EB 298: Our Top 10 Favorite Albums Of All Time

[Music] welcome to ear biscuits the podcast where two lifelong friends talk about life for a long time i’m link and i’m rhett this week at the round table of dim lighting we are talking about our top 10 favorite albums i’m excited about this because well this is what you would like to do every week if we could um this was a very difficult process for me we talked about this way more outside of this podcast than we should have just qualifying what went into this list you know it’s not the top 10 best albums of all time it’s not the top like best musical musically album this is like for me it was a combination of albums that are meaningful and albums that i just think are really good but i’m very like preemptively self-conscious about it because when i started looking at it i was just like man i don’t know how to put these in order i’ve got like more than 10 honorable mentions sure i feel self-conscious about my number one like there’s just lots of qualifiers coming in so this is because i can’t it’s a very difficult exercise i just asked me what my favorite food is of course i don’t know what your list is but you’ve told me what you just said about your number one i’m shocked that you’re self-conscious about your number one because i thought i knew what it would be and now i’m questioning that for me we don’t have to get into that really yeah yeah definitely definitely i thought i knew you i thought i knew you’re number one my number one is don’t it’s good i have to say it’s gonna be you’re gonna be like i think you’re gonna be like really i think that’s what you’re gonna say well okay because because i literally said that to myself when it got done this was an easy process for me because it’s something that i did like two years ago when i maybe i don’t know when i started my record collection but when i started collecting physical vinyl albums uh the way that i did that was the albums that were my favorite over the course of my life and really the criteria was what albums like complete artistic releases that are works from a particular point in time i don’t know if you know what an album is but that’s my definition uh that meant something to me that were very meaningful to me i mean the the thing with both of us is you know it at at our experience in our 40s how old are you are you 44 yet uh i’m working 43. we we both experienced albums growing up i mean we listened to tapes then we listened to cds you know when an artist put out a complete work that was the main way besides the radio of course that we would experience what an artist wanted to put out it wasn’t single oriented and it was physical it wasn’t streaming and everything wasn’t at our fingertips so whatever you acquired it it had a way of it had a lot of potential meaning to you because it became an active physical repeatable part of your life in a limited pool depending on what your music budget was of of of how much how many albums you could buy and that was the only way that you could enjoy me like you said it was the only way you could really enjoy music outside of the radio was you had the tape you had the record and obviously we’ve completely transitioned into a single this you know music streaming has just turned this into a just a singles industry um but there’s a bias towards albums for us for us that will never go away because the majority of our life we experienced our life through albums and i mean for me there were many i you know i i we both love music so much i know it’s you know sometimes i try to like maybe it’s we’ve talked about the fact that you perceive that i kind of like i got the corner on being a music lover but i really acknowledge but no but this is something that has been in your mind your entire life when you found out that emmy your stepsister liked music you thought that you couldn’t like music so you’ve seen music as a thing that has to be like possessed yeah by you personally but i don’t actually see it that way and that’s what i’m acknowledging that music has been a huge part of both of our lives in our friendship i think you’ll see from my list that like you’ve had an absolute you’ve had a tremendous impact on my music taste and i’m excited to talk about that i’m also excited to have some visual aids here i got i’m gonna show i brought in some albums now of course we never bought albums we bought tapes then we bought cds but now i’m going back and buying albums because i don’t have my tapes well actually i do still have a lot of my cds yeah and i and i have fully and you know i still value the album but i’m not a i’m not a collector it’s not in my personality to collect things right so i’ve actually had to resist because what is in my personality is to get interested in things and to go through phases and i’ve actually had to hold myself back and make a definitive decision that you’re not going to be that guy who gets a record player and gets a you’ve got too many things already so don’t don’t do that don’t get a really nice record player and start collecting albums so i’m never going to do it so and now you can have that i’m so yeah it is an active hobby of mine and maybe that maybe that’s the only difference we can point to but some putting together my top ten list was really easy for me but again the the there is some overlap in my list between what would be my favorite albums and what i believe or the the best albums that i like of all time there might be a few that would overlap and that that maybe that’s different for you and how you put your album uh list together i’ll say up front and there’s some there’s some definitively bad music on my on