Category: Rush

Perfect Albums

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This post is a bit convoluted because it’s dealing with two related topics that each deserve their own post, but I’m lazy, so you’re getting one that’s probably going to just as long as the two posts would be collectively if written separately.

Perhaps I’m not as clever as I think I am.

Topic One

About 5 years ago, I published a post about an apparent consensus among 80s music professionals that Boston’s first, and self-titled, album and Def Leppard’s Pyromania were perfect albums.

Topic Two

I love listening to entire albums at once. By doing so, you see where a band is in their current development as artists. Listen to more than one, and you see their evolution (for better or worse). Additionally, concept albums can be fascinating even in pure isolation. Finally, if you’re in the mood for Maiden, all you want to hear is Maiden (or whatever band is infecting your brain at the time. If you’re

The Convoluted Mess

As of late, I’ve been listening to entire albums on my commutes to and from work, inspired in no small part by several recent deaths of musicians that meant a lot to me. On my worst day, my commute is 25 minutes, so longer albums are spread among a few back and forths. I began to think about perfect albums. Boston and Pyromania may have been consensus “perfect” albums to a particular set of people at a particular point in time, but whether an album is “perfect” is obviously subjective. So, my list will differ from yours (perhaps drastically), but the theme will remain relevant. I should also add that the implied definition of “perfect album” is that 1) there were no bad songs, and 2) the album was ground-breaking or stupendous in its artistry. While that definition may make for some interesting discussions, I want to use a definition that has more practical value, and also opens up the door to a larger number of albums, thus encouraging even more of those interesting discussions. Nevertheless, the definition should still meet the commonly understood meaning of “perfect.”

An album is perfect if there isn’t a single song on the album that you want to skip when listening to the album, regardless of whether even a single one of those songs is what you consider “great.”

To help appreciate the subtle shift in new definition, my favorite Night Ranger album is Seven Wishes because in the aggregate, that album has their best collection of music, but it’s not a perfect album. I’ll skip a couple of songs on that album that I don’t like. On the other hand, I never have any desire to skip a single song on their Big Life album. Big Life is perfect by this definition, but it’s still not a desert island necessity. If given a choice between the two albums, I’ll take the imperfect Seven Wishes and spend my remaining days marooned on that desert island listening to only part of it.

I mentioned above that I may want to listen to an entire album simply to hear where a bad was at the time, but if I’m listening for nothing but pure entertainment value, I’ll skip through the stinkers.

This definition certainly opens up the door to more perfect albums, but it’s still a very high standard to meet. Many albums come very close, but if you think it through, they fall short. Perhaps the best example of that is True Blue by Madonna. Yesterday, I listened to that album (minus one song) for the second time in less than a week. It’s so good that I had to hear it again, but I never liked, La Isla Bonita. It just doesn’t do it for me. The same can be said for Madonna’s Like a Virgin. It has my favorite Madonna song, Material Girl, but I find myself skipping a few songs.

I just want to say why Material Girl is my favorite Madonna song. It’s a bouncy, ditzy, simplistic song with a horrible message. Though the music video shows that the message is being delivered sarcastically, it’s still just silly, bubble gum pop. But somehow, within that context, when that chorus kicks in, it drives. How does she pull that off? You have to respect that.

Sticking with 80s pop for a little while longer, I love the Outfield’s first album, Play Deep, but Nervous Alibi sounds like a song that they added to the end of the album just to make sure side one and side two were about the same length. Switching to some harder stuff but staying in the 80s, I feel the same way about Inside on Van Halen’s 5150. 5150 is one of my favorite 80s albums, but it ain’t perfect. Inside is boring, repetitive, and clearly a song for them, not me. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I’m going to skip it every time. My favorite Cars album is imperfect. Obviously, my favorite album of all time, Duke by Genesis, is perfect no matter the definition you use, but Genesis’s self-titled album from 1983 falls short for the opposite reason as Play Deep and 5150: it’s first song, Mama. Though very popular even among merely casual Genesis fans, I never liked it. Every other song on that album receives my full attention, but it’s not perfect.

It seems almost unfair.

Bands with Multiple Perfect Albums

Not many artists have perfect albums, and even fewer have multiple perfect albums. Being that Rush and Fleetwood Mac (with Stevie and Lindsey) are my favorite bands of all time, they obviously have several perfect albums. In fact, it’d take far less time to tell you which of their albums are not perfect, so let’s skip them. There are a couple of artists that are high on my list of favorite bands, and they fall into this category. I think that Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast, Powerslave, and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son are perfect. Piece of Mind and Senjutsu are close, but no cigar.

