Here are some of my favorite all-time albums (in no particular order, as they say). Help me find some new ones! It skews towards albums that came around the time I was in high school and listened to CDs in my car or on the CD player in my bedroom. But there are a number of newer ones, too.
I’ve been reading a few books lately that touch on learning as an adult, like Beginners and How To Change Your Mind, and that has made me really feel like I need to keep finding new music to like as a way of keeping my mind open to new things (lately I tend to listen to music I already know mostly as something to ignore in the background while working or working out). Thinking about that has also made me think more about the music that I’ve listened to over the years – can I go back to some of these artists and find more music I like that they’ve released in the years that I’ve somewhat forgotten about them? Do I still like their albums that I used to like?
It’s also made me realize how hard it is to really describe what you like about music. For me, at least. I’ve tried to find something to write about for each blurb but I’m not sure they really capture the magic that the respective album has for me. Music tastes are so particular; I don’t necessarily expect any readers to like any of these albums, but maybe a couple people will find (or re-find) something that they find interesting. In other words, the blurb for each album could just say “the songs on this album are good”.
Chief, Eric Church (2011)
I was looking for some new music this week and searched for the top country albums of the decade. I saw Chief on the list and thought to myself, I like Eric Church, but I’m not sure I’ve listened to that album all the way through. I should do that. It turns out that…I already know all the songs on the album… and I already like them all, too. I think one thing I like about country music is that they’re not scared of a little goofy wordplay. On “I’m Gettin’ Stoned”, Eric Church sings about being a “hater of old lovers’ new last names” with the line, “She’s got a rock/I’m getting stoned”. For me it works. “Drink In My Hand” is one of the very few songs I’ve “liked” on Spotify.
Heard It In A Past Life, Maggie Rogers (2019)
I just discovered Maggie Rogers last year. (Well, I wasn’t that late to the show: the album only came out in 2019.) To be honest, I don’t know every song on this album by heart. I don’t even know exactly what they’re all about. But I do know that I really like listening to them.
Troubadour, K’naan (2009)
K’naan’s Troubadour is another album that came out when I was in high school and I listened to it driving around. It was close enough to the hip-hop that I already loved while being just different enough that I couldn’t stop listening. His odd voice could make it or break it, but for me it makes it. These songs bang (including the Adam Levine collab, “Bang Bang”) but also have a message. And of course a person with my mindset couldn’t help but love a song whose chorus goes, “any man who knows a thing/knows he knows not a damn, damn thing at all”.
Sadly, he made one more album that wasn’t very good a couple years after this one, and hasn’t released any music in the ~10 years since then.
Comin’ From Where I’m From, Anthony Hamilton (2003)
I liked the song “Why” by Jadakiss so much that I bought Anthony Hamilton’s CD without knowing anything else about him. This is one of those albums that for a long time I listened to it even though I didn’t love it, and then it just got to the point that it had a certain place in my heart. “Mama Knew Love”, “Cornbread, Fish & Collard Greens”, “Charlene”, and “Chyna Black” are some of the songs that still stand out. I should listen to some of his other albums.
Suit, Nelly (2004)
Maybe the most love-focused rap album on this list? I still joke around with kids the way he does with his son on “Die for You”: “How old are you turning this year? 30?” That’s a dope song. “Nobody Knows” featuring Anthony Hamilton is, too. (Maybe I had actually known “Why” and this song before I bought Anthony Hamilton’s CD?) None of Nelly’s most famous songs are on this album, and the music has a different feel from most of his famous songs,but every song is listenable.
Get Lifted, John Legend (2004)
A concept album if there ever was one. He starts out playing the field (song title: “She Don’t Have To Know”), meets The One (song title: “Number One”), decides to change (song title: “I Can Change”), and settles down and introduces her to his family (song title: “It Don’t Have to Change (feat. The Stephens Family)”). “Ordinary People” is a classic, and “Used to Love U” is another standout. Produced by Kanye West who’s one of my favorite musical artists...
