it came to the songs, the Who smoked just about everybody. There have been just a handful of rock songwriters as gifted and as original as Pete Townshend. He is surely one of the strangest and most fascinating musicians of his time - a man of immense talent and intelligence, wildly ambitious (and wildly pretentious,) but also a man regularly consumed by self-loathing, and perpetually filled with nagging doubts about the value of his work, and indeed, its very right to exist. He was and is a man with a deep taste for the mystical. It was often only his band that kept him in contact with planet earth. It may have held him back in some ways, but it grounded him and gave him purpose. He's never been the same without it.

The original version of the band is gone forever, of course. It's been gone for a very long time. It died with Keith Moon more than forty years ago. They tried for a while to keep it going with Kenney Jones of the Faces in Moon's chair. Hey, the Rolling Stones had just filled a vacancy in their lineup by pinching someone from the Faces. But Daltrey quickly found that he wasn't in sync with Jones as a drummer and the band sputtered to a halt. As a songwriter, Townshend has been lost without his group, and he's been lost now for most of the past forty years. They reunited on stage at regular intervals and Daltrey's voice has gradually frayed around the edges as he belted out the old hits with nothing new to sing. They were, they all freely admitted, only in it for the money these days, even if Entwistle - utterly incapable of living within his means - was the only one who actually needed the dough. And Entwistle's long gone now as well.

But at their peak, no one could touch them. No one. Dig out some of those old videos. And then try to tear your eyes away. Just try. You can't, not if rock and roll means anything to you, anything at all. The Who, ladies and gentlemen. The greatest band I have ever seen. 

13. It's Hard (Sep 1982)

This was the sound of the band's first incarnation fizzling out, on their second record since Moon's death. Daltrey thought it should never have been released, but the record company wanted product. The band doesn't sound bad, but Townshend's songs add up to very, very little indeed. Townshend had long wanted to explore some new musical directions, something he had long found difficult with this band. He indulges that desire here and "Eminence Front" is actually pretty good, if utterly unlike the Who (Pete Townshend discovers funk? Sort of.)  But Townshend didn't want to tour anymore and after this  album he found himself unable to come up with any more material for the band. He ended up paying for Jones and himself to be released from their contracts. A year after this came out, he announced he was leaving the band. This sure did look like the end.

12. Endless Wire (Oct 2006)

So more than 30 years after the depressing finale of It's Hard they made this, even though Townshend and Daltrey were the only ones still standing. It really doesn't feel much like a Who album. It feels like another Townshend solo project, just with Daltrey present to do some of the vocals. As Townshend solo projects go, it's pretty good, although Daltrey is not in very good voice.

11. Face Dances (Mar 1981)

At the time, Kenney Jones seemed like the obvious and only possible replacement for Moon, but he and Daltrey never clicked on a musical level. Still, the main problem with the record is that the songs simply don't amount to much. By this time, we had simply come to expect more - and better - from Townshend. And he had produced a very fine batch of tunes indeed. But not for the Who. His best songs could be found on Empty Glass, the very fine solo album he'd released the year before. The problem was, those songs didn't really suit The Who. They had to make do with his leftovers, they knew it, and they weren't too pleased about it. But it's simply a fact that none of the songs on Empty Glass, not even the rockers, made sense as Who songs. Which left this bunch. "You Better You Bet" is insanely catchy and the closer "Another Tricky Day" is the best thing on the record. But in between those two poles, the best songs by far are Entwistle's two storming numbers (composed because he was sick of "My Wife" and wanted something new to sing on stage.)

10. WHO (Dec 2019)

This was quite a bit better. Like all albums in the CD age, it runs a little too long. But although Entwistle and Moon are long gone, this somehow sounds a lot more like the Who. Or at least it sounds like a band - let's be honest, it's never really going to sound like the Who so long as Keith Moon remains in his grave. But by this point, Daltrey and Townshend had worked so long with their regular touring musicians (Zak Starkey and Pino Palladino) that this sounds like a record by a band rather than a Townshend project. It's somewhat concerning that "Break the News", which is actually the best song on the record, was written by Townshend's brother. But Daltrey was in better voice this time and Pete really had managed to come up with an  interesting batch of tunes. It's taken him more than 70 years to get to this point but at last, at long last  - Pete Townshend has nothing left to prove. He's just making some music. And it's much better than anyone had any right to expect. 

9. Who Are You (Aug 1978)

If the previous record, The Who By Numbers, was all about Townshend worrying about his place in the world, this one - their last with Keith Moon - seemed to be Townshend worrying about his band's place in the world.  "I write the same old song with a few new lines / and everybody wants to cheer it." Townshend had begun looking for new kinds of music to play, and Moon would have a great deal of difficulty finding his place in some of these songs. He was unable to cope with "Music Must Change" at all, and doesn't even play on it. It's Entwistle who wrote the most Who-like numbers, "Trick of the Light" and "Had Enough," (the latter sounds like it was left off Quadrophenia by mistake); he also contributes the sci-fi nightmare of "905." The record attempts to explore some new musical paths and is only intermittently successful. But after all its steps and missteps in all its various directions, the record closes with a bang. The title cut is is one of the band's last great moments on record. It's Townshend's memory of a drunken evening with a couple of Sex Pistols, who to his immense disappointment looked up to him as a great rock idol. He had hoped to be declared redundant instead, as if that would somehow free him from all the burdens he had imposed upon himself.  "How can I measure up to anyone now, after such a love as this?"

8. My Generation (Dec 1965)

The Who burst onto the scene in 1965 with three brilliant singles: "I Can't Explain", "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere", and "My Generation." All had made the Top 10 in the UK. None had caused even a ripple on the other side of the Atlantic. The last of them, the biggest hit, would become the title track of their debut album, released a few weeks before the end of this remarkable year. "My Generation" (the song) was unforgettable - iconic, anthemic, and undeniable from the moment it dropped to this very day (and all the days to come) - the stutter, the bass solo, the key changes, the chaos of the ending. And My Generation (the album) is as ferocious a collection of rock music as could be heard anywhere in 1965, largely because of the teenaged maniac behind the drum kit. It starts to run out of steam towards the end a little, as the band begins to run out of original material, but it closes with a rush - the panicked "A Legal Matter" and the crushing power of "The Ox." What a debut. And if you don't believe me... "why don't you all f-f-f-f..."