Ozzy has two: Blizzard of Oz and The Ultimate Sin. As with Play Deep and 5150, many albums fall short of perfect because of the last song on the album. In sharp contrast, The Ultimate Sin ends powerfully with Shot in the Dark. It’s almost daring you to call it imperfect, then says, “Sike!”

No More Tears is oh so close, but it’s ultimately imperfect.

Supertramp’s Breakfast in America is perfect. Billy Joel’s Glass Houses and Yes’s 90125 are perfect, though not their best albums overall. Jefferson Airplane/Starship is one of my favorite bands, but they don’t have a perfect album, and that bugs me. I feel like I failed them.

Overall, I have a small amount of fun revisiting albums with this question in mind. Maybe you will too.

Or not, losers.

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31 Songs in 31 Days Challenge, Day 10: Favorite Song from the 80s #music @rushtheband #Rush

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It’s September, the start of a new month. Well, in mid-August, half a month too late, I came across one of those internet challenges. Being a music nut, I’m willing to take my chances with the data mining assholes and participate. For the month of September (plus October 1), I’m going to answer each of these with a blog post. Here’s the challenge:

Day 10: Favorite Song from the 80s

Being that it’s my favorite song in any genre from any decade, I have to go with this. Thankfully, I already was able to post about my other favorite band yesterday, so I don’t feel bad leaving them out here.

Unsurprisingly, I never want to be famous.

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31 Songs in 31 Days Challenge, Day 5: Song with a Color in It #music #Rush @rushtheband

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It’s September, the start of a new month. Well, in mid-August, half a month too late, I came across one of those internet challenges. Being a music nut, I’m willing to take my chances with the data mining assholes and participate. For the month of September (plus October 1), I’m going to answer each of these with a blog post. Here’s the challenge:

Day 5: Song with a Color in It

Recently, I saw a Rush cover band. Leading up to the concert, I told my two friends that also attended that I really wanted to hear music off of my favorite Rush album, Grace Under Pressure, and one of Rush’s more underrated albums (even by the band itself!), Presto. The band played The Enemy Within early in their first set, but in the second set, they played the worst song on Presto, Scars, followed immediately by the worst song on Grace Under Pressure (though neither are bad songs). Here’s the latter.

When you make a wish, try to be more specific than I was.

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Hate Always Beats Like/Love @Nickelback #Caturday #haters

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This is a Caturday post, but in the most roundabout way possible.

The other day, a music video hit my Facebook stream. It was a video I had never seen, and song I had never heard. The video was Nickelback’s This Afternoon. The video quickly arrives at a scene in which someone brings a band they’ve kidnapped to play at a party intending to prove that “the Nerd Brigade knows how to rock.” The organizer is disappointed to see that the band is Nickelback. This is a brilliant moment of self-awareness that’s lost on society today. No one seems to be able to laugh at themselves anymore, especially when it comes to politics and religion.

But that’s not my point.

This got me thinking, yet again, about how everyone hates Nickelback. There’s even been a “scientific study” done to prove this is the case. And yet, Nickelback was, as of January 25, 2017, the 11th Best-Selling Band In History. How do you explain the discrepancy? It’s simple: This is yet another example of the squeaky wheel getting the grease. A bit more formally, this is yet another example of the statistical fallacies people commit when analyzing data. In the YouTube generation, a single point of data is often used to extrapolate a broad rule. Confirmation bias also plays a factor, of course, and people don’t appreciate the fact that their specific search command loads the data. For example, if you Google “eating sauerkraut on ice cream,” you’ll find plenty of stories on it, and if you leave your blinders on, you’ll ignore the fact that almost all of those stories are reporting the same phenomenon originating from the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania region.

But again, I’m drifting from my point.

The truth is that Nickelback is, in fact, very popular (or at least was), and is probably still well loved by those that grew up with it (much my love of Rush, Fleetwood Mac, etc. doesn’t fade with time). So why is it that the only people you see in your streams are the haters? Consider this: How many of you (myself absolutely included) have criticized people for talking about home much they like CrossFit, veganism, or, well, Nickelback? Anytime someone does, they get blasted. There are countless social media posts asking which fan group is the most annoying of the bunch. That drives positive comments underground. On the other hand, we welcome the hatred people spew for just about anything. It’s probably seen as “edgy” or “raw.” It’s really just dickish. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t be allowed to be dickish. Here’s another example, and it’s the one example where hate is criticized.