my in my title yeah i got some of that too because it meant something to me at the time and i will be showing the records so if you’re for for the video viewing uh v well i guess that’s the viewer out there if you if you’re watching on the youtube channel um okay so we’ll get into that in just one second do want to let you know that you know you’re listening to a podcast which means that you might listen to other podcasts and you’re listening to podcasts that have us on them which may mean that you want to listen to other podcasts that have us on them well you know what we are on a hot dog is a sandwich the episode that i made a guest appearance on talking about my favorite regional barbecue that is out right now hot dog is a sandwich is the mythical kitchen podcast hosted by josh and nicole over the mythical kitchen you slang in some hot takes over there i haven’t listened to it yet yeah strong hot takes with maybe there’s some mustard i don’t know uh and then link is gonna be on the next episode talking about uh picky eaters because you know i know it’s just a coincidence that he has i know on that particular episode plugged into that world let’s get into it man let’s let’s let me hear your number 10. i want should i go first i think you should go first because i know what my number one is and i’m not self-conscious about it and that would be a better ending okay um number 10 is 311 i’m so glad you did this the 311 album self-titled 1995. what what we called their blue album right i think it was their third album uh yeah it was the one that got it it was the one that people cared about uh okay and this is on the list uh well can i ask is it on your list it is not on my list but it should have been okay so the reason that this is on my list is very meaningful because this was 1995 we had not two basically right around the same time that we started the wax paper dogs we were beginning to write music i was learning how to play the guitar again we told the story before that when we started the band we were literally doing things like wearing cowboy hats and white t-shirts tucked into jeans and boots and singing together not in harmony two melodies yeah i can see clearly now the rain is gone whatever the actual name of that song is we think that’s that’s how we country roads by john denver and then that’s a different song but we were interested in other kinds of music we just couldn’t play it or sing it 311 comes out and i remember literally being in the back of the church van going on a trip somewhere and listening to 311 on my headphones and trying to teach myself how to play drums while listening to 311 which incidentally i figured out how to do the keep the hi-hat rhythm not that i’m a drummer while listening to 311 but it was really it was influencing the way that we thought about music and also i think if you if you could unearth some of those wax paper dog song we’ve only found one um you would see that we weren’t doing a great job of emulating what they were doing but it was just like it was the reason that we had bleached hair and shaved heads and earrings and big jeans oh yeah was what they were doing we changed a lot and then some some know that we have always been down down if i ever didn’t thank you then just let me do it now this is what i could not do i couldn’t give you one lyric from this album so that’s down that was a song that was on the radio and it just blew my it was a hybridization i mean so much of what it was truly innovative a mythical approach to things not just food but obviously food has been how we like to hybridize things and uh maybe 311 deserves a little bit of credit because uh that’s why we were we had the confidence to shift it’s like hey we like rap we can do it on our our like distorted guitar terms we can but i will say just quickly definitively this i’ll do this at the end of every one of these it does not hold up i i’ve tried to i’ve tried to listen to it with my kids i’ve done that with every single one of these albums and i’ll especially shepherd because me and shepherd share a lot of musical taste and it just it doesn’t there’s a couple of good songs and then a lot of like what is happening here and why is he saying that what he’s saying it was 1995 when you could say anything in a song lyrics it just as long as it was words it was okay yeah so give him a little grace there but it just it doesn’t hold up musically in my opinion but it for the time and what it meant to me it’s on the list it can be cringy especially with like i’m some people may level some sort of reggae approaching there’s definitely some appropriations happening there okay i’m gonna give you my number 10 which this is so meaningful to me it had to be on the list because it is the first album that i ever purchased of course i purchased it on tape in 1988 after going over to your house and seeing that you had his previous albums and hey as a 10 year old there’s nothing better than like really silly funny songs and not only is it making my top 10 list for being the first tape i ever owned i still have it weirdo yankovic even worse this is the i’m i kept the tape all these years since i was 10 years old look at this does it have any notes inside and the liner notes of course the the album art is um weird al yankovic uh impersonating michael jackson in his bad uh era and i don’t i’m not referring to anything that came out about him later i’m talking about uh his album called bad um yeah because the first album that i ever bought had buckles all over it zippers okay actually his head’s weird outs had buckles all over it and i guess that was the joke i never got that until now it’s not