Under the Radar

Picking an all-time favorite album is a difficult endeavor. I know, because I have spent the last three months mulling it over. I imagine it might be akin to choosing your favorite child, although I only have the one and can devote all my paternal lo

The reason why I would choose Bruce Springsteen and that live record in particular is because that was really the first adult music that I loved. We always had music playing in the house. I loved Sinéad O’Connor, and I loved Phil Collins, and I loved

I’m so uncomfortable when people ask me what my favorite anything is. I don’t think of myself as being a fair weather person, but I do think that as I grow and I change and I learn, that things become vastly different and more or less valuable to me

I was in high school when this record came out. I was buying punk rock records and SST records and trying to make sense of all these different bands that were being called “punk rock” that didn’t sound like the uniform sound of punk rock that a lot o

A River Ain’t Too Much to Love was the first of Bill Callahan’s music that I was ever exposed to, so it has always been imprinted on me as the most essential and indelible work of his career. The album led me chronologically backward to Red Apple Fal

I grew up on a steady diet of classic rock. My dad, who was a teenager in the ’70s, would tell me all about the times he was first in line to see The Rolling Stones, the night he saw John Lennon join Elton John on stage at Madison Square Garden, and

I am happy to have the opportunity to say it aloud as I think to myself often as such in my mind. It is The Future of What by Unwound. It is hard to describe how—but I get so excited just thinking about this album. Unwound for me is conceptually, int

From the very first listen, this album instantly sounded like an old friend. A comforting companion in a troubling year. Maybe that’s partially because the album is quite literally littered with old friends, like an Elliott Smith lyric or a repurpose

It wasn’t easy landing on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass as my all-time favorite album, especially when there’s no denying the impact of other favs like Shania Twain’s The Woman in Me and “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Bad Hair Day had on me as a musi

When Jessie Clavin was 17 and her sister Jennifer was 15, the sisters were typical teenagers feeling their first rushes of freedom outside of parental supervision—staying out late, going to shows, and generally experimenting with newfound independenc

I’d recently moved from my hometown and was spending all the money I’d saved working in a supermarket warehouse on CDs. In about two weeks, I’d come across [Madvillain’s] Madvillainy, [John Fahey’s] Blind Joe Death, Tower Recordings, Animal Collectiv

There are a few albums I come back to again and again, wanting to listen to after repeated exposure. Every time someone asks me about my “favorite album of all time” I find myself going through the usual impossible mental gymnastics that hurt my brai

Most of us recognize it without thinking twice: iconic flute whistle (or yodeling), wahh wahh wahh, and spaghetti guitar: the main motif in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly soundtrack. The 1966 Spaghetti Western film made millions of dollars, and made

“An album that starts with ‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,’” Tim Booth laughs, “it’s better than anything I’ve ever written or heard.” The frontman of James is referring to Patti Smith’s 1975 album Horses. He puts the album on religiou

When I was 13 my dad started dating a harp player who had recently traded in her pink mohawk for a smart, long auburn bob to get a job in the symphony orchestra. I was a socially awkward Star Trek loving book nerd with large glasses and hair that alw

There’s only one album that I would ever consider my favorite forsaking all others and that’s My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. It’s a nice comfortable thing having a favorite that you love so much—like a happy marriage. I never have to even engage my

Australian iconoclast Kirin J Callinan has a predilection for ’80s music and recently released an album of covers titled Return to Center. He picked Let’s Change the World with Music by Prefab Sprout as his favorite album. The English band led by Pad

I think I was about 12 or 13 when it came out, but I think I really got into it when I was about 14. I was sort of resistant to it for a little while, I think because it was a really successful record and I was sort of getting into my stage, you know

In the long and impressive discography of Beck albums, there are over 25 years of singular, genre-bending records to top anyone else’s personal top 10 list of favorite albums (1994’s Odelay or 2002’s Sea Change often spring to mind); but 2005’s Guero

I’m sure that I discovered this record when I was living in Olympia, Washington, going to college there and hanging out in a very immersive and inspiring punk and music scene and being a very enthusiastic and eager record collector. In the pre-Intern

Lil Green is unfortunately largely forgotten as far as pre-World War II blues singers go. Born in Mississippi before moving to Chicago, Green began her career singing in nightclubs. She’s most famous for recording a slew of tracks for Bluebird Record

Just over 10 years on from their debut, Vampire Weekend already feel like a relic from the Obama era. They emerged during a naively congratulatory moment in American history—when “post-racial America” seemed a realistic, if not, imminent reality—in w