Hey friends! Welcome back and thank you for joining me again this week. I know my last couple of weeks have been D&D-based, but as I promised last week, I’m switching it up this week and bringing you something different.
I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do this week, but after going on a lot of long walks and listening to music the entire time, I was inspired to channel my inner Buzzfeed. This week, I am going to list off (and write a little something about each of) my top 10 favorite albums currently. At first when I thought of it, I was going to put my 10 favorites “in no particular order” but I realized that would be a cop-out on my part, and take away from some of the fun, so I have forced myself to order them.
Keep in mind that these aren’t necessarily albums that I think are the best – in terms of innovation or lyrical supremacy or musical intricacy or anything – just ones that I find myself turning to more often than others because they make me happy.
Please don’t judge me too harshly. The way I describe my musical tastes is that “it ranges from ‘you have got to listen to this’ to ‘I know, please don’t judge me’.” Also, disclaimer: I don’t own the rights to any of the photographs used in this post.
Without further adieu, here is my (current) top 10 favorite albums!
10. “Big Willie Style” – Will Smith
A good portion of why this is one of my favorite albums is nostalgia. I’m not 100% positive, but I believe this is the first CD I ever purchased with my own money (it was either that or “Affirmation” by Savage Garden). However, this album is also filled with some true bangers – cheesy as they may be.
Anyone born between 1985 – 1995 undoubtedly was “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” at school dances, and “Miami” was practically a Spring Break anthem for anyone heading to warm weather looking to party. Throw in the cheesy-but-catchy “Candy”, the celebration-of-life “It’s All Good”, the “Just The Two Of Us” remake he did about he and his son, and of course the theme song for the movie “Men In Black” and you’ve got yourself a fun album. Not bad for the first album he put out as Will Smith instead of as The Fresh Prince!
9. “Bad Habits” – Every Avenue
Not everyone has heard of this band, but for those that have, they were treated to some really fun “pop punk” or “alternative rock” music. This album in particular I believe holds the record for album that I purchased most.
I am still a pretty big physical media guy, preferring to have a hard-copy CD or book to their digital counterparts, but back in the mid-2010’s when I discovered this band (and this album) that was almost exclusively the case. I’m still not entirely sure what caused me to do so, but I think I lost this CD 4 or 5 times and just kept re-buying it because I liked it so much.
The album starts out on a really fast-paced note with “Tie Me Down” and does a good job of mixing fast-paced songs with slower ballad-y songs. It also helps that they are one of the most fun concerts I’ve ever gone to see – playing at a small converted-church venue in downtown Detroit to a couple hundred people.
8. “Photographs and Memories: His Greatest Hits” – Jim Croce
Okay I’ve got to level with you folks on this one. The majority of my love of this album comes from a few songs, rather than loving the album from front-to-back. However, whenever I decide to break out my records for a Vinyl Night, this is almost always the album the night starts out with. You just absolutely cannot go wrong with good old-fashioned storytelling hits like “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”, “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim”, and even the slower “Operator”. It’s one of my favorites, and one that I’m very glad to own on vinyl.
7. “Scream Aim Fire” – Bullet For My Valentine
I know that this album is definitely a “one of these things is not like the others” situation, but some days, you just really need a good hard rock album to blast and jam out to. The thing that I like about Bullet For My Valentine as a band is the fact that, to me, they have the perfect mix of adrenaline-inducing musicianship, “screamo”, and understandable lyrics. Unlike some other hard rock bands, it’s generally pretty easy to follow their lyrics while still getting pumped up from the music.
This album in particular has some of my favorite songs by them – some of their “slower” (as slow as a hard-rock song can be anyway) songs like “Forever and Always”, “Hearts Burst Into Fire”, and “Say Goodnight” along with some real adrenaline-pumpers like “Waking The Demon” (which, by the way, I do NOT recommend making your alarm in the morning – unless you want to fly out of bed with a near heart attack), “Disappear”, and “Take It Out On Me”. All in all, I feel like this is their best album, and a great one to listen to while working out, or if you just need to get pumped up for something.
6. “YSIV” (Young Sinatra IV) – Logic
This album is absolutely on this list thanks to recency bias. It’s a bold step for me to place this in my top 10 all-time favorite albums – especially this highly – since it is one that I only purchased it a few months ago, but I have already listened to it front-to-back a couple of dozen times since then.
While I generally am much more a fan of rock or pop music than rap, Logic is one of my favorite rappers and this is my favorite album of his that I have heard. It’s hard to describe exactly what I like about Logic or what makes him stand out from other rappers in my mind, but he just seems to have a much smoother delivery than a lot of others I’ve heard, and the beats he uses are really easy to just sit and bob your head to. On top of that, I really like the fact that a good portion of Logic’s songs tell some kind of a story, rather than just being about how much money or women or whatever he has. This is a great album from start to finish, and well worth a listen.
5. “Dark Side Of The Moon” – Pink Floyd
Although not quite as big of a Pink Floyd fan as I used to be (at one point, I considered them my all-time favorite band – now I think they come in somewhere around the 7-10 range), it’s hard for me to not include this album in my top 10. I know that it’s easy or cliche to have “Dark Side Of The Moon” be picked as my favorite of their albums, and it was really a three-way race between it, “The Wall” and “Wish You Were Here”. I just feel as though Dark Side of the Moon gets the slight edge for having a higher percentage of songs that I like than the other two (though “Comfortably Numb” from The Wall might be my overall favorite Pink Floyd song and “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” from Wish You Were Here is an outstanding 13-minute journey of psychedelic rock).