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye West (2010)
Everybody thinks MBDTF is great, and that’s because it is really great. One thing I love about this album is just how different every song is from each other. The sounds are so different from track to track but they come together so well. The songs on this album are...impressively long. The middle of the album has a song of 5:59, followed by 6+ minutes, 6+ minutes again, 5:51, and then “Runaway” at over 9 minutes.
The College Dropout, Kanye West (2004)
Everybody also thinks The College Dropout is great, and that’s because it’s also great. This CD and Beyonce’s Dangerously In Love were the first two CDs I ever bought. Generally I’m not a huge fan of skits on albums, but at least these skits about the American education system hold up – Joe Biden is considering canceling student loan debt, economists are writing books about how our education system is a waste. (“When a lady walks up to me and says, Hey, you know what's sexy?, I say, no, I don't know what it is but I bet I can add up all the change in your purse very fast”) I used to skip “Two Words”, but it’s kind of grown on me over the years. “Never Let Me Down” is one of the best songs I’ve ever heard. “Spaceship” is up there too.
Late Registration, Kanye West (2005)
OK, one more Kanye West album and then that’s it, I swear. To be honest, I didn’t really like “Gold Digger” that much when it came out, but it grew on me over time. “Drive Slow” is one of my favorite songs that nobody knows...I don’t know what exactly it is for me: Kanye rapping about being an insecure teenager:
See back—back then—then, if you had a car
You was the Chi-Town version of Baby
And I was just a virgin, a baby
One of the reasons I looked up to him crazy
I used to love to play my demo tape when the system yanked
Felt like I was almost signed when the shit got cranked
followed by Paul Wall rapping about how amazing his car and bling is:
It's a star-studded event when I valet park
Open up my mouth and sunlight illuminates the dark
followed by Kanye and GLC rapping about how amazing their cars are…and somehow, it works perfectly.
Late Registration has the hard-hitting political songs (“Crack Music” and “Diamonds from Sierra Leone”) and the songs about family (“Roses, “Hey Mama”); “My Way Home” is less than 2 minutes long but still beautiful.
Real Authentic Reggae, Vol. 1, [Various Artists] (2008)
[The link is to Spotify, but most of the songs aren’t available on Spotify; I couldn’t find a playlist already available on Youtube, either. This is a real deep cut I guess.] I think I was at the record store in the mall and kind of wanted to try something new and this album caught my eye. I have never heard any of these songs anywhere else nor heard anyone talk about them. But…it’s a great compilation album of unheard-of reggae cuts.
Live At Stubbs, Matisyahu (2005)
I don’t remember how I originally heard about Matisyahu. Maybe “King Without a Crown” was on the radio? But I could always vibe to this album. Even with most of the songs being about religion. The combination of rapping/singing was really interesting. Also, the way Matisyahu’s look has changed over time is pretty impressive.
Mr. Misunderstood, Eric Church (2015)
This was the first Eric Church album I got into on Spotify. I don’t remember how I found it. Maybe I heard one of the songs on a Spotify playlist and went on to listen to the rest of the album. “Mr. Misunderstood”, “Record Year” and “Holding My Own” are all amazing, in my opinion. My only complaint is on “Chattanooga Lucy”, where he says the bar in the song is “the only place on earth I know that gets hotter when the sun goes down”. Apparently he’s forgotten about popular Uncle Kracker songs.
My Name Is My Name, Pusha-T (2013)
There’s never been a better pump-up album. Sometimes I skip the song with Chris Brown, because I feel weird about Chris Brown. And the duet with Kelly Rowland has never completely fit in for me on an album that’s otherwise not about love relationships. I think the songs of My Name Is My Name have the best first lines of any album I know. The album’s first song begins:
This is my time, this is my hour
This is my pain, this is my name, this is my power
If it's my reign, then it's my shower
This pole position, I made a lane 'cause they blocked ours
I’ve never dealt drugs, but the energy channeled through these songs that are mostly about drug dealing and living the high life has always been unforgettable to me.
