When Aimee Mann released Whatever I bought it on the strength of the review in Q magazine and loved it, played it loads. Yet I never got around to listening to any of her other albums. This is strange behaviour from me, because whenever I have an album I like my usual reaction would be to buy every album that artist has done. This has led me to discovering some great albums, but it has also seen me buy a right load of old rubbish out of loyalty to a band whose debut album I liked. I’d listen to the album, decide it’s rubbish, put it on the shelf, from which it will never be plucked again, and then wish that said band would just quit, like wot REM did.
It’s only in the past couple of years that I have been able to stop this stupid habit of mine. Ironically, after years of buying increasingly disappointing Morrissey albums I stopped just before he released a couple of crackers, but there you go.
Back to Aimee Mann, I always intended to buy her follow up album, I’m With Stupid, I just never got round to it. I’d just moved to London in 95 and there were so many other things competing for my disposable cash. But a couple of days ago I thought I’d download it and give it a listen to see if it’s worth buying. It is!
It’s not the only album I’ve done this to. Back in the 80s there were a few albums I wanted but never bought, finally getting round to listening to them a couple of years ago. I played Gary Moore’s Out in the Fields and Empty Rooms singles to death, along with Out of My System, which was on the B-Side of one of them. So Run For Cover went straight on to my wants list. I finally heard it a couple of years ago and loved it and had bought the CD before the album was halfway through. I really wish I’d got round to it at the time, but I was 16 and only had a modest amount of pocket money to spend. I worked 5 or 6 hours per week, around my school work, but it was voluntary, so didn’t top my pocket money up. And at 16 in 1985 there were around 30 years’ worth of great albums to catch up on. Run For Cover would have been great, but not as great as Trans-Europe Express, or Moondance, or Transformer, or dozens of other albums that were yet to enter my life and were on my hitlist, so it had to wait.
Not every delayed listen had me heading to eBay or Amazon though. Billy Joel’s An Innocent Man, that I so wanted at the time is a good album, but I would have enjoyed it much more had I listened to it back then. In fact, I’d have loved it as a 13 or 14 year old. Chicago’s 17, however, apart from the single that I really liked (which sounds really dated now), is a bit shite, so I’m glad I never bought that one.
Anybody else take 20-30 years to get round to listening to an album you really wanted at the time? And did it live up to expectations?
You should get Aimee Mann’s Lost In Space ASAP! (Other albums of her as well, but that one’s the best one of hers IMO)
Whatever, I’m With Stupid, and Bachelor No. 2 first, though. I thought Lost in Space was less good than Bachelor #2.
There was a US RSD vinyl release of Bachelor No 2 on three sides and the songs from the Magnolia OST on the fourth. I’ve not been able to track down a copy for less than 50 quid, which is a bit steep even for an album I love to bits.
Have to agree with those 3 named, but there is much in the later catalogue too. I have a soft spot for the Forgotten Arm.
She’s fab.
My favourite of hers of ‘recent’ years is her ‘The Both’ album that she did with Ted Leo…. whose solo albums I really ought to investigate further!
Nothing she’s done past the first three have really clicked with me.
There’s probably a thread there, if we get short of something to talk about in 2021.
So, so many. The thread I posted last week about 80s frontman who’d gone solo was full of albums I either wasn’t aware of or just didn’t get around to. As a perfect example only last year i bothered to listen to The Associates “Wild and Lonely” (I know!!) which was the last album released under the name and it was really a Mackenzie solo album. It is fantastic. A great showcase for that voice and full of brilliant songs. Try this for a pure pop anthem. “Just Can’t Say Goodbye”
Astral Weeks – bought it because “I felt I should”, plus I was trying to collect a copy of each of the Top 100 Albums book from 1987 (I think I ended up with about 80 of them).
Now … listened to once, and then put away.
It has even been upgraded to CD, and after 30-odd years … I still don’t get it.
As I’ve doubtless said before, I didn’t get Astral Weeks until I listened when I’d been up all night and was monsterously hungover. Then I got it.
I’ve been teetotal for 6 or 7 years, and so it has been welded to the shelf since.
I am going to stand in the corner with my back to the class when I tell you that I have listened to Tapestry for the first time a couple of weeks ago.
Such a fabulous album, how on earth have I let it go 50 years (50 fucking years!)..
I really am not worthy.
Well I only got around to it last year, Jack, so that makes two of us…
Talk Talk’s Spirit Of Eden. I have now listened to it a dozen times or so, after taking it off the ‘pending’ pile. I have to be in the mood for it, but it is wonderful. I don’t however think its as good as The Colour of Spring, which I only really first listened to seriously late last year. The good news is I still have ‘Laughing Stock’ and the Mark Hollis solo unplayed.
I have never knowingly heard anything by Talk Talk, due to irrational prejudice manifested when the albums were released, for reasons which completely escape me now…
@fitterstoke how strange!
As @gcu-grey-area rightly says, The Colour of Spring is their meisterwerk. The two that follow are regarded as even better but I don’t think they’re an easy listen.
I certainly can’t claim any rational reason…my head was a bit messed up anyway in the mid 80’s; and the people I knew who liked Talk Talk used to proselytise a bit, how they were the “saviours of music as we knew it”, managed to send me off in the opposite direction without hearing a note…just thrawn, I suppose.
Time to remedy that stupidity, I think…
Well, I’m a fan but not sure they were ever the saviours of music. Each to their own etc.
It’s never too late!
I haven’t listened to the albums preceeding Colour Of Spring, though I know the singles. I liked ‘Life’s What You Make It’ when it came out, but never heard the album it was on until recently. Didn’t take many listens for it to become one of my favourites. There are a couple of things that they do which slightly annoy me; sudden random splurges of sound or notes, and recorders on one track, but they’re there because that’s what Hollis and co. must have heard in their heads, and that’s fine by me.
There’s a very good review on ‘Pitchfork’ of Spirit Of Eden, which I read before I listened and may have delayed my doing so. I was slightly put off by just how much of a construct the whole album was, and I shouldn’t have been, because every LP is a construct.
Turn off your mind and float downstream.
I very rarely make any great effort with music. If there’s not a catchy hook I usually move on very quickly. “Spirit of Eden” is one of those where I did put some work in because I loved “Colour of Spring ” so much. It truly is worth it. My favourite time to listen is when I’m walking the dog. If the weather and scenery are right “Spirit of Eden ” adds to the whole effect in a quite dramatic way. I love it. In the spirit of this thread I need to do “Laughing Stock” next….
I don’t think there’s anything irrational about not liking Talk Talk. They’re as dull today as always.
Dull, you say? Maybe that’s why I like ’em.
Doesn’t one have to be in the mood to hear anything? I only play Ringo’s Christmas album at Christmas. It’s a cracker by the way.
Let me roll you a joint and put on ‘After the flood’.
Cripes, I’m forever revising my oversights and prejudices. And expensive it is too, especially when whole genres. This week I am dangerously close to liking trad jazz….
Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways. I’m waiting at least fifty years before I suddenly discover its brilliance.
How old d’ya reckons y’all will be by then?
Au contraire Monsieur Saucey, Rough And Rowdy Ways is the Bob Dylan album I have been waiting fifty years to hear. I’ve never been smitten with a record so much in my life. Don’t wait fifty years.
To return to topic, I seem to have accidentally avoided Lee Hazlewood between 1968 and 2008 when a work colleague played me Some Velvet Morning. I was gobsmacked how great it was.
The thing about playing Whatever at the exclusion of Aimee’s other great records is that you automatically reach for your favourite. Well, why Not? I’m much the same with Santana: the first four are all great but 9 times out of 10 I play Abraxas. It is what it is.