7. A Quick One (Dec 1966)

The Who's original management team, Kit Lambert and Christopher Stamp (legends in their own right), had newly realized the financial rewards attendant upon performing original compositions. They therefore urged each band member to come up with two songs for the second album. This despite the fact that Daltrey and Moon were not, and never would be, songwriters. Moon's "Cobwebs and Strange" previews his contribution to Tommy, with plenty of wild drum interludes thrown in. His "I Need You" is a surprisingly tuneful Beatles pastiche. Daltrey could only manage one tune.  But John Entwistle came up with two instant classics, both brilliant, both utterly unlike anyone else. "Whiskey Man" was a delusional alcoholic's lament for his imaginary friend. "Boris the Spider, " the saga of a spider who comes to a sticky and unpleasant end, with an unforgettable bass riff, would be part of the the band's live show from that day to this. They're actually more memorable than any of Townshend's proper songs, although "So Sad About Us" is pretty damn great anyway. But the guitarist stepped up with his first extended piece, the title track. It was billed at the time as a "mini-opera." It joins six valid song fragments into a unified whole, with a narrative, weird shifts of tone and perspective, and inspired playing and singing. It would demonstrate, not for the last time, that few rock musicians know better how to build to a big ending than Pete Townshend. The Who would perform it at the Rolling Stones Rock 'n' Roll Circus the following year. It stole the show - from the Stones themselves, from John Lennon's ad hoc supergroup - so thoroughly and so convincingly that the Stones buried the film for almost thirty years.

6. Tommy (May 1969)

Lambert and Stamp always encouraged Townshend to indulge his pretensions, and it led him in all possible directions. Some were profoundly brilliant, some were profoundly silly. Some - like the first full-length rock opera - were both at once. I've always thought Tommy was a little over-rated. The story, let's face it, is extremely silly. And because it's an "opera" it's filled with numbers that exist mainly as linking devices or to advance the narrative. Which makes them dependent on their place in this silly story. (Townshend can get mystical and wax profound about the concept of a deaf, dumb, and blind boy who perceives the world through "vibrations" - but I find it silly. Sorry.) For the most part, it's an acoustic record (as far as the guitars go), and while Townshend is a wonderfully distinctive acoustic player, I miss his electric playing and wish there was more of it. These caveats aside, the highlights are incredible. Everybody knows about "Pinball Wizard, " written to guarantee a good review from pinball fanatic Nik Cohn. It's a track so great that it takes its absurd precept and simply steamrolls right over it. John Entwistle plays huge bass note power chords as Townshend builds an undeniable, unforgettable chord sequence (all based on alternating suspended fourths and majors. So obvious no one else thought of it.) There's the awesome piece of pure power that is "I'm Free." There's Entwistle's creepy contributions. There's "Sparks," and "Amazing Journey." And, especially, that miraculous finale. The Who, and Townshend especially, always thought of themselves as connected to their audience in a way that was unique to themselves. They weren't just another band. They weren't stars putting on a show for the people. They were the people, too. They just happened to be the ones on the stage, representing them. When they sang "listening to you, I get the music" it meant something. It meant everything.

5. The Who By Numbers (Oct 1975)

After two wildly ambitious concept albums, and a third that had failed to materialize (but generated an astonishing record out of its leavings), Townshend found himself - as usual - lost and confused. This resulted in a truly remarkable set of songs, but it doesn't seem quite as much like a Who record. This is mostly because Keith Moon had gradually lost his place at the centre of the band's sound, partially because of his own issues with drugs and alcohol, partially because the needs of the songs had changed. He was fading away, and it could have been any good rock drummer playing on these tracks. But the songs are, without exception, all winners. Townshend has finally run dry, he has no more big ideas, and it simply doesn't matter. There's something awesome about "Slip Kid, " the opening track - it sounds quite literally like The Who by numbers, the kind of thing they can and do crank out on automatic pilot. And they make it sound easy, effortless. Yeah, for them, maybe. Not for anyone else.  Townshend's got no extravagant concepts or theories to put forward here - just a bunch of sharply observed, and generally self-lacerating, pieces. Some of them - "Dreaming From the Waist," "However Much I Booze," and "How Many Friends" are at once as good as anything he's ever written and deeply disturbing in that they cause you to seriously worry about the author's capacity to deal with life. He sounds like a man in a great deal of trouble.

4. Quadrophenia (Oct 1973)

This, I believe, was their last true last blast of glory, the last record that truly sounds and feels like the fucking Who. Townshend remained obsessed with the Mod sub-culture that the band had emerged from, and here he elaborates his tale of a confused young mod into an allegorical story of his own band. It's  a concept utterly ridiculous in its pretensions, totally breathtaking in it its audacity, and completely successful in its execution because he wrapped it all up in some of the finest hard rock music ever written, played by a band at the absolute peak of their considerable powers. It's more coherent and far more consistent than Tommy. This means that, among other things, no individual songs rise above the whole the way "Pinball Wizard" does on the earlier opera. But these are, almost without exception, truly great songs themselves. They function so well as part of the whole that there is little desire to ask them to stand by themselves - but any band would kill their relatives to come up with songs as great as "The Real Me," "The Punk and the Godfather" or "5:15." And the power of the playing is stunning.

3. Who's Next (Aug 1971)

It was going to be called Lifehouse, and it was Townshend's most ambitious idea yet. The concept was utterly mad, an attempt to fuse some of the thinking Townshend was absorbing from his Sufi gurus with pure science fiction (a futuristic world where people live in pods like something out of The Matrix and all experience is virtual rather than real) and there was something about a musical note so pure that... it gave its author a nervous breakdown as he discovered no one around him had the faintest idea what he was on about. Eventually the band simply recorded eight of the songs from the aborted project (along with a new tune from Entwistle) and settled on that as their new album instead. It's just the Who's next, that's all. It's not that big a deal. It's one of the greatest rock albums ever made, but not as big a deal as it was supposed to be. Pete Townshend has the bluest eyes this side of Paul Newman (or Bob Dylan) and "Behind Blue Eyes", may be his bitterest confession of all. It's also one of Keith Moon's last great moments on record - halfway through, he suddenly comes crashing in and simply kicks the song into a totally different emotional territory.  Townshend was the first rock composer to truly integrate the synthesizer into his music, rather than merely use it for sound effects. His synthesizer is the basis for the opening and closing tracks, and what tracks they were - the haunted "Baba O'Riley" looking askance at the wasted lives all around him, and the bitter finale, the mighty "Won't Get Fooled Again," as great a song and recording as rock music has produced. And as great as this album is, it might have been greater still if two of the best songs from the Lifehouse project had been included. (One issue was that the Who's versions of "Pure and Easy" and "Let's See Action," fine as they are, didn't quite measure up to Townshend's remarkable demos, as released on his solo album Who Came First.) But these are mere quibbles. All this and this isn't even their best?

2. Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy (Oct 1971)

 A bit of a ringer, I admit. But like all British artists who emerged in the 1960s, the Who drew a distinction between their singles and their albums. Unlike, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones though, the Who's singles generally made little impact in North America. Which made this somewhat random selection of some of the singles from their first six years an essential introduction to the band for anyone who wasn't already a stone Who fanatic (like your author.) For the most part, these songs were all largely unknown to North American audiences. It begins where they did, the full frontal assault of "I Can't Explain" with the sharpest guitar chords anyone had ever heard (and Moon's two quick triplets as the band pauses before the chorus... help!)  It's followed by "The Kids Are Alright" which somehow rocks furiously while being utterly gorgeous. There's the immortal statement of purpose that was "My Generation," the "anthem they sing at Who football matches" Townshend would one day quip. There's the unrestrained chaos that was "Anytime Anyhow Anywhere." The strange, wild narratives of "I'm a Boy" and "Pictures of Lily."  The bizarre juxtaposition of Beach Boys harmonies and Keith Moon going berserk all over his kit, also known as "Happy Jack." And better than all of these was the single that they opened 1966 with, the one that they used it to kick off their eye-opening set at Monterey in 1967, the remarkable "Substitute" ("I look all white but my dad was black.") Only one of the songs in this collection had managed to crack the US Top 10. But that was the very best of them all, the greatest track this band ever did record, the jaw-dropping "I Can See For Miles." To this day, it remains as powerful a piece of music as has ever been made by anyone. Indeed, I'm pretty confident that it was the finest single ever to come out of England. 

1. The Who Sell Out (Dec 1967)

Perhaps it's precisely because he's so serious (and often so pretentious) about his work that Townshend has often been acutely aware of how ridiculous the whole enterprise can be. So all the while, along with the high-flown concepts and the extravagant theories, Townshend had provided very different kinds of songs: a boy masturbating to a long-dead pinup girl, another boy dressed up in girl's clothing by his mother, a weirdo sleeping on a beach, and sundry anthems of inarticulate confusion. It's a crucial part of the band's personality. (Most of Entwistle's material for the band fits neatly on this side of the aisle as well.) On no other album is that duality better seen. There is a concept here, of sorts - it's an affectionate evocation of the wonderful pirate radio stations that had sustained the British pop scene, and had just been legislated out of business. The jingles and commercials are, remarkably enough, as fresh and as enduring as the songs themselves. And the songs themselves - the psychedelic rush of the opening "Armenia City," the twisted tale of manhood that is "Tattoo", the full power of the band roaring behind "Relax" and "Our Love Was", and the exquisite "Sunrise," as gorgeous a song as Townshend would ever write. The album had been previewed by a single, the mighty "I Can See For Miles," of which I can say little more than I have already without lapsing into gibberish. And it closes with another of Townshend's bizarre multi-part concept pieces. But he kept this one below six minutes, and though the story is incomprehensible, the music was so great that Townshend shamelessly recycled some of it for Tommy. There isn't a weak moment on the record. Not one note.

The Rolling Stones Catalogue

 The Rolling Stones have always been linked with the Beatles, so let's have a quick look at that subject. It's simply not a fair fight, certainly not in the beginning. Way back in the day the Stones couldn't compete with the Beatles, neither on stage nor on record. It was never even a contest. The Beatles had an enormous head start and it would take the Stones years and years to catch up. The Beatles had far more experience than the Stones as a live band, and they had far more experience playing with each other. They were also much, much hungrier than the Stones, and far more ambitious. The Beatles were extremely conscious of being Northerners, aware that for that reason alone it would be a battle for them to be taken seriously by the rest of England, London in particular, in 1962. And so they were on a mission. They had "come out of the fuckin' sticks to take over the world." They wanted to be "bigger than Elvis." 

The Stones had no such dreams. Their mission, such as it was, was fairly modest. They just wanted to play some Chicago blues properly, and gain some kind of foothold in their own home town. The Stones liked to think of themselves in the beginning as blues purists, Keith's love for Chuck Berry and Mick's taste for contemporary pop notwithstanding. It was very much Brian's band in the beginning, and Brian took his blues very seriously indeed. The Beatles were musical omnivores by comparison, much more receptive to all kinds of popular music, if only because they always needed more and more material to fill out their marathon live performances. 

Then, when they started recording, the Beatles had the great good fortune to have George Martin working with them on their recordings. Martin was an experienced pro, a man who knew his way around a studio. He was also a man with a musical background himself, someone with an open mind, and a truly remarkable willingness to trust the judgement of his artists. The Stones, by contrast, had a wannabe hustler named Andrew Loog Oldham, who had never been in a recording studio in his life and whose approach to recording the Stones basically amounted to cranking up the volume on anything he happened to think sounded neat. And of course Lennon and McCartney had written literally hundreds of songs together over five years before it even occurred to the Stones to try writing one themselves. And the only reason it occurred to Mick and Keith at all was because they had actually watched John and Paul write a song right in front of them. That song ("I Wanna Be Your Man") turned into the Stones' very first hit. (It still took Oldham locking Mick and Keith in a room and telling them not to come out until they had written a song to make it finally happen.)