zippers it’s buckles i never saw that i i really regret not bringing this in and having weirdos sign it when he was on our show but it you know uh it had fat on it it had stuck in a closet with vanna white i don’t remember many of these songs i didn’t listen to it that much i just listened to fat a lot because that was the single well you’re going to be surprised because you know my first weird album that i ever bought was weirdo in 3d and it’s not in my top 10. and the only reason it’s on my honorable mentions the only reason i didn’t put it in my top 10 is because i just categorize weird out in a different place as because because it’s parody music and it means a lot to me and it helped influence the way that we think about music and the fact that we do comedy music so it probably should be on my top ten but for some reason it just felt like because listen i want you to be a little and you want my weird out that’s cool he’s like so he may so weird al in 3d made my honorable mentions but not my top ten give me a number nine um number nine i’m assuming that this artist is on your list but probably not this album number nine for me is john mayer’s continuum okay um now let me be clear this phase so this is 2006 i wasn’t into john mayer in the room for squares right me neither uh continuum was my like all of a sudden i just was like this guy is doing something that i absolutely love musically now i actually prefer the next phase of john mayer’s music yeah uh paradise valley valley that’s like those like three sort of kind of country albums that’s the john mayer that’s my favorite even more so than the latest john mayer which i would still love but the album itself that is uh for me is a musical masterpiece and i can listen to it at any time except for that one jimi hendrix cover like uh bold is love honestly i’m like i lose a little interest okay well yeah i’m not okay that’s not everything it’s a little too blue but everything yeah i mean i’m pretty sure it was nominated for album of the year uh but it didn’t win the grammy but it was i mean waiting on the world to change uh not not my favorite song belief belief is an interesting song to listen to because our beliefs have changed since we first they were starting to change when we started to when when that came out but they’ve completely changed now it’s yeah i think about that line uh belief is beautiful armor but it makes for the heaviest sword like punching underwater you never can’t hit what you’re trying for right yeah i mean he’s got a he’s got a way with words you know he’s going to show up on my list so i’m going to uh i’m going to step back on this one but it is a good vultures is my favorite song on it well it’s just it’s a you know a lot of the things that made my list are things that when i listen to them it’s you know how every once in a while you see a movie and you’re like this changes things for me in the way that i think about movies yeah and again as an adult it was kind of difficult it was easy to do that as a kid and some of the albums on this list changed the way i thought about music like that’s why 311 made the list but for me this was like i haven’t really been listening to anything but country and rap for most like growing up a lot you know yeah and and and all of a sudden it was like this is like blues rock i don’t know how i would even categorize it but all of a sudden i’m on board you know yeah and i’ve kind of been on that train for a while um all right i’ll talk about my number eight but first let’s promote some merch you got a nice looking shirt on uh outlook mythical you know it’s like a magic eight ball you want to make your life better do you want to see everything or the lens of mythicality well you can make some personal changes in your life and when you or you can just short circuit that and just buy a t-shirt at mythical.com when you shake it gives you a new answer yeah ask a question uh should you buy this t-shirt outlook mythical go to mythical.com rep your boys all right my number nine is right here for every man by jackson brown released in 1973 this is his uh second album and then i mean this is his parents house on the cover of this thing it’s like this uh this grotto looking situation then when you pull out the album sleeve he’s gone he’s gone i know you love jackson brown jackson brown jackson brown is on my honorable mentions but it didn’t did not make my uh did not make my top 10. there’s famous people all over this album you got you got bonnie rate you’ve got you got some eagles playing in here he co-wrote take it easy with glen frye and released it on this album the the eagles also released that song on their debut album and that’s that’s the version that everybody knows but this album really flows man it’s such a good album from start to finish but the reason why this is on my list is because when i was working at ibm uh as an industrial engineer i’m i was friends with another guy who we co-op together and then we both got full-time jobs and he became kind we connected over music and he introduced me to a lot of music he was like my musical sherpa if you met him you only met this guy in passing matt hungate i don’t know if the name rings a bell for you but shout out to matt hungate we have fallen out of touch and man i just i owe you so much for all the music that you introduced me to and we would connect over and this was we would talk about this album what the songs meant and it’s so this is a combination of this could potentially be in one of my favorite albums even now i mean it’s a it’s it’s just an amazing experience i like i just the vibe of it is great and of course jackson brown has