As a free speech nut, I’m completely fine with you spewing your hate; I just have a problem with the weakness society has embraced allowing your hate to cause them to self-censor themselves. No one’s opinion is more entitled to be voiced than any other’s. The second we abandon that principle, everyone will be censored. You need support for that assertion? Look around you, America. It’s everywhere. But the fact that this phenomenon favors hate is a bit disturbing and explains how we get the impression that beloved things are largely hated.

Full disclosure: I shamelessly admit that I like (don’t love) Nickelback. It may appear that I’m trying to do the same thing, saying I like Nickelback because everyone else supposedly hates it, thus turning around the attempt to sound counter-culture on itself. However, I’ve often said that when asked about guilty pleasures. Nevertheless, Nickelback is not a guilty pleasure. I’m far from alone.

If you don’t like Nickelback (or anything else), that’s fine, but holding them up as a poster child for what’s wrong with music is stupid. If there’s something wrong with modern music, it’s a trend among all the bands, but there’s isn’t. Popular music is popular because it’s what people want to hear, and not all of it is as formulaic as is claimed. Take it from this old fogey: No one cares what the old people think. As a demographic, you don’t have a lot of disposable income, but even if you do, you aren’t spending it on new things. Don’t become your parents. Stop hating on what the young-uns want. You’ll be dead soon, and the only people left will be the young-uns. While you’re at it, stop basing your worldview on one video or article.

Nickelcat?

With that in mind, fuck you guys. I like cats, and I’ll post about it (and anything else) whenever I want. Your hate has no power over me.

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Musings on Game Design and Revisiting AD&D 1st Edition: My AD&D Playlist #DnD #RPG #ADnD #music

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Introduction to Each Post in This Series

On Friday (July 23, 2021), I mentioned that I was relearning AD&D 1st Edition (“1e“) with the intention of running it. As I read through the Player’s Handbook (“PHB“), certain mechanics or text will strike me as odd or surprising, but in either case worthy of discussion. In fact, the most surprising thing I’m experiencing is that I’m finding a lot more great ideas in 1e that we’ve since abandoned. I find myself asking, “Why?” As a result, I’ll be writing several posts over the next few weeks. I’m sure everything I’m thinking has been discussed before — sometimes be me — so perhaps my questions have been answered, and my concerns resolved, years ago. My experience with RPGs is relatively limited in scope, having played a small number of games, so I’m sure a lot of what I’m going to say has been incorporated into games I’ve never even heard of. (Some have certainly been addressed by future editions of D&D themselves.) Nevertheless, bringing this directed conversation to the public is new to me, so here it goes.

Posts in this series: | My Playlist | Campaign Settings and Pantheons | Languages | Level | “Dead Levels” | Division of Labor, Distance, and Time | Initiative | Combat Subsystems | Armor Class Ratings | Alignment and Reputation | The Feel of a School of Magic | Boring Magic Items | Ability Score Bonuses and Skill Rolls | The Problem with Democracies | Hitting More Frequently | Encounter Balance and Shooting Yourselves in the Feet |

That was a big build up. I hope this doesn’t disappoint. This post was written today (7/25), which means it’s actually the seventh post I wrote in the series. Why am I front-loading it? Because Sundays are always reserved for posts that celebrate other people’s thoughts, deeds, or work; something silly; some of the above; or all of the above. That, and not game theory, is what this post is about. You should expect the same tomorrow, as Mondays are reserved for mythology. So, consider the next two days sessions 0 and 0.5 if you will.

Like all of you, when I hear a song, it takes me back to the time I first heard it and/or listened to it the most. As a result, there are a lot of songs that bring me back to 1e that wouldn’t necessarily put high fantasy into your brain. Nevertheless, if I’m at the gaming table, I don’t want to hear the 1812 Overture, the Anvil of Crom, or even Sisters of the Moon (a later-discovered song) by one of my two favorite bands, Fleetwood Mac. No, these specific versions of these songs are what I want to hear. While gaming. Seriously.

