I don’t know if any of Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions songs were pop singles but I love Living for the City, He’s Misstra Know It All, etc.
U2- The Joshua Tree. With or Without You is the weakest song on the album. The whole second side is just great.
I’m surprised it took so long to get to this one, and I agree–the album was intended to be listened to end-to-end.
Likewise, I don’t mind the songs “Wish You Were Here” and “Have a Cigar” but I would prefer to hear the entirety of “Wish You Were Here”
“The Wall” is so much more than “Another Brick in the Wall, Part II”
I’m sensing a theme here…
Agree with Reluctant A regarding Sheryl Crow. I never cared for her hits. I found them to be vacuous pop sung in a journeyman style. Imagine my surprise when at a summer barbecue a couple months back, I noticed the music playing was a wonderful female singer performing and upon asking the hostess what was playing, she told me “It’s a Sheryl Crow album.”
I don’t know what the song was - perhaps the one Reluctant A likes - but one of these days I’m going to make the effort to find it. It’s that good.
I’ll nominate the original Jesus Christ Superstar album from 1970. I think the two commercially released singles, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” and “Superstar”, are among the album’s worst songs. Not that they’re terrible; I just think that almost all the other songs are musically and lyrically more interesting. And there are probably good, historically grounded reasons for this. “Superstar” was produced and released about a year before the rest of the album—maybe Rice, Lloyd Webber, and the performers hadn’t really gotten into the groove yet. And “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” is actually an old tune of Lloyd Webber’s, from 1967, that they shoehorned into the musical by penning new lyrics. (“Herod’s Song” is also a recycled Lloyd Webber tune, but in this case the stylistic dissonance is used to great artistic effect.)