it’s is such a good songwriter the dude you look is layers and layers of what you can discover from from this guy and one of the things he’d like to do what you did on this album is he had these songs that had this really pronounced innuendo redneck friend the one on this album elton john played piano on that but what’s the one about uh his hand uh that’s not on rosie rosie so anyway like because because you know my father-in-law introduced me to jackson brown and he would play that song and he would be like what do you think this is about it’s like it’s like a test and then if the answer was well this this song is about masturbation uh i didn’t want the conversation to end in that way but no i would put jackson brown on my top 10 best artists of all favorite artists without a doubt he’s he’s so good you can still go out and see him you know what around here my wife was at the the largo uh for the they had like a bluegrass thing like the guy i don’t know the guy from the uh i know you know that old that bluegrass band was doing like a a weekly thing and then all of a sudden jackson brown comes out and not cool on you know it’s like a crowd of like 200 250 people and Jessie’s a huge fan so i was mad that i didn’t go that night that won’t prop up but it’s it’s cool to have somebody in your life that introduces you to new music and you know not having an older brother your older brother was that for for me and for you in a lot of ways especially when it came to the gangsta rap of the late 80s what’s your number eight um my number eight is southeastern by jason isbell okay 2013. now jason isabelle is probably my favorite artist currently making music uh i think he as john mayer said is the best lyricist of our age uh he said that yeah he said jason isabelle is the best lyricist of our age i heard it the first time and uh i think i without a doubt i agree with that like if you just listen to the things that this man says in his music no one else is doing it now in musically i think it’s great as well i love watching him i love seeing him in concert but so it was difficult to just narrow it down to one album but you have to so southeastern and then something more than free are like sort of like representing the new era when he he left the drive by well he was always kind of doing his own thing with the 400 unit which is his band but he was also in the drive by truckers and i don’t know exactly the timeline i was not a fan of the drive-by truckers at all musically a little too rocky but then the story goes that he basically kind of sobered up and got got himself straight and then started making this music uh starting with southeastern being the first album kind of after that time and so this album is like intensely personal and it’s just i mean i can just go back to this i mean and jason isabelle is a family favorite so some of the ones on this list one of the reasons is because every single person in my family loves to listen to this music and so this music will be playing in our house all the time so jason isabel’s playing in the house all the time um but yeah if you haven’t familiarized yourself with what’s in now he won i can’t remember which album he won a grammy freak it was southeastern for best americana album which is a sore spot for me at least and probably for jason as well because i think the easiest way for me to sum it up is what he’s doing is too good for country music what he’s doing is too good for nashville now he also is pretty outspoken and his politics are not really in line with what most country music is but he got he gets categorized as amer americana he’s making country music he’s just making really really really good soulful introspective thoughtful meaningful country music and uh southeastern number eight boy this is going to be a really good one-two punch with my number eight um you texted me one day i was at home it was a saturday morning i was just putting around the house and you said you got to listen to this album i didn’t realize that like weeks earlier we had actually gone to amoeba record store i’m pretty sure it was me and you and we had seen this album okay yep and then i went back home and i didn’t ever listen to it and i don’t know if that’s what prompted you to listen to it uh seeing it and discussing the album cover but when you texted me this album i immediately started playing it right there and i just i was standing behind my couch and listening on my speakers and i had like it was almost like as the most spiritual like a purely musical experience can be like i can’t i can’t remember being so floored by an artist in a particular album ever i’m surprised this is your number eight yeah because i’m definitely building it up but i was i know what you’re gonna i was absolutely floored from from the first like note that he sung and then all the way through the album as an entire experience it was what i was always hoping to find and becoming convinced that it would never exist because of course it’s an idea that people might have to try to do this type of thing i’m talking about sturgill simpson y’all all right this is his second album meta modern sounds and country music you can you can see why we’re drawn to the album cover because it’s got it’s got this mixture of um uh astral projection like cosmos superimposed with old uh portraiture well but you know you know the the real story of how we got introduced both to sturgill simpson and jason is belt shout out to matt harmon oh you think he did that i i know for a fact that matt sent me a text um and was like and both sergil simpson and jason isabel were recommended in the text and i had never heard of either