If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late, Drake (2015)
This one was on repeat after it came out in 2015. The interesting thing about this album is that it feels to me like it should be workout music…except a lot of the beats are a little too slow for optimal workout speed. But then even at that slower speed, they really bang. How does the phrase “Runnin’ thru the 6 with my woes” get me so pumped up? Also, were any of these songs even on the radio? I don’t see any song titles that I recognize from anywhere (radio/Youtube) outside of this album.
Thank Me Later, Drake (2010)
I’m a big fan of actually-rapping Drake, and Thank Me Later is the epitome of early actually-rapping Drake. “All I know is she was fine, like a ticket on the dash”. That being said, “Find Your Love” is great, too and doesn’t really have any rapping Drake.
Entren Los Que Quieran, Calle 13 (2010)
[I couldn’t find the album on Spotify…I swear it used to be there]
“Latinoamerica” has to be one of the best songs of all time. Calle 13 has never been scared to make some goofy songs (What would I think of “Muerte en Hawaii” or “Vamo’ a Portarnos Mal” if I were listening to them in my first language?)
My Spanish is at the level that I can understand the majority of Calle 13 lyrics but there are other rappers who rap in Spanish who I can barely understand a word of what they say. So, of course this album pick is biased that out of all Spanish-language rap, it’s one of the few albums that I can actually understand.
“La Bala”, a song about gun control, is a political banger
Sería inaccesible el que alguien te mateSi cada bala costara lo que cuesta un yate
Tendrías que ahorrar todo tu salario
Para ser un mercenario, habría que ser millonario
“La Vuelta al Mundo” and “Preparame la Cena” both have an incredible calmness to them:
Soy las ganas de vivir, las ganas de cruzar
Las ganas de conocer lo que hay después del mar
Yo espero que mi boca nunca se calle
También espero que las turbinas de este avión nunca me fallen
No tengo todo calculado, ni mi vida resuelta
Sólo tengo una sonrisa y espero una de vuelta
The Big Day, Chance the Rapper (2019)
Among my favorite albums of the past couple years. “Roo”, “Ballin Flossin”, and “Zanies and Fools” (This must be my only favorite workout song that tells a cute story about little kids) are my favorite songs to work out to. There’s wordplay throughout the album that I was still discovering more than a year after I started listening (“Let’s beat the traffic, give it a whip-ping”). Maybe my favorite is the first verse of “Roo”:
It was all us crammed in the house
Back when my dad was the man of the house
A lot of dads left, they abandoned the house
My dad Joe Jack’, start a band in the house
And few lines later, another memorable line that gets me pumped up to do great things with the people I love:
We come in peace, but we don’t come in pieces
We on some tag-team, W-W-E shit
Continuum, John Mayer (2006)
Continuum is the other album on this list, that, like Eric Church’s Chief, I originally heard most of the songs on this album through Youtube/streaming (or maybe even through Limewire, way back in the day?) without knowing the album as a unit. Then I listened to the album one day and was like, “I like that song...and that one...that one, too”. For me, the strongest section of the album is the middle, with “The Heart of Life” followed by “Vultures” and then “Stop This Train”. But I’ll never forget the lyrics to “Waiting On The World to Change”, either:
Me and all my friends,
we’re all misunderstood.
They say we stand for nothing and,
there’s no way we ever could
Good Kid M.A.A.D City, Kendrick Lamar (2012)
If I told you that a flower bloomed in a dark room, would you trust it?
I sometimes feel like I want to like Kendrick Lamar more than I actually do. I don’t love his other albums, DAMN. or To Pimp A Butterfly. (One Kendrick Lamar work that is at the top of my all-time list is his verse on Schoolboy Q’s “Collard Greens” (Weirdly that’s the second time the word “Collard Greens” has come up in this article).)
But I do love Good Kid M.A.A.D City. I remember when I started hearing more and more about Kendrick Lamar, towards my last few years of college, and I downloaded this album to see what all that was about. And to be honest...it kind of took me a while. I think I could listen to the album without really hearing the lyrics, but slowly I got to the point of understanding some of the lines, and I started to be more and more impressed with Kendrick Lamar. As I’ve written elsewhere (or “will write elsewhere”, depending on when I publish various drafts I’m working on), “Black Boy Fly” is one of my favorite songs. “The Recipe” has such a smooth beat.
The Heist, Macklemore (2012)
Did Macklemore deserve to win the Grammy over Kendrick Lamar? I have no idea. Is The Heist a really good album? Yes, it is. You already know by now that I like music that I can workout to. So of course I’m a sucker for an album that starts with “10,000 Hours” (a very slow beat, but the incredibly-on-point lyrics make up for that) followed by the high-energy greatness of “Can’t Hold Us”. Maybe Macklemore is the American Calle 13? Political songs that are pretty easy to understand (“Same Love”, to give the most well-known example) and some songs that are pretty high on the goofy scale (“Castle” on this album). Perhaps “Thrift Shop” counts, too. It actually doesn’t sound that goofy to me (not in the same way “Castle” does), but I’m not sure if that’s not just because it became so incredibly popular that it started to sound normal instead of goofy) The chorus on “Make the Money” is also after my heart:
Make the money, don’t let the money make you
Change the game, don’t let the game change you
Meat and Candy, Old Dominion (2015)
For me, this album is just smooth listening – the beats go down easy, and, while the lyrics are everything you’ve already heard from 2000s country-pop, they just work for me:
I just wanna roll around with youLike a beer can in a truck bed
or
You're getting just a little too flirty
You're getting just a little too close
Said nobody
Said nobody, ever
Their next album, Happy Endings, was good but wasn’t quite up to making this list. But “Written in the Sand”, “Hotel Key” and “No Such Thing as a Broken Heart” from Happy Endings have the same country-pop magic that I love from this album.
When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold, Atmosphere (2008)
None of the songs that I think of first when I think Atmosphere are on this album (like “Fuck You Lucy”, “The Woman With the Tattooed Hands”, “Sunshine”, “Trying to Find a Balance”, etc. etc.). However, this is the album that came out first after I both (a) started listening to Atmosphere and (b) started buying albums. And while it doesn’t have some of the raw emotion I loved in some of his earlier work, this album really worked for me as an album, with a little more upbeat/optimistic feeling overall and some moments of happiness mixed in with the working-class sadness (One song literally starts with the lyrics “These warehouse wages/ Kill the ends introduction/ Man I should have schooled it up/ When I was younger should have stuck to plan”). “In Her Music Box” has a certain type of beauty that I’ve only ever heard in a couple other songs:
She had a bad dream in the backseat
The same one as yesterday
The same one as last week
Surrounded by her favorite favorites
Elmo, Barbie, her purple baby blanket…
Writing this blurb (and looking up Atmosphere on Spotify) makes me realize that I need to listen to Atmosphere more. They have albums before this one that I’ve never listened to in full, and have continued coming out with music in the years since (I listened to To All My Friends… and didn’t really like it, and mostly stopped listening to Atmosphere after that)
Between The Pines (Acoustic Mixtape), Sam Hunt (2015)
I think the first few times I heard Sam Hunt songs on the radio…I kind of hated them. What is this kind-of-country-music, kind-of-just-talking-on-top-of-the-beat? But then I somehow came across this album and my opinion of him did a complete 180, and this album was on heavy rotation for a long time. I just liked the way it sounded right from the start. I liked that the lyrics are “country” in a way I can personally relate to (not always the case with all the blue jeans and trucks and whatnot):
Running for the grass on the hot concrete
We're still working on our summer feet
or:
Well the year me and my grandad fixed that car
It was a summer full of grease and changing parts
But when we finally got that thing to start
Man, it sounded just right
Riding with the prettiest girl I know
Breaking in a brand new record on an old back road
When that first slow love song came on
She couldn't hide that little smile
Other songs like “Ex To See” and “Vandalizer” play with words in a way that’s fun and goofy.
The Foundation, Zac Brown Band (2008)
Another album where I think I had listened to and liked 90% of the songs before I listened to the album itself as a whole. The first half is a bit more fun with “Toes” and “Where the Boat Leaves From”, the second half is a bit more melancholy, with “Highway 20 Ride” and their cover of “Jolene”, both great songs. Separating those halves is “Free” and “Chicken Fried” (one of the first country songs I ever liked, when I started listening to country a bit more).
Elephunk, Black Eyed Peas (2003)
I think my dad bought this album for me because he saw it somewhere and it was a rap album that didn’t have the “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content” notice on the front of it. (However, did you know that the non-radio-friendly version of their hit “Let’s Get It Started” is called “Let’s Get Retarded”. Have we canceled Black Eyed Peas over that yet?) That being said, it’s good (sold over 9 million worldwide!?) and I listened to it a lot. The three radio hits (“Hey Mama”, “Let’s Get It Started”, and “Where is the Love?”) are all good. “The Apl Song” is the kind of music you won’t hear on the radio. “Latin Girls” was fun. “Anxiety” is an odd mix-up of rap and metal that got me pumped up for more than a couple high school sporting events.
The Rising Tied, Fort Minor (2005)
Well I just wrote about “The Apl Song” in my blurb about Elephunk. The Rising Tied also has a song about an immigrant that you’d never hear on the radio – “Kenji” is the only song I’ve ever heard about WWII internment camps. I vibed with both the songs that got radio play (“Remember the Name” and “Where’d You Go”). “In Stereo” has a beat that always got me pumped up and sounded real good in my car. “High Road” was another good one to get hyped up to, which is a bit surprising to say about a song with a high-pitched piano intro and a John Legend chorus.
The Love Below, Outkast (2003)
This one’s a bit a change of pace – there’s not really any songs to get pumped up to! And to be honest, there aren’t as many songs that really stand out, the way there are on some other albums. This album has synergy – I love The Love Below more than the sum of how much I like each individual song: my love for this album is more about the chill vibe that runs throughout it. And I really like when Andre 3000 raps...but I really like this album, too. I never really got into Speakerboxxx, for some reason, which is a little odd since it’s the one that’s a little closer to my usual style.
Collision Course, Linkin Park & Jay-Z (2004)
What could be more 2004 than Linkin Park and Jay-Z mashed up together? By far the shortest album on this list...but it’s 20 minutes of solid music.
19, Adele (2008)
Adele’s 21 was really good too, maybe even better in some ways, but looking at the tracklists for each, there’s a few song titles on 21 that I don’t remember at all anymore. Not so for 19. This is another album that everyone else thinks is really good and I fully agree.
La Dura Vida del Joven Rapero, Don Patricio (2019)
I think I found this album when one of the songs was on a reggaeton playlist I was listening to on Spotify, and I liked how it was funky and a little different from the usual styles that were popular in reggaeton a couple years ago. I have never heard anyone talk about Don Patricio before, either in real life or online. He might be the only artist on this list (not counting the Real Authentic Reggae compliation) that doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. However, his top song on Spotify does have 200 million streams (they’re not all me, I swear), so I guess he’s not completely unknown.
His style is kind of unique, at least out of Spanish-language music that I’ve discovered. A bit like an even-weirder Bad Bunny. (Specifically, he reminds me of Bad Bunny’s “Si Veo a Tu Mamá”.) A lot of the songs here have a soft feel compared to the average in reggaeton (less…drums? I’m not a musical expert).
Be, Common (2005)
Did you know Common’s first album came out in 1992 and he just released his latest album in 2020? Be and Finding Forever are the only two I’ve listened to in full, so I have some catching up to do. My favorite part of Be is the first few songs: “The Corner”, “GO!” and “Testify”. “Testify” is unique in that most of the songs I know that tell stories are usually longer songs; “Testify” tells its story in a tight two and a half minutes.