Apologies to all you streamers, but this is aimed at folk (dinosaurs?) who own LPs and CDs.
We still have maybe 3-4’ of albums. We keep them downstairs under our old stereo and listen to them rarely. Recently I’ve decided to go through them A to Z, and have been listening to one album side on most days.
The albums we own are the “keepers” from our youth. When we went to CDs however long ago, we bought CDs of our favorites, tossed what we wouldn’t miss, and these are the rest.
Just listened to John Cale’s Honi Soit from 1981. Hadn’t heard it for years/decades, but knew I loved the first song on Side A - Dead or Alive. Well, it still held up. I knew every beat and lyric, and it is one of my all time fave songs (personal taste and all that).
But the rest of side A? Yeah, I remembered and KINDA liked the rest of it, but none of them would have been a reason for me to buy the album - let alone keep it all these years.
The biggest shock was when I turned it over - and I couldn’t swear that I had EVER listened to Side B! Not only did NONE of the 4 songs sound at all familiar, but none of them sounded like anything I woulda liked then or now. So freaking weird! I’m interested as I progress past the Cs to see how many more “one siders” I have.
So now I gotta decide, am I gonna hang onto this album for however many more years I have left on the strength of a single song that I may play - who knows how many times in however many years I have left?
How bout you all? Any “one hit wonders” in your collections?
It’s been quite a while since I kept any physical media: you can find just about anything on YouTube nowadays, and with a decent adblocker that’s a very good source.
I do sorta miss albums though: sometimes there would be a less known track that just appeals for some reason…
And oddly there have been a few times in my life when I wasn’t really listening to music much at all for a while, and somehow missed a few bands or singers that I only discover much later now…
I have a Stream of Praise music album in which the only good song is the first one, “Give dreams a pair of wings.” (translation) It’s all lousy stuff after that.
I’m a big Dylan fan, as every regular in music threads should know by now, but he sure had stinkers among his albums, but even on his weakest outputs he always had at least one song that stood out. So I’ll nominate “Knocked Out Loaded”, which is total crap except for the last song, “Brownsville Girl”, that ranks among his best songs of the eighties.
I saw the thread title and came in to nominate that. Dylan and Sam Shepherd, wow, wish they’d written more stuff together.
A writer that I worked with analyzed the song. All he’d tell me was “Just listen to the protagonist’s relationship to the story he’s telling, and how that changes as the song progresses.” (“Well, there was this movie I seen one time, about a man riding 'cross the desert, and it starred Gregory Peck…”)
Now I gotta go play it. Bye!
She said, “Even the swap meets around here are getting pretty corrupt.”
Yeah. We’ve basically been keeping THIS number of albums because they fit in the space in our stereo stand. Recently I decided to start doing cals/weights more regularly, so I decided after I bike I will exercise for exactly 1 album side. I know that is not much (but it is better than nothing - and a level I have been able to keep up.) The albums are pretty much half mine and half my wife’s. The Bs and Cs so far were heavily weighted towards hers. I wouldn’t have guessed that there were than many Beatles songs I had not heard before. Jackson Brown apparently couldn’t figure out how to end his songs without fading out, but that David Linley sure could play! And that JJ Cale sure liked short songs.
It has been a fun experience to just listen to these albums from first track to last. And has been good at encouraging me to keep up my modest exercise regimen.
Just bought a new CD today - the latest by Bruse Molsky’s Mountain Drifters.. CDs are my wife’s and my preferred way to listen to music. One reason we bought our current 2 cars is that they still had CD players. Likely won’t get into streaming until one or both othe them crap out - which could be a while!
The Revealing Science of God (Dance of the Dawn) from Topographic Oceans. It’s one of my favorite Yes songs. I don’t exactly hate the other songs(album sides) but I haven’t listened to them more than once or twice since the album came out.
In a much more obscure choice, Cheetah from the album “A Musical Odyssey” by Year 2000. A high school friend found the album in a dollar bin. We thought it was pretty meh but we got a big kick out of the final song. Listen to the breakdown towards the end and you’ll know why.
Not really. I’ve generally tended, over the years, not to keep those albums. And as time went on, I became more and more wary of buying an album on the basis of one song I knew I liked.
I’m certainly not going to argue that that’s one of his better albums, and yeah, it’s been a loooong time since I’ve played it. But I find it listenable all the way through. Even “T-Bone.”
First, disclaimer, I’m too young to have owned more than a half dozen LPs as a child, my youth was cassettes and mix tapes, and my adulthood was CDs. For that matter, I was a pretty early adopter of iTunes where I could buy all the singles I wanted… mostly.
But for years, I couldn’t get a single of John Cale’s transformative cover of Hallelujah. And I love that song. After making myself crazy about it for a long time, I ended up buying a copy of the “Scrubs” soundtrack, which had it, and literally ripped the album for the one song. I’ve made it a point to listen to the whole CD once or twice, and everything on it was “meh” or “fine”, but otherwise, nope, just the one song.
Foghat - “Fool For The City”. The title track is meh, the second track is pure album filler, but then you get “Slow Ride”. And like the OP, I’m not sure I’ve ever listened to side 2.
There’s a reason that everyone knows only one song by King Floyd (Groove Me) and that’s because the rest of his ‘Best Of’ record is pretty nondescript.
Jefferson Starship’s Red Octopus has “Miracles,” and that’s about it.
Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves” LP could have been a single.
This is hard for me to answer, because “liking” songs is neither binary (i.e. either I like a song or I don’t) nor unchanging (i.e. my liking for a song the first time I hear it = my liking for it the fifth time I hear it = my liking for it the fiftieth time I hear it).
I’ve owned albums where at first there was only one song that really appealed to me, but over time some or all of the others really grew on me.
I’ve owned hundreds, maybe thousands, of albums, but right now I can’t think of any that, after giving them a fair chance, I really like one song but absolutely don’t like any of the others.
Not only did NONE of the 4 songs sound at all familiar, but none of them sounded like anything I woulda liked then or now. So freaking weird! I’m interested as I progress past the Cs to see how many more “one siders” I have.
. Here’s another outstanding song from the album other than “Police And Thieves”. His voice and Perry’s production are just unique: