As terrible as 2020 was, I eagerly anticipated writing this essay and making its accompanying list of my 40 favorite albums (check out that first) since at least August because 2020 was, in many ways, a blessing in disguise for my music listening. In total, I listened to 385 albums in the year, which means my ranking of the best albums I listened to is probably the most kickass list you've ever seen--definitely beating Rolling Stones' (drab but nevertheless their best edition so far) newest list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Because I only started writing down the date that I first listened to an album in October 2019, 2020 was always going to be my biggest music listening year so far. However, I could have never predicted how big it turned out to be. With the extra time quarantine allowed me to delve into my hobby, I introduced the grading system in April and created this blog in late July. Once quarantine began, I also saw a significant jump in the amount of albums I was listening to. I went from listening to 20 albums in January and 15 in February to 38 in March and 42 in April. Incredibly, the 385 albums I listened to ends up being about 74% of albums I've ever listened to. Although I'm generally known for listening to musicians from the 60s and 70s, those albums cover every year from 1963 to 2020.
Given the shear volume of albums I first checked out in 2020 and the fact that I mostly check out artists I'm very likely to enjoy, it should surprise no one that there were great albums that didn't make my list of 40. To illustrate this, I also made a list (on the same post as the top albums) of famous--and usually good--albums that weren't among my top forty albums. Some of it will make you laugh, some of it might annoy you, but that's okay because, as you can see from my list of top 40, I had no interest in ranking the albums in any way other than putting up top what I enjoyed the most.
Some of you are probably already delegitimizing my list because Bob Dylan's "Love and Theft" topped it. Dylan is his favorite artist, you say, who else would you expect to be on top? To some extent, you're right. He's my favorite musician and that hasn't changed since I discovered him. Now, please, allow me delegitimize your claim: I think "Love and Theft" is the best album Dylan ever released. If you aren't ready to torch the earth, it's because you don't understand how controversial that statement is--a look through a few rankings of Dylan's albums generally put "Love and Theft" around 11th best. Let me further spell it out: Bob Dylan, the voice of the baby boomer generation and who became the biggest thing in the world in the 60s, released his best album on September 11th, 2001--weird coincidence right?
Hopefully, you understand now. It took me a long time to say that, much less believe it. It took two months after first listening to it before I claimed that it was his second best album ever. At the time, I didn't dare touch his 60s masterpiece Blonde on Blonde. Now, I believe it's his best and I don't care. So apologies for ranking a Dylan album as my favorite of the year--he's my favorite artist and that sort of makes "Love and Theft" my favorite album of all time too. I guess it is, but note that the Stones' Exile on Main St. got the same amount of points in the top ten breakdown and Mitchell's Blue got one fewer. Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks and Highway 61 Revisited and The Basement Tapes would probably get 14 too. It might be my favorite, but not by much and perhaps not for long.
Just about everything on "Love and Theft" is the best work he's ever done including assembling his best band ever. Guitarists Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell play with as much attitude and heart as Dylan has on vocals. Musically most, if not all, of the songs are based on the melodies or riffs of songs from the era which Dylan grew up in or even farther back in time. While this might at first seem to weaken such a masterpiece, rock critic Robert Christgau so eloquently pointed out that "it would mean much less if it wasn't also [rooted in] tradition."
In the lyrics, Dylan presents some of his best characters of his career--many of them killers or numbed vagabonds you'd see from a Flannery O'Connor short story. On the opener "Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum," Dylan turns the Alice in Wonderland characters into murders. Tweedle Dum, we learn, "will stab you where you stand" and the song ends abruptly with him telling Tweedle Dee "I've had too much of your company." On "Floater (Too Much To Ask)," Dylan coolly claims "if you ever try to interfere with me or cross my path again/you do so at the peril of your own life" before doubling down "I'm not as cool or forgiving as I sound." Paul Simon once said he envied Dylan because everything he said was both serious and sarcastic at the same time. Here, with the villainous characters and Dylan's deathly grumble, the serious interpretation of the lyrics are sinister and threatening in a way his lyrics has never been. And he plays the characters so well: on "Tangled Up in Blue" from Blood on the Tracks, I, unlike most people, have never bought that Dylan meant "she bent down to tie the laces of my shoes" as a sexual innuendo because he sounds too modest. On "Lonesome Day Blues" from "Love and Theft", when Dylan growls "Samantha Brown lived in my house for about four or five months/I don't know how it looked to other people/I never slept with her even once," he does the line so well that he could be telling the truth or lying and I have no idea which.
Despite all the dark undertones of the album, he's also never been funnier. Check out when Dylan sneaks in lines like "I said 'Freddie who?'/He said 'Freddie or not here I come!'" or "I'm sitting on my watch so I can be on time" or when he imagines Romeo telling Juliet she has a poor complexion and Juliet spits back "why don't you just shove off if it bothers you so much?" I've always laughed at the absurdity of "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" from Blonde on Blonde, but the overall anger of the song has always made me doubt that he thought it was funny when he wrote it. Here, it's impossible not to imagine him chuckling at all the jokes as he wrote them.
I, of course, could go on but I assume there are other albums that you're probably more interested in. I'll save you from deep analysis of all the other albums on the list to keep this essay from being too long. Plus, it's much easier for me to analyze lyrics than to analyze music, which I'm mostly unequipped to speak at length on. Heck, I only learned what a pedal steel guitar was a quarter of the way through the year.
