Music Is My Savior, I Was Named by Rock and Roll

I've been slacking. I am sorry. Let's start fresh.

This past weekend Amanda and I went to Las Vegas with her business school group, sort of a post-finals thing, and I spent some time talking to the boyfriend of one of her classmates, who has probably the coolest job of anyone I've met out here so far, or maybe anyone I've ever personally met. He's the equipment manager for Green Day. He's been friends with the band for 15 years, and he's been working with them for 10. He goes on tour with them, goes into the studio with them, hangs out with them. Really nice guy, and once Amanda told me what he did, I was immediately struck by the urge to annoy the crap out of him (well, hopefully I wasn't annoying, but who really likes talking about work when they're in Vegas??) by asking all kinds of questions and just talking music in general. I'm a huge fan of their last album, "American Idiot," and we spent a bit of time talking about that album (evidently he gets a pretty darn sizable cut of each CD sold, so the 8 million copies it's sold have given him a nice cushion). I tried not to kiss his ass too much, since I don't like kissing ass, and also since he didn't actually write any of the songs or play any of the instruments, but we got to talking about how the album is really an album, rather than just a collection of songs that most albums are these days.

The album as a collective work seems to be a lost art, but American Idiot is one of the best examples of that in recent history. The kind of album where the individual songs are good, but the whole thing together just makes so much sense and flows so well that you can't really listen to the songs individually anymore. In fact, if there were more than 2 or 3 good radio stations in LA, I'd probably change the channel when "Jesus of Suburbia" comes on roughly every 45 seconds, but unfortunately, there's just not much in the way of options to change to.

There are a handful of other albums that have come out lately, in the past year or two, that fit this mold. The mold established by The Beatles with "Rubber Soul" (my favorite, and possibly the first example of a concept album of all time) and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band", by Pink Floyd with "The Wall", and by Bob Dylan with "Blonde on Blonde."

The new group of albums as collective works, rather than collections of songs, includes some new artists, some old artists, and some unlikely artists. I think that other than Green Day's American Idiot, the best examples of this type of album include the following (feel free to disagree or add to the list - I LOVE discussing this type of thing):

Death Cab For Cutie, "Plans" This was a ballsy major-label debut from one of the most deified indie bands of all time, and it's getting mixed reviews because some (maybe many?) shortsighted fans have put too much emphasis on the independent factor. It's not like they went out and collectively married Renee Zellweger, for crying out loud. They just made a great record that's going to be much more easily distributed, reaching many more people and hopefully expanding their already exponentially expanding fan base even more exponentially.

Brian Wilson, "Smile" This is one that I absolutely can not listen to any individual tracks without listening to the entire album. Probably the best example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts that I have EVER seen. The tracks by themselves are good but not great, but the album is just mind-blowingly good. Never fails to put me in a really, really good mood.

Jay-Z, The Black Album Before you tell me how preposterous it might look to see a rapper's CD on this list of great recent albums, let me just tell you that if you don't think there's the possibility for this quality in all types of music, then you have no business listening to music. You don't have to like it, but you have to know it can be, and sometimes is, there. This album was, in a word, awesome. Shy of the perfection he achieved with The Blueprint, but awesome nonetheless. Pretty much summed up his entire career, or even his entire life, and so far has proven to really be his farewell to the industry. It's been, what, 2 years since he put out a record? That makes "My 1st Song (very well-titled, being the album's closing track)" sound that much more credible. Not that he really needed the help in the credibility department.

Bruce Springsteen, "Devils & Dust" This one took some time to grow on me. At first, I was very disappointed, hoping for some solid rockin, like that live version of "Youngstown" from the "Live in New York"concert, but this is just a great example of storytelling, and listening to it really gives you the sense that you're sort of travelling America. Bonus points for The Boss earning a "Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics" tag for a detailed account of a night with a hooker.

Kanye West, The College Dropout His second album that "dropped" this fall, Late Registration, is good, but not nearly as good as his first one. The College Dropout not only flows, but it all makes sense, it sticks with the central theme. It also makes me want to strut when I listen to it while walking down the street. I'm not a fan of the "skits" in most rap albums, because they usually take up space that could be filled with, I don't know, music?, but the skits in this album are not only pretty funny, they help hold it all together at the seams. They are the seams. The skits are the seams of this record. The songs are damn good, too.

Bright Eyes, "I'm Wide Awake It's Morning" This is one of the best albums I've gotten in years. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it might be one of the top 10 or 20 albums that I have ever owned. Conor Oberst is a better songwriter than most people out there who started making records after he was born. I think he's about 25. Yeah, one of the best songwriters of the past 25 years. I think I feel comfortable with that statement. He's in an elite group, and some of the other members are dead, so he really doesn't have much competition. This album effortlessly transports you to New York City and keeps you in good company during your angst-ridden nighttime journey. Bonus points for writing a song about an actual protest rally that caused such a major traffic jam that I actually got stuck in it and missed my bus to Boston one afternoon. That's not something I can say very often, that something immortalized in song, or in film, actually affected me when it happened.

Elliott Smith, From a Basement on a Hill Posthumously released, this record was probably the most artful and beautiful suicide note of all time that was subsequently sold to millions of people. His music was always dark, and his songwriting was always depressingly vivid, and this one's not necessarily any more so (except for "Kings Crossing" which I could listen to over and over and get chills each time - that line, "I can't prepare for death anymore than I already have" - oooohhh), but the fact that there's no way for this to not be his last album makes it seem that much more morbid. His songwriting was largely unrivaled (joined by Oberst and a scant few others) yet sorely underappreciated. If there's an afterlife, Elliott Smith might be hanging out with Kurt Cobain and John Lennon somewhere, but the odds might be better that he's with the likes of Hemmingway, Faulkner, and Twain. He was just that good.

Thanks for letting me ramble. Like I said, if you want to add or subtract from this list, please do so in the comments section. I'll be more than happy to get into this with you.