one of them so actually matt harmon has done a lot for you know you’re talking about math he’s a sharp i guess you got to be named you got to be a mat yeah but uh he’s done a lot for me now he’s got some recommendations that i don’t always i’m like okay now i see where our taste is he goes into this genre deeper and uh but but sturgeon and jason this is my pick this is my picture i’m talking about matt matt has done a lot for me musically turtles all the way down is the um i mean the the main single you might remember but you know it’s at first i was like this guy is channeling wayland’s vocals and merle sensibility with some george jones uh inflection like i don’t know it just brought together everything i loved about classic country into an album where he had things to say and he had an experience that he wanted to convey he was talking about experiences he’s had and conclusions he’s come to but then he presented it sonically in a way that takes you on a journey and this so this is another one of those places that overlaps with one of my this is my favorite three you’re number three so i need to talk a little bit more about it before you take it off the table because you’re taking one of my top three out so it is your oh you’re not going to come back to it yeah we don’t yeah let’s see if we have crossover we talk just like when we do movies you talk about it at that moment hopefully you won’t take my number one uh so yeah i can see this being your number three again if this was my favorite albums i think it would be higher now again but not most meaningful i am a bigger fan of the body of work of jason isbell than i am of sergio simpson i just connect more with with jason’s music on a uh on a more consistent level with everything that he does sturgill goes into the bluegrass stuff which i’m kind of like i kind of just tolerated i’m not a huge fan of bluegrass but is this album this album is a perfect album and the fact the subject matter that he is willing to take on again i think one of the reasons i’m drawn to to sturgill and to jason and i don’t have anybody except maybe some old people that we’ll talk about in terms of people making country music today i don’t want to hear you talk about a tractor or your beer or your friday night like that kind of i get it and i respect it but that’s not what i am interested in hearing people sing about it because that’s what people are all singing about on the radio everybody’s doing the same songs over and over again these guys are talking about real stuff i mean sturgel’s talking about psychedelic drug experiences and he’s putting it into a perfect country song it’s wild and he’s also talking about questioning the foundations of reality and your the faith and the worldview that you were brought up with i mean you know i’m saying so i think that it’s just it was bold and it was as far it was as authentic of a throwback as you can be coupled with as innovative as a message as you can have you put those two things together you get a number three you get number three for me now this reminds me we’re not playing any of this music um i wish we could you know i if if we could solve that problem in an elegant way then you know i’d i’d be doing a listening party with britain a lot more i would be i would be coming up with music programming for you mythical beast um but we just can’t there’s no elegant solution that there are solutions but none of it’s coming together so what we’re doing for this is we’re respecting the opinions of our lawyers and we you know we want artists to benefit if you if you play their music and that’s really the crux of it so what we’re going to do is create a playlist of one track from each of these albums in the order that we’re presenting them to you on our spotify account the retin link account so we’ll tweet that out but if you go to the ret and link spotify account and then look at our playlist there there’s other playlists too but this would this will be one of them all right we’ll probably just pick like the biggest single you know from each one of those albums all right so number eight you’re number three sorry for stealing your thoughts this has got to be on your list i don’t know what number it is number seven dj jazzy jeff and the fresh prince he’s the dj i’m the rapper 1988. yeah here it is right here i’ve i found this record at like some some weird shop in highland park and i was like i got a guy i got to get it even though they’re charging like like 35 for this thing uh first thing i you know on the tape it’s it’s not quite as obvious but it’s it’s just jeff just jeff on the front you got to turn this thing over and with the tape you turn it over and i can’t remember exactly how you think you think will smith’s all about will smith well in his seminal album he’s not even on the freaking cover he starts with he’s like hey he’s the dj i’m the rapper now i think that this was so significant for both of us what number is it for you this is my number five okay so at least 17 88. so the reason that this is so significant for me is now we talked a little bit about like my brother introducing us to to rap and specifically gangsta rap and like nwa straight up out of compton that kind of thing yeah none of that made my list and one of the reasons is is it was too much for me at the time i loved it it was scandalous i had no idea what they were talking about but i had no idea what they were talking about i was a little white christian kid in the middle of bowie’s creek north carolina it don’t matter just don’t bite what i didn’t understand anything that they were talking about and they were rebelling against but the thing that