Like Lennon-McCartney, the Jagger-Richards writing credit includes songs written in a variety of combinations: songs that they wrote together, sitting side-by-side ("Jumpin' Jack Flash," "Midnight Rambler") songs written mainly by Keith ("Ruby Tuesday," "Gimme Shelter") and songs written mainly by Mick ("You Can't Always Get What You Want," "Brown Sugar.") There's also the songs written by Mick in collaboration with one of the other guitarists only for it to be credited to Jagger-Richards anyway. Keith suddenly blossomed as a songwriter some time in 1967-68 and had about a three year run as one of the greatest songwriters rock has ever seen. And then he slid into a decade mostly lost to drug addiction and misplaced a fundamental part of his talent along the way. And Jagger could never carry that part of the band's burden by himself, although he comes reasonably close on Some Girls.

At any rate, you can't hold it against the Stones that they didn't arrive fully formed, that it took them years to become a great band. Which it did. Because they did become as great a band as one could ever imagine. Furthermore, Mick and Keith were even able to do something John and Paul never could manage. They kept their band together. They made some of their best music after the Beatles had imploded in bitterness and recriminations, never to work together again. 

The Stones have not been all that prolific. In almost 60 years of recording, they have produced just 23 studio albums, and eight of those were made for Decca Records in the 1960s, while the Beatles were cranking out a dozen albums in the same period. The Stones have made just 15 albums in the half-century since. There are also some ten "official" live recordings by now. Most of these were relevant only in their particular moment, and are now primarily of historical interest. One of them ("Got Live If You Want It") isn't really a live album at all, being studio recordings dressed up with phony crowd noises. Two of them ("Love You Live" and "Still Life") are actually somewhat dire, documenting the band's steady deterioration as a live act through the 1970s and early 1980s. The rest are generally companion sets to latter day tours and they - along with many of the numerous additional live recordings that have been issued as "official bootlegs" - demonstrate that the Stones have become a far more professional and satisfying concert act since Mick and Keith patched up their differences at the end of the 1980s than they ever were in their heyday, when their performances could be anywhere from awesome to awful.

Finally, like all British acts of their day, the Stones made a clear distinction between albums and singles - and even more than the Beatles, much of the Stones legend is built on their 1960s singles. Fundamental Stones classics like "Satisfaction," "Jumpin' Jack Flash," "Paint It Black," "Ruby Tuesday," "Honky Tonk Women" were all singles, not included on any album (in the UK, anyway.) They generally ended this practice when they left Decca at the end of the 1960s, and drew their subsequent singles from their albums. There are many, many compilations of their work, of course. While there is no single package that gathers their complete singles output, all the essential ones can be found on the two Decca compilations Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass) and Through the Past Darkly. Both compilations would probably crack the top five on this list. It is, of course, some of the most essential music in their catalogue.

I hope we're not too messianic

Or a trifle too Satanic

We just love to play the blues

23. Undercover (November 1983)

This is where the rift between Mick and Keith began to be a very serious problem. The story is well known. Having spent most of the previous decade in a stoned-out haze, Keith had finally kicked the junk and looked to assert his position in the band. But Jagger, who had been carrying the load more or less unaided all the while, had grown accustomed to running the show. And while Keith may have been off the junk, he had basically replaced it with alcohol. Meanwhile, Charlie Watts was now a junkie himself and Ronnie Wood had become a crackhead. It must have been lovely coming to work with that crew. It certainly wasn't possible to come up with any decent songs. 

22. Dirty Work (March 1986)

By now, Mick and Keith were at daggers drawn, and the only reason this is better than Undercover is the novelty of Steve Lillywhite's production, and the presence of a couple of songs Jagger had left over, that didn't make his solo album. By this point, Mick was utterly fed up with his bandmates and refused to tour with them. He tried to build a solo career. It didn't work out, and three years later he and Keith would patch up their differences and put the band back together.

21. Blue and Lonesome (December 2016)

An album of blues covers, bashed out in three days with minimal overdubs. It's a deeply weird achievement. This is where the Stones finally give up trying to be a modern band and revert to their original ambition - to become a competent Chicago blues band. It works, too. It only took them half a century, but they have finally become what they always set out to be. There's something strangely admirable about the whole thing, and it sounds just fine while it's playing. You do have to wonder if there's any point.

20. Emotional Rescue (June 1980)

They went into the studio in a good frame of mind (Keith was free! He wasn't going to jail!), they wrote lots and lots of songs, they worked hard and well... and came up with this? Baffling. A couple of the songs might have made it as deep cuts on a better album. It's all filler but at least some of it would be quality filler somewhere else.

19. Their Satanic Majesties Request (December 1967)

A notorious misfire, one that is often mocked to this day. John Lennon once sneered, with considerable justice, that the Stones generally did whatever the Beatles did but "three months later." This is the most obvious instance, one that Keith is apologetic for to this day (to the extent that Keith is apologetic for anything that's ever happened.)  That said, it does have its moments. The glorious psychedelic single "She's a Rainbow" and its gloomy and spooky b-side "2000 Light Years From Home" is utterly fabulous. The single they left off the album ("We Love You" and "Dandelion"), recorded during the same time frame, was also outstanding  and a couple of the album tracks - "Citadel" and, especially, "2000 Man" are well worth your acquaintance. But the rest is pretty silly and unfocused. 

18. Steel Wheels (August 1989)

The great comeback, as Mick and Keith patch up their differences (largely because Mick's solo career simply hadn't gone as well as he'd hoped) and the Stones machine has rolled on ever since. The band sounds fine, the songs just aren't very memorable.