It’s hard to say anything about Dark Side of the Moon that hasn’t already been said exhaustively in the last 47 years since its release. Having always been afraid of growing up and having always been uncertain of what I want to do with my life, “Time” hits pretty close to home with the lyrics “You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today / And then one day you find ten years have got behind you / No one told you when to run. You missed the starting gun.” Overall, I think that this is one of the albums on my list that does deserve to at least be in the conversation among the “best” albums of all time, in addition to being one of my favorites.
4. “Physical Graffiti” – Led Zeppelin
I’ll admit that this album (and my number 5) don’t fit in on this list in the same way as the others. What I mean by that is that this album (and Dark Side of the Moon) is not one of my favorites for its upbeat, happy tunes that you’re likely to sit and bob your head along to, but it is absolutely one of my go-to’s when it comes time to just sit and vibe and transport back to a simpler time.
The album seems to fuse a variety of musical styles (harder rock, folk, psychedelia, and even an acoustic instrumental) but never once feels done in a clunky way. One of my favorite songs from the album is the aforementioned acoustic instrumental called “Bron-Yr-Aur”. Add in “Houses of the Holy”, “Trampled Under Foot” and of course “Kashmir” and you’ve got (in my opinion) my overall favorite band’s best album.
3. “Kamikaze” – Eminem
Though it was a foregone conclusion that I would include an Eminem album in my top 10 list, I had an almost impossible time deciding which one. If I’m being completely honest, I’m not even positive that this is my overall favorite album of his (other contenders were “The Marshall Mathers LP”, “The Eminem Show” and “Recovery”) but I feel like this gets the slight edge due to its lyricism.
After having released what many consider his worst album (“Revival” in 2017 – his first since “The Marshall Mathers LP II” in 2013) many were dismissing him as being washed up or ‘yesterday’s news’. He came back with Kamikaze where he seemingly went after anyone and everyone in the industry that doubted him, and went back to his earlier, more aggressive sound without relying on simply doing “shock rap” like he did in a lot of his earlier albums.
One of my favorite disses on the album is one aimed not at any one specific artist, but instead at the music industry as a whole. In it he says “All I know is I wrote every single word of everything I ever murdered / Time to separate the sheep from goats / And I got no faith in your writers, I don’t believe in ghosts,” seeming to attack the industry’s standard of artists having others ghost write their songs for them and take all of the commercial credit for it. As with many other albums (or artists) on this list, it’s hard to find anything to say about it that hasn’t already been said a million times by people much more intelligent than myself, but if you somehow haven’t heard this album yet, and consider yourself even a casual rap fan, do yourself a favor and check it out.
2. “X (Deluxe Edition)” – Ed Sheeran
This was another one that was very difficult for me to nail down. I knew I was going to include one of Ed’s albums, as he’s arguably my favorite artist, along with Led Zeppelin and John Mayer (allusion to the #1 spot on this list perhaps?) I just wasn’t sure which one.
There are songs from each of his albums that I absolutely love, but I feel as though “X” (his second studio album) again has the highest percentage of songs I love vs songs I just like. The album had five singles, which is impressive considering the non-deluxe album only had a total of 12 songs! If you listened to the radio at all in the summer – winter of 2014, you undoubtedly heard one of the singles – most likely “Sing” or “Thinking Out Loud” (which he won Song of the Year Grammy award for in 2016), but the album also has some very catchy songs like “I’m A Mess,” – where he humanizes himself and allows his flaws to shine through – and “Nina,” – which is my probably my favorite song on the album.
The deluxe edition also includes the fantasy-inspired “I See Fire” which was included in the movie The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. If all that you have heard by Ed Sheeran are the songs of his that the radio plays, do yourself a favor and look in to some of his non-single songs – and start with X!
1. “Any Given Thursday” – John Mayer
This one feels a bit cheating because it is a live album which kind of is like a Greatest Hits album (then again, I already included a Greatest Hits album earlier). If I had to pick a favorite studio album by John Mayer, it would probably have to be Continuum – yeah I know, cliche again.
It’s probably a very unpopular opinion, but I feel as though John Mayer is one of the most musically talented guitar players and songwriters of my generation. This album includes some of his biggest hits like “No Such Thing” – where he takes aim at high school authorities telling kids to ‘stay inside the lines’ and do the smart, sensible thing (go to college and get a ‘real job’), rather than following your passions, “Your Body Is A Wonderland” – which he describes as being “a song about girly parts”, and “Neon” – which is lauded as some of his most impressive guitar work.
Some of the lesser known songs on this album (relatively speaking anyway – they’re known enough to be played at a concert) are also fantastic. You’ve got songs like “Something’s Missing” – where he tries to understand why, despite his fame and fortune and talent, he still feels empty inside, “My Stupid Mouth” – where he explores the awkwardness of dating and how it’s difficult to find the right thing to say in many situations, and “Love Song For No One” – in which he laments not having a partner to create love songs for.
This album also includes a cover of The Police’s “Message In A Bottle” and Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Lenny”. But what sets this album apart for me personally is a song that never made it on to any of his studio albums, but is absolutely one of my favorites of his – the 10 1/2 minute long “Covered In Rain” which includes (in my opinion) his best guitar solo. Overall, this is an outstanding album by one of my all-time favorite musicians, and you should absolutely check it out.
Well, there you have it everyone! My top 10 favorite albums. If I’m being honest, if I were to sit down and think about it for days – or even weeks – and write down every album that I would even consider in my top 10, I may be able to kick some of these out in favor of others, but these are the ones that jumped out at me most quickly. This was probably the most fun I’ve had coming up with a blog post so far, and I really hope that you all enjoyed it just as much as I did! Feel free to leave me a comment with a couple of your favorites – I’m always looking for new music to fall in love with.
Thanks again for joining me again this week! See you all next week, friends. 🙂
Musings Of A Struggling Creator 