Going back to Aimee Mann, I heartily recommend Till Tuesday’s Everything’s Different Now. It’s a masterpiece of broken love and haunting melodies – Aimee’s Blood On The Tracks.
The thing about the Bob album, like many other Return To Form albums he’s released, is that his voice is shot to hell. And so – therefore – are the tunes. The only way anyone is going to enjoy this is if they Just Love Bob. Which is fine. But nobody hearing (eg) WARW objectively, without having a personal investment in the man’s work with all the years of devotion that entails, is going to find much to enjoy here. His band is fine, and obviously supply the chords that are beyond him. His sincerity is admirable, but (and it’s a big one) he can no longer sing. At all. This seems a pretty crucial quality in a singer-songwriter to me. And there’s the elephant-in-the-room issue of why anyone would want to give this ear-time over any of the many fantastic albums he’s released. When I listen to Bob, I want to listen to him at his best. When he could sing.
See also; Paul McCartney.
You won’t want to hear this, HP but your “review” of Rough & Ready is 100% Right.
Goshdarn it. Where did I go wrong?
If you’re invested in Bob, that helps for sure. But there are tunes.
Put off by the cover (the first time Dylan looked naff) and with a huge amount of material taking precedence year on year via the Bootleg Series, I listened to “New Morning” for the first time during lockdown.
I didn’t exactly hate it, but after about 10 plays I couldn’t have hummed, or even named you, a single song.
I was on listen / forget / repeat mode for about three days.
“Chopin’s Interludes – I Contain Multitudes” Bob wouldn’t have said that in 67. I would have but I was so much older then..
Rainy day women. They’re da best!
( That Moose fella sure gets under the skin.)
Loads of albums from my younger days where I played the singles to death but didn’t have the funds to purchase the parent record. It usually turns out there were strong reasons why those tracks were released as singles and the rest weren’t.
Even with bands I discover now, I generally avoid delving into the back catalogue in case it doesn’t measure up and they simply needed the practice to get this good.
Coincidentally, only this year I delved into Aimee Mann’s back catalogue by downloading a Til Tuesday compilation. I’d heard a few tracks before and like all Aimee’s output (except perhaps Magnolia) so was expecting to like it. It’s not bad but simply not worth the effort.
I still have Everything’s Different Now which I played a lot when it came out but last time I dug it out, it’s appeal had gone.
I have hundreds of examples, but here’s one I was reminded of this week as I was flicking through the second-hand CDs at a music store. I own two Josh Rouse albums: 1972 and Nashville. I love them both and play them frequently, yet I’ve never had any desire to explore his output further. His other albums, as good as they probably are, can’t be as good as those two, so when I’m in a Josh Rouse kinda mood they are the ones I’m going to reach for. Which is why I passed over two of his CDs for a few bucks each.
I guess I subconsciously lump artists I like into two buckets: those where I think their output is diverse enough to warrant further exploration, and those where I assume (maybe unfairly) they will keep mining the same seam. Thus I own 20 Bowie albums and the entire Daft Punk catalogue, yet only own two Josh Rouse album, love them as I may.
I stopped at Nashville too, but I started a few earlier, with Dressed Up Like Nebraska, Home and Under Cold Blue Stars, plus Chester with Kurt Wagner. There’s a definite change in style from his earlier albums to 1972. Surely when you hear this you’ll want to explore further…
It’s lovely, but it sounds like it’s painted from the same palette as 1972.
I spent a long, long time wondering whether ‘Come Taste The Band’ would be worth looking into. Bear in mind that at this time I didn’t own any Deep Purple albums at all. It’s worth a go. On the back of that I finally invested in a copy of Tommy Bolin’s ‘Private Eyes’. Sounds like jam night at the local. We do have some good players, but really…
Among many, many discoveries this year, Ron Wood’s I’ve Got My Own Album To Do is worth a mention because at least Afterworders will have heard (of) it. What a corking album this is. What a ripsnorter!