17. Bridges to Babylon (September 1997)

Mick is always looking for a way for the Stones to be a modern, contemporary band and he brought in outside producers Don Was, Danny Saber, Rob Fraboni and the Dust Brothers to help with this one. But Stones records always rise or fall on the quality of the songs. This one did have a few winners, including the one Mick seems to have accidentally pinched from k.d. lang and best of all was "Saint of Me."  ("You'll never make a saint of me" might be the most honest lyric Jagger has ever written.) And having already brought in the mighty Sonny Rollins to play on Tattoo You, here they get the great Wayne Shorter to blow over the end of Keith's remarkable "How Can I Stop." Like most modern albums, it runs about three cuts too long - after a strong beginning, this one sags quite a bit in the middle. And it may actually have a bit too much Keith.

16. Out of Our Heads (July 1965)

Mostly an album of covers, with just three Jagger-Richards originals, one of which ("Heart of Stone") is easily the best thing on the record. That's the thing about the Stones during this period - when they had a great track, and they came up with several, it went out as a single. They took the albums seriously, they didn't want to pad them with filler. But before Aftermath, their albums are made almost entirely of covers of old, generally well-known R&B classics. And while the Stones play them with purpose and passion, they can't quite match the originals (whereas the Beatles for the most part cunningly chose to cover songs they could actually improve on, selecting mostly contemporary songs that had been hits in America but weren't well known to English audiences.) Between their second album and this one, the Stones issued several great singles - and most important, singles of original material: "The Last Time," "Satisfaction," "Get Off My Cloud." But British bands didn't put their singles on their albums those days. Oh well.

15. The Rolling Stones (April 1964)

The debut album is almost entirely a collection of covers, and their best covers - in particular, their ferocious take on Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" - had been used as singles. So the same caveats apply. The one original tune - "Tell Me" - is an absolute killer, though, and a sign of what would come. About four albums later. 

14. No. 2 (January 1965)

They're still mostly a cover band on their second album, and the originals on this one are rather undistinguished. Even so, there's so much energy in the best tracks that it makes for a fine listen, especially "Down the Road Apiece" and the Solomon Burke and Chuck Berry covers. In the meantime, they had issued a string of fabulous singles, most of which were also covers, especially "It's All Over Now," and "Little Red Rooster." Which are not on the album, of course.

13. A Bigger Bang (September 2005)

This is still the band's last collection of original material. It was released some fifteen years ago, and in its turn it arrived fully eight years after its predecessor. As has been true for most of their recent history, they don't really write great rock tunes anymore but they can still come up with very strong ballads - in this case "Laugh I Nearly Died" and "Streets of Love."

12. Tattoo You (August 1981)

Barely an album in any sense of the word - this is a hodge-podge of leftover studio recordings that they had lying around. But they thought it would be a good idea to have some new product in the stores while they hit the road in America. So Mick and Chris Kimsey finished off some tracks and assembled this collection.  Much of the material was salvaged from the Emotional Rescue sessions, but two of the tracks actually date as far back as Goats Head Soup in 1972, and feature Mick Taylor on guitar. A couple more were recorded during the auditions to find Taylor's replacement. And the opening track was originally a reggae tune they worked on for Some Girls called "Don't Stop." They had tried one rock take of it, and Jagger took that one take, gave it a new vocal and a new title and with "Start Me Up" the Stones actually had a 1980s hit and a song that would be part of their live shows to this day.

11. Black and Blue (April 1976)

Recorded while they were auditioning various guitar players to fill Mick Taylor's spot, it's an odd collection of material. It has maybe just three actually finished, written songs. One of them, the hit ballad, is Mick indulging his weird falsetto. "Hand of Fate" is a formulaic rocker, but it's a pretty good formula, and "Memory Motel" is an epic, and strangely affecting, ballad about a lost love and life on the road. The rest consists mainly of settings for the band to jam a little. Which isn't bad - it's always fun just to hear these guys play together. There's also a reggae cover, which is a serious misfire. Keith loves his reggae, and the band is all right, I suppose. But Mick can't sing it. Mick can be a very great rock vocalist indeed, but his limitations are fascinating. He's one of the smartest, most self-aware men in the business, and he's very well aware that he's a middle class white boy from Kent. He'll sing the blues for you - it's why he started singing in the first place. But he's far too self-conscious to sing reggae or country music. He can't take possession of it, he can't take ownership, and so he always sings it as if he's doing a parody.

10. Goats Head Soup (August 1973)

Exile on Main Street was a tough act to follow and Keith was sinking further into heroin addiction. He did come up with a couple of strong ballads ("Coming Down Again" and "Angie.") The rest is mostly  Jagger trying on a variety of musical styles. Along the way, he makes some half-hearted gestures towards what was becoming a kind of Rolling Stones mythology ("Star Star" and "Dancing with Mr D.") Mick Taylor, so vital a part of the previous two albums, seems to have slept through the whole thing.

9. It's Only Rock'n'Roll (October 1974)

It's as if the Stones were positioning themselves to make some kind of grand statement - only to find themselves with nothing to say. The title track is pretty great but it isn't even a Stones recording - Jagger cut it with the Faces and David Bowie at Ronnie Wood's house. Mick Taylor rouses himself to contribute  the gorgeous "Time Waits For No One" but the rest is mostly Stones-by-numbers. Which is never all that bad, I must admit.

8. Between the Buttons (January 1967)

This is just their second album made entirely of original material, and we find them moving away from their roots with impressive speed. There are some extremely strong songs here, which are not nearly as well known as they should be, because none of them have ever become an important part of their live show. In other words - there's not really very much guitar rock on the record, although "Miss Amanda Jones" is an absolute killer. Mick is starting to play the cynical young aristocrat and it seemed a fresh perspective in its moment. (It would eventually grow rather tiresome.) And Brian was still functional, and though he seemed to have lost all interest in playing guitar, he was very interested in playing all the other instruments. And the single missing from this collection (but tacked on to the North American editions?) The glorious  "Ruby Tuesday," the thundering "Let's Spend the Night Together."