  1. Limelight, Spirit of the Radio, and Closer to the Heart by Rush;
  2. Sweet Dreams and The One That You Love by Air Supply;
  3. While You See a Chance by Stevie Winwood;
  4. Sara, Monday Morning, and Say You Love Me, Not That Funny, Rhiannon (one of the strongest vocal performances I’ve ever heard), and Landslide by Fleetwood Mac;
  5. Literally anything off of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors album;
  6. Turn Your Love Around and Give Me the Night by George Benson;
  7. Goodbye Stranger, Take the Long Way Home, Fool’s Overture, and Babaji by Supertramp;
  8. Just Between You and Me and Sign of the Gypsy Queen by April Wine;
  9. Almost any song I can name by Triumph, but especially Magic Power and Fight the Good Fight;
  10. The Voice and Gemini Dream by the Moody Blues;
  11. Find Your Way Back and Jane by Jefferson Starship
  12. Ebony Eyes by Bob Welch;
  13. Don’t Fear the Reaper and Burning for You by Blue Oyster Cult;
  14. Babe and Best of Times by Styx;
  15. Lady by the Little River Band;
  16. Crazy Little Thing Called Love by Queen;
  17. Another Brick in the Wall Part 2 by Pink Floyd;
  18. Games People Play by the Alan Parsons Project;
  19. Refugee by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers;
  20. Almost every song from Foreigner’s album, Four;
  21. Almost every song from the Police’s album, Ghost in the Machine;
  22. Almost every song from Asia’s debut album, Asia;
  23. Point of No Return by Kansas;
  24. Hold on Loosely and Caught up in You by .38 Special;
  25. I’m Winning by Santana;
  26. Don’t Let Him Know by Prism;
  27. Switching to Glide/This Beat Goes On by the Kings;
  28. No Time to Lose by the Tarney/Spencer Band;
  29. On the Loose by SAGA;
  30. A Life of Illusion by Joe Walsh;
  31. My Girl (Gone, Gone, Gone) by Chilliwack;
  32. Take It on the Run by REO Speedwagon;
  33. American Pie by Don McLean;
  34. Blinded by the Light and For You by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band; and
  35. Tragedy by the Bee Gees

I’m sure I’m forgetting a few big ones. I’ll add them as I think of them.

There’s a surprising number of songs on this list released in 1981/1982, which is the last year I played until 2005. I wonder what it says about me that I have the strongest association with songs that were there at the very end before the Satanic Panic kicked my ass. Probably that I’m a sociopath. That would check out.

Just order some pizza and put that shit on continuous loop, and I’ll keep playing the entire weekend nonstop.

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Dungeons & Dragons is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast, LLC, who neither contributed to nor endorsed the contents of this post. (Okay, jackasses?)

My Five Favorite Albums . . . Really Five This Time @rushtheband @StevieNicks @LBuckingham @MickFleetwood @billyjoel @IronMaiden @PhilCollinsFeed @tonybanksmusic @officialmatm #music #Rush #FleetwoodMac #IronMaiden #BillyJoel #Genesis

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I’ve provided my favorite movies, bands, and songs, and now we reach the last in this series: My favorite five albums. This should be the easiest of the posts, so I shouldn’t be such a coward this time. You’ll get your five. Again, however, I’m going to give you my favorite albums by the bands I mentioned previously, but my absolute favorite album of all time isn’t from any of them. Despite my methodology, though, this could very well represent my actual, favorite five albums.

Grace Under Pressure, Rush

R.I.P., Professor.

This is an unusual choice for Rush fans, but in discussing it online with several other fans, I’m definitely not alone. I’m not going to go into this in detail, because it’s a personal matter. I’m simply going to make this vague statement: There was a moment in time when I truly became an independent person. For better or worse, this was a significant moment and a significant development, and Grace Under Pressure was part of my life during that moment of clarity. It’s tough to separate this album from that.

Rumors, Fleetwood Mac

If you’ve read the previous two posts, you knew this was coming. I was raised on this album. It belonged to my older brother, but I could listen to it whenever I wanted, and he bought it at a time when I finally had a choice of what music I heard. I had my own radio, so I could listen to which songs I heard on the radio, and from 1977 forward, I slowly started my modest collection of albums so I could listen to the music I wanted to hear when I wanted to hear it. Despite it not being mine, Rumors was the start of that.

Powerslave, Iron Maiden

As with GUP above, I think I’m making a choice that isn’t very popular among fans of the band. Yes, my favorite Iron Maiden song is on this album, but as with much of our attachment to art, this is about more than the art itself. This is about nostalgia. This was my first Iron Maiden album, and the music on it is solid from start to finish. I’m also a huge fan of the instrumental, Losfer Words, as well as the title track. I’ve spent many hours jamming to these songs on my guitar or bass (though I’ll never win an award for my playing).