will smith very very uh astutely understood is that he could make this and i don’t know what where his mind was at but what he ended up doing was he created something that kids of all shades all across america would be i remember when linwood campbell stood up in the bus on a field trip and wrapped parents just don’t understand word for word i was like that was my introduction i was like lynnwood what was that yeah i was like that was the coolest rap in the funniest rap and the most relatable rap that i’ve ever heard in my entire life it was fun it connected with a middle schooler it it had a sense of humor the entire album i mean you got nightmare on my street where it’s like this story about him him coming downstairs and freddy krueger’s watching letterman on his couch yeah and we and they were a duo you know what i’m saying yeah and i think that that connected with us as well in fact during that time so this is 88 is when we were inventing our rap alter ego and i was m.c skye and that was dj strawbeat and i have no clue what that means straw beat yeah i don’t know m c sky just meant i was tall and i was an emcee i wanted i wanted to be the dj because i don’t know i was just drawn to that role and you know what they gave him props on this album maybe i’ll get on the album cover if i’m the dj i mean that was so much for that dj djs were the center of hip hop and then over time it became about it became about the emcee but like smart mcs would always give their dc props and that’s why he’s on the front of this album yeah because i think will smith knew that he was this let’s talk about the sky the sky is the limit for this guy i mean look at him now i also i also find like this inspiration from the fact that he was a kid when he made this album there’s this crazy story of him going broke after experiencing the success and the touring of this and then he was completely broke when he tells the story of quincy jones giving him the opportunity to make make the fresh prince of bel-air you should google i don’t know what you would google but just google will smith tells the story of the fresh prince of bel-air you let him tell it it’s a great story on youtube um and and again is it so i haven’t been doing this with everything but this it doesn’t hold up okay i actually listened to it last night and uh it was so much of the time that it’s it’s it’s so cheesy it’s i mean it’s just so cheesy that our tastes have changed so much but hold on but let’s get some good you listen there’s some good tracks well but if you listen to straight outta compton now it still totally hits like i mean it’s it’s not every single one but yeah but you’re like yeah yeah like but this is interesting you’re kind of laughing at this when you go back you know but at the time it was it was the perfect recipe uh for for kids and ready rock c their beat boxer was considered part of the group back then but yeah i mean there’s a couple of like time to chill got a great sample yeah it’s really once he starts rapping that you’re like this is not this isn’t the way people rap anymore and it’s kind of hard to listen to it’s endearing but yeah it’s just nostalgic at this point but it was my number five because as a ten-year-old like having that little tape like dual tape deck where you’re recording stuff off the radio and when you do buy an album you you buy it wherever you can get it it’s like mom’s not going to take me all the way to raleigh to buy an album every weekend to buy tape i went to the tmart in anger with my grandma just to get some fried chicken and right at the they had tapes right at the counter and they had this tape and i bought it and i listened to that thing religiously and i memorized every single bit of it like i was just obsessed with it and it like it was i wanted to be them so badly at that time and that’s why we were we were writing wraps and we were like doing the talent show thing and and wrapping them on the playground it was all because of them and then i discovered when i think cole did he have the cd this was he yeah it might have been a tape i don’t think so um i was listening he was listening to it at his house and i realized his his tape or whatever it was had twice as many songs on it as mine yeah because there’s the the extended version that’s got like 20 songs or something no i had bought a bootleg tape from tmart and they weren’t they were so lazy they didn’t even put all the songs on it it was xeroxed like the cover was black and white okay yeah you got a boot it was like shady it was like dot matrix printed black and white cover like i just thought that’s what it was and i saw the real thing yeah but it does have a lot of how many songs does it have on it i don’t know a lot it doesn’t list them on the back because fresh prince takes up the whole thing okay it is two records what’s your number seven okay yeah i’m going backwards in my number seven this is the only record that i don’t own that maybe i need to buy because i mean it is my i’m putting it in my number seven this one’s a little tenuous but it doesn’t mean a lot to me from 1997 surfacing by sarah mclaughlin whoa [Laughter] i mean i know you know this well she’s like you know i love her and listen to but singles i got compilation i didn’t i couldn’t even have named the album what what song is that is your love is better than ice cream on that album no that’s that’s the next that’s a good song though this one’s got building a mystery sweet surrender and eddie i do believe i failed you yeah yeah you know it was great uh it’s it’s got i don’t know how well it holds up but i think it does it’s definitely like got this strong 90s vibe and