7. Some Girls (June 1978)

I've always thought the first album since incorporating Ronnie Wood into the band was somewhat over-rated. It's not Exile or Let it Bleed. But it is pretty damn great. It's very much Jagger's record and Mick was living in New York and hanging out at Studio 54 at the time. It reeks of cocaine and dance floors , and it sounds like everyone is on speed. Which may be how everyone manages to keep up. But it's that desperate rush that makes it all work.

6. Voodoo Lounge (July 1994)

Was this the last Stones album that seemed like an important event in the rock world of the day? Like your modern album in the day of the CD, it goes on too long and at least five tracks could be jettisoned without complaint, but the best tracks are very much up to standard. "You Got Me Rocking" has survived in their live shows to this day, which makes it probably the only song from the last 30 years to achieve that. But "Sparks Will Fly" is even better and Keith chips in an excellent ballad ("The Worst.")

5. Aftermath (April 1966)

The Stones' first album consisting entirely of original material was released five months after Rubber Soul, which was the Beatles sixth. Like I said at the top, the Stones were always playing catch-up with the boys from Liverpool. They were learning fast, though. This is a stunning leap forward. Sure "Going Home" - all 11 minutes of it - is a bit of an indulgence, but after the overwhelming rush of the first five tracks one can actually use a break. Just an incredible batch of songs. They had shown no indication whatsoever before this that they were capable of this quality in this quantity. The album is so great that it survives missing the great single that was left off - "19th Nervous Breakdown."

4. Sticky Fingers (April 1971)

This was the first time the Stones put out a hodge podge of tracks from various sessions and called it an album. It worked so well they'd try the same trick again when circumstances required. Keith, though, is already starting to disappear into the haze. He comes up with "Wild Horses," true, but he left it to Jagger to actually finish it. He isn't even on "Moonlight Mile."  The other highlights come from Jagger ("Brown Sugar," "Dead Flowers") and Taylor ("Sway," "Can't You Hear Me Knockin.') So that's going to be a concern and a problem going forward- but in the meantime, just a great record.

3. Beggars Banquet (December 1968)

In its moment, with its mostly white cover and back to basics musical approach, this looked like Stones' own version of  The Beatles (the White Album), which had been released exactly two weeks earlier. It's as if psychedelia had never happened. This album features Brian Jones' last great moment on record, the mournful slide on "No Expectations" - all the other instruments he'd taken up have been banished. That said, the Stones got back to basics in an original way. The famous opening track is a samba? Yes it is, and what a track it is. Most of the guitars on the record are acoustic, even the ones that sound electric - Keith had discovered a new sound by overdriving an acoustic guitar through a cassette machine until it started to distort.  And as great as the album is, can you imagine how great it would be with its missing single? Which is nothing other than "Jumpin' Jack Flash."

2. Let It Bleed (December 1969)

The album recorded in between the Brian Jones and Mick Taylor versions of the band might have the strongest collection of songs of any Stones album. The bookend tracks - Keith 's "Gimme Shelter" and Mick's "You Can't Always Get What You Want" might be the finest such pairing on any record, ever. In between, we have the stunning mini-opera (the Stones would never actually call it that, such pretensions being best left to others) that is "Midnight Rambler", dreamed up, with all its weird stops and starts and twists and turns, by Mick and Keith sitting at an outdoor cafe somewhere in southern Europe one afternoon. There's a couple of gleeful country parodies, an overly respectful Robert Johnson cover, an even better blues from Keith, and another ferocious rocker with one of Mick's most memorable lyrics ever. 

The maid, she's French, she's got no sense

She's from the Crazy Horse

When she strips, the chauffeur flips

The footman's eyes get crossed

Keith is the only guitarist on most of it, which makes it unique in the band's catalogue (Brian may not have done much on Beggar's Banquet, but at least he had "No Expectations.") But that's just fine. Keith can play. The last great Stones single omitted from an album would have gone here, although they do provide a kind of country-western take on "Honky Tonk Women."

1. Exile on Main Street (May 1972)

It's always been very difficult for me to pick between this and Let it Bleed. I usually end up thinking that Let It Bleed has the best songs, but its recording is almost pristine. Not so here. This was, when it came out, a famously difficult album to absorb, guitars jamming ferociously, vocals buried in a dense and murky mix but startling snatches of words emerging from the din. It took quite a while for it all to sink in. But ultimately, Exile simply sounds like the Rolling Stones at their best: dense, weird, sloppy, falling off a cliff half the time, generally out of control, charging forward anyway. And the best songs here are pretty damn great themselves: "Torn and Frayed," "All Down the Line," "Shine a Light"...  Yeah, there's fever in the funkhouse now. 

The Best Albums of 2020

I used to regularly announce my favourite albums of the year. Then I forgot for a few years. Hey, I'm old. Sometimes I forget things. 

Let's see. I started doing this in 2013, crowning Vampire Weekend's Modern Vampires of the City by a hair above all-time classics from the National and Jason Isbell. I'll stand with that judgement. But in 2014 I was dazzled by St Vincent, for some reason. I still like it but I really should have gone with the Hold Steady or Lana del Rey. And in 2015, I was likewise enthralled by Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, which is certainly a great record. But let's face it. I'll never be a hip-hop guy. The ones I was really listening to on repeat were by the Staves, Jason Isbell, and Joy Williams.

Then I skipped four years. What did we miss?

Well, 2016 should have prompted an actual essay on "the divorce record" because the two albums that really stood out for me were Miranda Lambert's (she actually did get divorced) The Weight of These Wings and Beyonce's (she just gave Jay-Z some grief) Lemonade. Fabulous records, but Miranda's more in my sweet spot. Some very fine honourable mentions, too, generally from artists with some years behind them: the middle-aged Lori McKenna ("Halfway Home" was definitely the Song of the Year), the elderly (a senior citizen!) Alejandro Escovedo, the ancient (he was pushing 80!) Ian Hunter, and the newly deceased (can't get any older than that) David Bowie and Leonard Cohen.

