Magic Jewball

This was hard. Really hard. The criteria I used was sort of an average of how often I hit the repeat button on my iPod or Diamond Rio or discman at the time it first came out and how often I listen to it now. For example, I listened to the first Killers album multiple times a day when it first came out and then never listened to it again. As a matter of fact, I almost forgot it when considering this list because it’s not even on my computer. Wow, who’d have seen that coming? But these all have stood the test of time and are still regulars on my playlist.

(Songs are either my favorite on the record or the one referenced in the description; songs don’t appear in RSS, sorry)

10. Radiohead/In Rainbows (2007)

There’s a mini-stereo system in my bathroom where I mostly listen to WRXP, sometimes the news in the morning, occasionally I attach my iPod but it’s awkward. There’s been one CD in the player for the last two years, I kid you not. It is this one.

9. Deftones/White Pony (2000)

Once, I stood outside the Roseland Ballroom without a ticket to the Deftones show on the White Pony tour. The scalpers were charging $75 and I just couldn’t see paying it. So I headed home, switched on my discman, and as the opening bars of Feiticeira played, some power turned my legs around and made me go back to bargain with the scalper. I knew I could not spend another evening of my life not seeing this album performed live (I paid $60 in the end).

8. Keane/Hopes and Fears (2004)

A very emotional album for me, big in my life at the time my mother was ill. Still hard to listen to without crying (it’s a pretty emotional record even when not associated with the death of a loved one) but I try because it’s that good.

7. Muse/Black Holes and Revelations (2006)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the only music that can make my legs keep going when all the run has gone out of them. Big, beautiful, vast, emotional.

6. Interpol/Antics (2004)

At a certain moment of my life, I could have done with a 64MB mp3 player because really, this was the only thing I was listening to for months and months and months. This was the other side of Keane for me: the album that made everything OK when it really wasn’t.

5. Animal Collective/Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009)

Too soon? This is really the only time I’ve agreed with all the critics. I waited and waited for this album to come out and it was just as amazing as I’d expected. But even now the utter joy and jubilation of this record can still make my heart burst and my body sing. How could you not be happy when this song is playing?

4. Editors/An End Has A Start (2007)

An album in the old-fashioned sense of the word, I never listen to this record unless I can commit to the whole thing. It has no part in any kind of shuffle, let me tell you. The hardest on this list from which to choose just one song. Dark, beautiful, perfect.

3. Deftones/Saturday Night Wrist (2006)

So personal that it’s hard to write something here. If I had to in a few words I think it would be, “the sound of pain.” I would still be listening to this non-stop… if I could.

2. Neil Finn/One All (2002)

Could this be the perfect album? Exquisite pop sensibility, intelligent lyrics, soaringly happy and poignantly sad? I think so! It might just be the greatest pop record since Jellyfish’s Bellybutton. Every year since 2002, when I walk down the boardwalk entrance to the US Open into the bright sunshine, this is the song that is on my iPod. (Also contains one of the saddest and truest songs I’ve ever known… all on the same record).

1. Interpol/Turn On the Bright Lights (2002)

If all the music in the world was gone and this was the only album in the universe left to listen to, I think I would be OK with it. It still feels exactly as magical when I hear it now as when I did for the very first time. I knew pretty much from the opening notes that this was going to be one of my favorite bands ever.

Honorable mentions go to (going in order by year):

Radiohead/Kid A (2000), New Order/Get Ready (2001), Tool/Lateralus (2001), Spoon/Girls Can Tell (2001), The Vines/Highly Evolved (2002), Radiohead/Hail to the Thief (2003), The Rapture/Echoes (2003), Franz Ferdinand/Franz Ferdinand (2004), Depeche Mode/Playing the Angel (2005), Nine Inch Nails/Year Zero (2007).

So I hope you had a great New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. I certainly did; I was working. But it’s not what you think, see, I had a big baked goods order for New Year’s Day. But while I was rolling dough to Pat Benatar, I was thinking about previous working holidays. It all ties in together. I recently found a cassette of my second favorite album of 1981, Precious Time. It was a cheapie that I had recorded off the LP I owned and man, is it in bad shape. But I’ve been finishing off its disintegration by singing along with it in the kitchen lately. Pat Benatar represents a lot of things to me. The most recent connotation is the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High where, of course, “three girls have cultivated the Pat Benatar look.” I still laugh out loud whenever any of those girls is in the shot.

They say FTaRH is accurate as far as representing high school goes, but I have no idea as my high school was nothing like the typical. But I’ll tell you what, it nailed what life is like as a teen working in a mall. Every time I hear Stacy say, “another Summer at Perry’s, I can’t…” I nod in understanding. Not that I disliked my time in retail. I adored it even while I hated it. I dream of it even now, vividly. But I always worked holidays and Sundays too. I was thinking tonight about NYE 1992. I went to a party at a friend’s posh place on the East Side, slept over, and then took an early morning train back to Baltimore. See, the mall opened at 11 and I had to work. I remember my other friends still sleeping, the empty, snowy streets, the silence in the taxi. But I didn’t mind.

Still, even now I won’t work Sundays. I appreciate every single lazy Sunday I have. This week I proctored exams at a local, er, unnamed Orthodox Jewish university. The week ran from Christmas Eve every day through NYE except Saturday, naturally. I signed up for every available session except Sunday. I am telling you, all these years later you will not take away my Sunday. Now, I may not know Mike Damone’s high school associations (I did internalize his “wherever you are, act like that’s the place to be” credo, but that’s a subject for another day) but these kids, well, they were my homies. They dressed just like the kids in my HS (nice pants, no jeans, button-down or polo shirts, all with the same haircut) and they had the same mannerisms and smartass senses of humor. Some of them swayed while they concentrated on their exams, as Jews do in prayer. I remember that too. I hope they all did well… except for that one kid who wouldn’t keep his eyes on his own paper.

But back to Pat Benatar. I was thinking while I was jam-spreading why I liked her so much when I was never a big fan of any other woman singer. I think it’s because of her toughness. I wasn’t a tough kid at all, far from it. My mother used to tell me I was like a flower, that anyone could crush me. I think I wished I had a little Pat Benatar in me when I was that age. And by that age I mean so young that I originally thought Hell is For Children meant that she thought children should go to Hell. I was a little offended, I have to say.

Oh yeah, and the songs. What great songs, they still stand up even now. If you’re wondering what my favorite album of 1981 was, that, of course, was The Police’s Ghost in the Machine. If you’re wondering what my Top 10 albums of the Oughts were, you’ll have to wait till Sunday… I still have some more baking to do.

Title comes from Mike Damone in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

People think Hit Me With Your Best Shot was Pat Benatar’s toughest song but I think it’s this one.