The Stranger, Billy Joel

This album combines the positive qualities I’ve referenced throughout this series of posts. While the music is all from a specific genre, it’s diverse within that genre. Scenes from an Italian Restaurant is epic. It’s like an Iron Maiden or Rush song in that it has multiple movements, all lyrically tied together, yet clearly distinct from one another musically, producing one hell of an effect. The band has enough members in it to fully fill out the music. The instrumentation doesn’t include merely the traditional guitar, bass, keyboard, and drum set collection, but adds woodwinds and other percussion. Hell, there’s even an accordion in there. Joel is a native New Yorker. He grew up in the ultimate melting pot. This influenced how he collected personnel and wrote his music, and the Stranger is probably the best example of that from his discography. As far as I’m concerned, this was one of my favorite artists at his absolute peak.

My Favorite Album? Drum Roll, Please. Duke, Genesis

Once again, I admit that this is all subjective, but there’s a pseudo-objective reason why Duke is my favorite album. As Duke was being written, you could still say Genesis was going through a transitional phase after the departure of Peter Gabriel. This was their third album after Gabriel left, and second after Steve Hackett left, so Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford, and Tony Banks were still trying to figure out what they wanted to do, even having considered for a time writing only instrumentals going forward. After finally settling on six songs that comprised the Story of Albert, the band realized they needed more music to fill out the album. Each of the members wrote two more songs. The result was remarkable.

Because the earlier six songs were telling a common story, Duke was strongly coherent. The later six songs mixed things up a bit to keep the album from being monotonous, but those later six songs were still connected to the earlier six, both lyrically and musically. In other words, you had a strongly coherent album of spectacular songs with just enough variety to prevent you from getting bored. The songs themselves represented a stunning bridge between progressive rock and popular music.

Of course, you must like this kind of music for any of this to matter, but that’s why I admit that it’s still a subjective question. In fact, many Genesis fans hate Duke because it tries to be both things, and to them Duke represents to worst of both worlds. Obviously, I believe it represents the best of both worlds. I’ve occasionally said that I’d be happy to pay full price for a concert ticket where Genesis got back together and just played Duke from start to finish. I’d need nothing else.

Subjectively speaking, Duke is my favorite album of all time. YMMV.

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My Five Favorite Songs . . . Sort Of @rushtheband @StevieNicks @LBuckingham @MickFleetwood @billyjoel @IronMaiden @jumonsmapes #music #Rush #FleetwoodMac #IronMaiden #BillyJoel

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Are you kidding me? How am I supposed to do this? Bands were hard, and movies were harder, but songs are impossible. There are just too many deserving of high praise and to which I have a deep, personal connection for me to pick just five, but that’s been the thing for the past two posts. I guess I’ll have to give it a shot. While I have a clear favorite song, what I’m going to have to do is pick my favorite songs by some of my favorite bands. My sanity depends on it. There’s just no way to organize a list that large.

#1: Limelight, Rush

R.I.P., Professor.

As alluded to yesterday, my favorite song comes off of Moving Pictures, and it’s Limelight. I have no connection to the lyrics, as I haven’t even had 15 minutes of fame, but that music kills me every time. I’ve heard that Alex Lifeson believes this to be one of his most emotional solos. For what it’s worth, I agree.

Landslide, Fleetwood Mac

Simply beautiful. The version from Fleetwood Mac Live adds in Christine McVie’s keyboards to really fill out the music. I won that album as a middle school dance door prize. It was the second album I ever owned personally, and at the risk of shedding my cowardice, I’ll add that Stevie’s performance of Rhiannon on that live album was one of the most powerful vocal performances ever recorded.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Iron Maiden

Sometimes, white people just want to punch someone. Rime appeals to that instinct, but the lyrics are based on Coleridge’s classic poem of the same name, which certainly doesn’t endorse such behavior. The bass solo always amazed me, but I could probably say that about any of Steve Harris’s bass solos. Like progressive rock bands, Iron Maiden didn’t shy away from epic songs that would never get radio airplay. They wrote what needed to be written and took no short cuts. The result, as expected, was always phenomenal.

Summer Highland Falls, Billy Joel

My favorite Billy Joel song comes off Turnstiles, which isn’t his worst album, but isn’t his best. The album isn’t bad in my opinion — he’s my #4 artist of all time! — but not everything can be the Stranger, ya dig? (Oooo, foreshadowing!) Anyway, I love how the consummate piano player just sits down with his piano and pours out his heart. Sure, he lets the band in for a bit of it, but make no mistake: This is about a guy, his life, and his piano.

Number 5?

By now, you must be getting the picture. To avoid undercutting the concerns of my post on bands, I’m going to cop out yet a third time. No #5 for you!

Yeah, I’m a coward, but let’s do this one more time tomorrow. I promise you’ll get five entries.

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My Five Favorite Bands . . . Sort Of @rushtheband @StevieNicks @LBuckingham @MickFleetwood @billyjoel @IronMaiden @jumonsmapes #music #Rush #FleetwoodMac #IronMaiden #BillyJoel

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Following up from yesterday’s post on my five favorite movies (sort of), I give you my five favorite bands. As this is all subjective, I can’t really justify my view by any objective metric, but I’ll be damned if I won’t try. Music is my favorite art form, so this one should have been tougher, but it turned out to be a little easier.

#1: Rush (tie)

What’s wrong with the people that don’t like Rush? No modern band in history can say that each of its members (or even just three of them) are in the consensus top twenty, of both music professionals and fans, for their respective talents. Geddy Lee and Neil Peart are often seen as the best bass and drum players respectively in modern music, and Alex Lifeson, while never given a #1 ranking, is solidly in the consensus top twenty. The songwriting isn’t silly and formulaic unless it’s the time for that. You can’t help but like what you like, but at the very least, this band deserves your undying respect for their musicianship. I, on the other hand, love this band’s music. I discovered it, and notably what remains my favorite song (q.v.) by any band, in middle school. The music kept coming until relatively recently. Oddly enough, I never particularly liked Tom Sawyer, which was the first song I heard from them.

R.I.P., Professor.

#1: Fleetwood Mac (tie)

Not only does this band get points for talent and songwriting, but they also get some serious nostalgia points. I was raised on Rumors. The fact that they had five members, three of whom were emotionally troubled songwriters, allowed them to produce rich, varied music packed with heart.

Here’s an interesting anecdote. Stevie Nicks wasn’t even two miles from me when she came up with the title to her masterpiece, Silver Springs. At least, that’s what I want to believe. As the linked map shows, I lived in Silver Spring, MD at about two miles from the exit sign that caught her eye and resulted in the name of the song. Rumors came out February 4, 1977, which is almost to the day when we moved out of that house. That’s when my brother bought the Rumors album and Silver Springs started to get some radio airplay as the B-side for Go Your Own Way. This band’s new music kept me going all the way through college. As soon as I was old enough to buy my own albums, I started going backwards through time and learning their older stuff as well, though nothing beats what was produced by the classic band lineup from Rumors, et al.

I also want to re-quote something an author wrote about the Chain.

[C]obbled together by Buckingham at a time when certain people in the band weren’t even speaking to each other . . . “[t]he Chain” is a stark reminder that you’re forever tied to the people you love most, even while they’re betraying you. –Jillian Mapes, https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/stevie-nicks-in-33-songs/

Nothing sums up that song, that album, or my life better than that.

#3: Iron Maiden

I didn’t discover Maiden until freshman year at college, and they hit me like a ton of bricks. I was primarily a bass player, and Steve Harris is one of the best that’s ever picked up the instrument. Bruce Dickinson is no slouch with the microphone either. It’s not just the music, though. One of the handful of concerts I’ve attended was the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son tour in 1988 (not sure if it was the 7/24 or 8/7 show). Along with Pink Floyd’s Momentary Lapse of Reason tour (June 1 of that same year), I was floored by the visuals as well. These remain my two favorite concerts because of how those visuals added to the overall showmanship of the concerts. 1988 was a hell of a year for me, musically speaking at least.

#4: Billy Joel

For the longest time (yes, that’s a pun), Joel was my favorite artist. Sorry, Billy, but you’ve been demoted to #4. What a fall from grace (almost a pun), loser! Seriously though, this guy goes back farther than I can remember. Like the other entries on this list, he was top five the moment I heard his music, and he never left that list. He’s also the only headlining artist I’ve seen live twice. (I saw Black 47 in a small bar in Soho and then again at the Guinness Fleadh, 1999, but no repeats otherwise.) I saw him on the Bridge tour with my sister and then again decades later with my sister and her eldest son.

Number 5?

Sorry, but I’m going to cop out again. I can’t name a fifth band because then I’d be slamming the door on a bunch of bands I’d instinctively call “top 5.” I also won’t even provide an “honorable mentions” list (again) for fear of leaving some deserving bands off that one as well. I challenge you to do better. See if you can limit yourself to just five without feeling dirty.

The lesson here is that there are really just four at the top, and then a bunch of stuff … bunched together beyond that. Or I’m a coward.

To all these musicians, including the ones I didn’t mention, whose music I listen to repeatedly, I sincerely thank you. Technology make life livable; art makes life worth living.

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