In 2017, the coast was finally clear for the National to make my favourite album - and for the first time in forever, they coughed up something I merely liked. An A minus, rather than an A plus. This allowed Lorde, Bleachers, and Emily Haines to fight for the prize and I went with Melodrama by the kid from New Zealand. It's not just that she was 20 years old - she actually made me wish I was 20 years old as well, which doesn't normally happen. But that green light, I want it too.

Now 2018 was the easiest choice I've ever had to make. Metric's Art of Doubt just blew me away and it still does, remaining a fixture on my playlists even two years on (I'm normally listening almost exclusively to music released during the last twelve months or so.) I absolutely loved the boygenius EP, I liked Annie Oakley, and Wussy, and Phosphorescent. But this was a total no-brainer for me. I was a little surprised that Metric came up with so many fabulous songs just one year after Emily used up a lot of excellent material on her very fine solo album. But they did, they did, they surely did. And the band has never sounded better.

And in 2019, the National finally - finally! - top my list with I Am Easy To Find. They're only my favourite modern band, it's just weird that it took them so long to top one of my year-end lists. And it was a damn close thing all the same. 2019 was a great year for albums and I especially loved Lana del Rey's Norman Fucking Rockwell. I went back and forth on which one I liked best for the longest time. Additional shout-outs are required for Vampire Weekend, Taylor Swift, Lula Wiles, and Joy Williams. Among others. Great bunch of albums.

Which brings us at last to 2020, year of the plague. Let's start with some Honourable Mentions, excellent work that just missed my Top Five.

The Drive-by Truckers released,  not one, but two fine albums in 2020. Who was the last band to do that? It may have been the Beatles in 1965. But they don't quite make the final cut because their former guitar player also put out a record this year that made my Top Five and then Truckers band leader Patterson Hood went and produced an album for some obscure guy I'd never even heard of that went and cracked my Top Five as well. A great year for the Truckers and an even better year for Truckers-adjacent artists! 

Two of Canada's finest singer-songwriters returned from long absences with very fine records. Kathleen Edwards hadn't been heard from since 2012's Voyageur - as was widely reported, she'd left music entirely to open a coffee shop on the outskirts of Ottawa. I'm a big fan, and I'm pleased to have her back and I'm very happy with the new record - but I like Sarah Harmer's record even better, and I was somewhat surprised to discover she'd been away even longer. Are You Gone comes a full ten years after her last one. Welcome back, ladies.

I liked Haim's debut but I was rather disappointed with the follow-up. I had no expectations at all for their third record, so I'm very pleased to report that it's really good. And so is the Strokes sixth album - a this point they sound like they're just amusing themselves, like a band that has nothing to prove anymore and is just making these cool songs for the hell of it. Lori McKenna's album is solid - her craft, as always, is impeccable and "When You're My Age" is one of those songs few other songwriters can manage, something that just cuts directly through to anyone's emotional soft spots. And we had noteworthy efforts from many, many other artists. A quick list would have to include the Beths, Soccer Mommy, Torres, Waxahatchee, Matt Berninger, Sufjan Stevens, Best Coast, Torres, Carly Rae Jepsen, Elizabeth Cook, Bruce Springsteen, Lydia Loveless, Fiona Apple, Chris Stapleton, Chuck Prophet, Bright Eyes, Porridge Radio, Christian Lee Huston, and Ruston Kelly. Settling on a final five was pretty desperate work. Which is the way I like it.

But these are the five that did the most for me this year.

5. Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit - Reunions

This is Isbell's fourth album since getting sober. He opens with a rather lengthy (6:40) rocker that's merely okay, probably the weakest thing on the record. But from there, he proceeds to provide yet another outstanding collection of songs, that range over a wide area of subjects that are somehow all quite close to home, family, and friendship. But Jason's been through some stuff and the things he values, he really values, and he's thought pretty hard about all of it. Meanwhile, his craft and his band are so dependable that he begins to remind me just a little bit of Tom Petty, although Isbell is a very different kind of writer and singer. (Isbell does do a great cover of "American Girl" on stage. He also does a ferocious "Whipping Post.") But he's got the same dedication to quality control that I always admired in Petty.

Jason Isbell "Only Children"

4. Bob Dylan - Rough and Rowdy Ways

He contains multitudes. He really does. He was mad, bad, and dangerous to know when he was a young man. Well, he's 79 now and he just doesn't give a fuck. This is his first collection of original songs in almost a decade and every last one of them is choice. Which is something that doesn't happen too regularly with Dylan albums. It also seems that spending these last few years singing the Frank Sinatra catalogue has had a real impact on his singing - it's as if he now has a much better idea of what the blasted ruin of his voice is still capable of doing. But the songs, the songs, my gosh the songs! 

Key West is fine and fair 

If you lost your mind, you will find it there.  

Or how about 

Hello Mary Lou, hello Miss Pearl 

My fleet-footed guides from the underworld 

No stars in the sky shine brighter than you 

You girls mean business, and I do too. 

From the Dr Frankenstein tale of "My Own Version of You" to the cosmic radio station invoked in "Murder Most Foul," America's greatest songwriter remains the master, quite undiminished, full of piss and vinegar, and completely out of his ever-loving mind. Mad as the mist and snow, as Yeats would have it.

Bob Dylan "False Prophet"

3. Phoebe Bridgers- Punisher

Dylan was 53 years old when Bridgers was born in the summer of 1994, just as the baseball players were going out on strike. I wonder - shouldn't it be hard to get my head around an artist so distant from my own generation? Nah. Really, I don't see why. She's much closer to me than Johann Sebastian Bach, right? I had found myself stepping rather cautiously into her debut album, 2017's Stranger in the Alps - I wasn't sure about her voice, which sounded a little small and pitiful on first acquaintance, murmuring melodies that didn't exactly leap out at me. But some of the lines that came out of that voice insisted on grabbing my attention anyway. (Mostly "You Missed My Heart" - holy hell, what a song.) Then she teamed up with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus for the brilliant one-off boygenius EP, by which time I'd fully assimilated the way she sneaks up on you and, however sadly sometimes, simply has her way with you. 