As great as my top ten albums for 2020 are, Dylan's "Love and Theft", the Stones' Exile, and Mitchell's Blue were the clear runaway winners--Exile is the quintessential rock and roll record and Blue is probably the best acoustic album of all time--and I knew they were way ahead of everything else before I drafted the list and subsequently began re-listening to everything. In addition, I knew they would be neck and neck with each other even after re-listens. If I hadn't already written so much about "Love and Theft", I might have been tempted to switch Exile on Main St. to number one after I re-listened to it on the 31st. Same thing for Blue, which was even better than I remembered.
After assembling a draft of my top 40 albums for the year in mid-December, I began re-listening to every A- album I gave in 2020 to see what deserved a spot on the list. Checking them all out was a mighty pleasure in December, especially because I hadn't listened to some of albums in six months or longer. Each album, as the grade A- indicates, was good all the way through, which made it difficult to disqualify anything from getting a spot on the list until I listened to the album all the way through once or twice or three times or four times. The task of choosing the best forty albums became so difficult, in fact, that I decided to put a limit of three albums per artist so that I wouldn't lose my mind.
In addition to all the A- records from the year, I also listened to a few strong B+ records I thought might have a chance--Neil Young's Americana, The Doors' L.A. Woman, Big Star's Radio City, Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel of Love as well as others. Despite enjoying Americana back in July, I felt there was something slightly off-putting about the music that was hard to pinpoint. Listening to it for the first time in five months made me realize that the slightly off-putting quality of it made it memorable, interesting, and, most importantly, highlighted fun--not perfection--as the album's central theme. Realizing this, I added it to the list. I revisited the Doors' L.A. Woman because their debut The Doors, which I previously considered to be their best album, was surprisingly underwhelming each of the three times I listened to it in December. I hadn't listened to L.A. Woman since I reviewed it and I found it surprisingly strong and more compelling than their debut, so I added it to the list. Radio City and Tunnel of Love? Not sure why they didn't click immediately, but both--Radio City especially, which I've listened to four or five times in December--were so pleasantly excellent upon my year-end revisits that they also made it onto the list. All of these albums were also subsequently given A-'s.
Besides those grade changes, four A- albums--the Grateful Dead's Workingman's Dead, Elton John's Rock of the Westies, Steely Dan's Countdown to Ecstasy, and Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark--became A's after I assembled the list. With the large number of A-'s I gave in 2020, it seemed like the reasonable thing to do and each album certainly deserved the grade. Another grade change was the Grateful Dead's Live/Dead--ranked as my second favorite album half way through the year--which fell drastically from 10th on the draft to 23rd on the final list after two pretty underwhelming re-listens only a few days before this publication.
There was also, unfortunately, an A+ that dropped down to an A: Patti Smith's Horses. I delayed doing this for a long time because when I ranked my favorite albums half way through the year, Horses was an easy number one. I can't remember the last time I fell in love with an album so immediately--"Love and Theft", Exile, and Blue all took at least ten listens before I became sure of their greatness. The past few times I've heard Horses though, I found that the album took more concentration than I wanted (and was able) to give it. I zoned out during Smith's lengthy verses a few times and the band only blew me away like they used to on a few tracks. That said, I still find a substantial amount of enjoyment from Horses--it placed fourth after all--but its power has noticeably diminished.
On my list of favorite artists for the year, the Stones, Mitchell, and Steely Dan were the clear runaways. The Stones have two albums in the top five, three in the top fifteen, and four on the entire list; Mitchell has two in the top ten and three in the top fifteen; and Steely Dan has two in the top fifteen and three in total on the list. A hallmark of each of these artists is that I can enjoy any of their albums from their peak years. The Grateful Dead would also be up alongside the top three if they had one or two more albums that I'm fond of listening to all the way through--could you imagine if Europe '72 was a single LP instead of a triple? The legendary Led Zeppelin, while generally having better quality albums than the Dead, basically fall slightly behind them because I personally like the Dead more.
A similar mountain of a musician, Elton John--6th on the list and who released an incredible twelve albums in his six-year peak--released mostly good albums that I rarely go back to except Rock of the Westies, which placed solidly at 13th (and usually ranked as Elton's eighth or so best album by others), Honky Chรขteau, which finished towards the end of the list, and the first half of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, which wasn't considered for the list. Then there's Patti Smith, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and John Prine--all great musicians who, other than their albums in the top 40, consistently released strong albums that I'm rarely inclined to listen to.
Although I will very likely not listen to as many albums in 2021, I hope to find just as many great ones. Scanning my list of most anticipated albums for the year (on the other post), as long as I get through a substantial amount of punk by the end of 2021, I don't see why next year's list won't be better. Part of the reason I have such high expectations is because, over the course of 2020, the musicians that I plan on doing next has become more and more influenced on whom and what music critic Robert Christgau recommends and it has helped steer me towards better music. His website, http://robertchristgau.com/, is the greatest musical resource on the internet and I use it numerous times each day out of curiosity and for help on my own reviews. Its set-up is the basis of the way I set up this blog and let's not forget that my grading system is also based on his grading system. With his help, 2020 has not only my biggest music listening year, but will likely go down as the most transformative and important year in my music listening.
Lastly, I'd like to thank my readers who support me despite sometimes knowing little to nothing about what I write on--those context paragraphs were made for you! Although I would still likely be writing my opinions on albums without an audience, I certainly wouldn't work as hard articulating them without knowing my mom is checking for grammatical errors. I also wouldn't be writing such an extensive piece celebrating a year which has been terrible in so many ways nor would I have listened to ten albums in one exhausting day trying my best to get the ranking of the top 40 just right. And now that I feel I have accomplished that, I can start getting to work on some of those anticipated albums. Buckle in folks, the first eight albums on the list (up to Paul Simon) will be reviewed by the end of February.