Big bolts of lightning hanging low

Over the coast, everyone's convinced

It's a government drone or an alien spaceship

Either way we're not alone

She can do whatever she wants. A huge talent, and utterly fearless.

Phoebe Bridgers "I Know the End"

2. Jerry Joseph - The Beautiful Madness

I try to pay attention. I try to keep up. And every year I dutifully peruse half a dozen year-end Best-Of lists and am alarmed to find dozens of people I've never heard of and must instantly investigate. I've tumbled down so many rabbit-holes following the  hint that "if you like this artist, you might also like..." And stuff like this just keeps happening. Who the hell is Jerry Joseph? He's 59 years old, he's been recording for decades, and I never even heard of him. But I follow Patterson Hood on Twitter, and this is why I follow people on Twitter! Hood mentioned late last summer that he'd produced the new album by Joseph, whose skills as songwriter and performer he vouched for. Well, I'll always take Patterson's word on something like that, enough to at least check it out. Needless to say, I'm glad I did. The whole album is outstanding but "Dead Confederate" is something else altogether. It's beyond anything you could possibly imagine. It's sung from the defiant, unapologetic point of view of the god damned statues of the rebel heroes and traitors that are finally being torn down in the land of the free. 

Swallowing my granite pride, 

they haul me out to gravel pits

Forget that I lived and died, 

smash me up to chips and bits

Buying and selling humans was good work if you could get it

And featuring Hood's erstwhile bandmate, Jason Isbell, playing what might the spookiest slide guitar part since Ry Cooder's work on "Sister Morphine" some fifty years ago. Bloody, terrifying music.

Jerry Joseph "Dead Confederate"

1. Taylor Swift - folkore

You can't argue about it anymore. America's Ingenue is all grown up. As an artist, she's at an extremely interesting turning point in her career. Like many young songwriters, Swift repeatedly mined her own biography for raw material. There are, however, only so many interesting songs you can actually get out of your own life, unless the adventures never end. No one can really live that way. Along the way, Swift took quite a bit of heat  and mockery for the ways various past loves featured in her lyrics. Joni Mitchell could have told her that while it's okay for the guys, it's just not cool when women do that. The rules have always been different for girls.

Swift is now the same age Mitchell was when she made The Hissing of Summer Lawns, which I regard as her last great album before she began to slowly lose her way. It seems to me that one of the driving impulses of Mitchell's life and career was a very basic need simply to be taken seriously, as a woman and - especially - as an artist. She started out in folk music, a musical form that has always taken itself quite seriously, and drifted gradually towards jazz, which tends to take itself more seriously still. She always had so much to prove, no matter what she did. She was a woman in the midst of a very macho and male dominated musical scene, and it didn't matter nearly as much as it should have mattered that she had more talent in her little finger than Crosby, Stills and Nash had in their entire bodies. Combined. She was still a chick on the scene, however talented. She'd written a hit single (for Judy Collins) before anyone knew her name, she'd had hits of her own - but she may have felt, on some level, that this kind of popularity was beneath her somehow. And eventually the unending need to prove her artistic validity swallowed up the brilliant songwriter she once had been. 

I think Swift's folklore is as good as anything Mitchell ever did and I'm much more optimistic about her going forward. Swift's driving impulse, as a woman and an artist, is almost laughably humble - she wants to be popular. She wants people to like her. Like everything in life, this has a downside of its own - in Swift's case, her need to be liked often makes her seem extremely calculating, trying to figure out what people want and expect of her so she can provide it. Swift also emerges out of country music, which remains a very conservative music community, unrelentingly hostile to anyone who would rock the boat, and firm in its belief that women should be seen and not heard. Not even on country radio. That's where Swift came from and she played by its rules. She wanted to be popular. But she was too talented and too ambitious to stay there. She always knew how good she was. When she faced some skepticism about her own songwriting ability after her first albums because she always seemed to work with co-writers, she wrote everything on her third album by herself just to prove that she could absolutely do it that way if she wanted. But she simply likes writing with other people. 

She wanted to be a pop star, and she became one. And this placed a new set of expectations on her - she found herself in a place where her life and career were planned, to the day, literally years in advance. She embraced it. She's here to please, though she admitted that she was beginning to tire of the whole treadmill. She was gearing up to spend most of 2020 and 2021 on the road supporting Lover, her (quite excellent) 2019 album when the pandemic cancelled everything. So she wrote some songs instead, many with a new writing partner, Aaron Dessner of the National. The story of how it all happened is itself rather interesting.

Swift, a self-proclaimed huge fan of the National (which gains her enormous credit in my book, of course!) had discussed songwriting with Dessner when they had met once before. Dessner had explained that as all the members of The National live in different parts of the world, the creation process usually began with Dessner, from his studio in upstate New York emailing musical ideas to his brother Bryce (in Paris) and singer Matt Berninger (in Los Angeles.) With her performance plans cancelled, Swift reached out to Dessner to inquire if he'd like to try writing with her. Dessner, who apparently has far more musical ideas that his bandmates like or can use, obligingly sent her some material. Swift returned one of them the very same day as a finished song - "cardigan," the second track on the album and its lead single. She is nothing if not eager to please. They wrote ten songs together that ended up  on this album - Swift expanded this method of working to include her longtime collaborator, the marvellous Jack Antonoff, for another five songs. And it turns out they had enough material left over to release a second album a few months later. 

It's a different kind of record for her. It's a songwriter's album. There are no splashy pop singles, made to be released ahead of the album and carve out its place on the radio, songs that would come to seem jarringly out of place with the rest of the record that followed them. This is quiet, reflective music - many of the tracks are based on the same kind of piano melodies fans of the National are very familiar with. And the songs seem to be about... other people. Or stuff she just... made up. From the saga of Becky Harkness, to the three linked songs about a doomed high school threesome, to the absolutely shattering "epiphany," these songs really don't seem to have much to do with Taylor's life and loves at all. And this is the best news of all, to my mind. As a songwriter, she's used up her biography, moved on to different subjects, and come out far, far ahead. So many songwriters never manage it. So many never even try.

Taylor Swift "the last great american dynasty"