you the production is very assertive in like this ethereal moody way that even though it came out in 1997 so we were you know freshman year leaving high school going off to college um by junior year i mean it was just a it was something it was an album that i kept going back to and did you get this like bmg music or something uh most likely yeah because that’s how but you liked it and i think you may have introduced me to it i love sarah because like you and greg love jewel and like these female singer songwriter types of that era what we we really said you know what we’re going we started eating that stuff up yeah um jewel pieces of you now that you said that that is a good album i don’t know that should be that should be on my list it’s not it’s such a delicate album but if you listen to it now which i actually recently did i listened to that song about adrian oh that’s sad and also you forget how the choices that artists would make the way that she’s sang it’s like nails on a chalkboard now like you won’t be able to take it if you listen i mean this you can definitely take and so by the time uh christy went away for the summer before our senior year and that’s when i we’re having a long distance relationship all summer and i was trying to figure out and go through my systems to like understand if we should be married if i wanted to propose to her and of course by the end of the summer i did like the day she got home i’ve told that story before of us getting engaged but this album i kept going back to it because emotionally it was where i was like it was just kind of like this it wasn’t about the lyrics as much as just the vibe of just it kind of had this aching sensation to it that i just wanted to sit there and listen to the entire album and just ache with missing christy and just feel it well she’s like this is what i kept going back to she’s the like the queen of melancholy i i tend to be pretty melancholy and i remember when when we were getting ready to move into the house in chapel hill and i was doing the drywall downstairs to like turn the basement into like a livable space and i did all the drywall myself uh-huh never will do that again but that drywall is multiple steps and i had a compilation that had sarah mclaughlin and tori amos and some other very like just some just some sad melancholy you know sit down there and like sand sand the seams on the uh probably really but yeah if i listen to it now it takes me back to laying on like i took a trip to wisconsin and i was like couch surfing and i remember sleeping on the floor and just putting this music on and just just concentrating all of my attention on missing christy and so now when i listen to this album it transports me back there and it’s that’s the experience i get and that’s that’s why it’s number seven because it’s that that moment of i’ve got a big decision to make and my heart already knows the answer my head’s really getting in the way and i so it’s actually a good reminder when i go back and like listen to this album that like i could be more in touch with my heart and uh and adopt enjoy myself a little bit a pet from a shelter [Laughter] my number six is billy joel innocent man 1983. this album is a musical masterpiece i think it goes without saying uh but for me this is you know that okay i’m six years old when this thing comes out i’m really getting into it when i’m like seven eight nine it was the sit in your room and sing with billy joel it was the first time that i’m like completely unself-consciously like just putting in the jam box and just singing so it’s like it’s just so good and first of all this was sort of the convergence for me i didn’t know by the way that he did all the parts he tracked all those vocals until like a couple months ago this was the convergence of mtv and having the music you remember the music video for that i remember the white t-shirts uptown girl it’s it’s you know the the whole album and again i didn’t understand enough about music to know that he had made a decision to move into this doo-wop 50s throwback place so in other words like you’ve got john mayer today in 2021 going back to kind of the 80s you know what i’m saying you go back 30 years or so well in in the 80s billy joel was going back 30 years to the 50s and bringing back this do up thing which i didn’t un i didn’t make the connection even though my parents had like frankie valley records and stuff that i would listen to i was just like i love what this guy is doing and he also has that he sort of sings with a little bit of a air you know he he’s got that like he has things with a little bit of an awesome battle with the clothes i’m not until available didn’t start the fire i mean i followed him into the fire okay and then after that is when i kind of stopped following him yeah but this i think this is just the definitive album for me in the way that it changed my relationship with music and that it became something that i would sit in my room and i would sing do you know what i’m saying like you you there there was some music at the time that i couldn’t really i couldn’t really sing along with in in not that i was sounding good when i was singing along with billy joel but it was just like this is it gets into your soul and you want to sing you want to dance have you gone back and listened to that album like in it start to finish yeah recently uh last year on a trip um road trip somewhere i was like let’s listen to this album that was one of my favorite albums as a kid start to finish and we did and like i knew that shepard would be into it and i would say that i didn’t immediately say to myself man i got to keep going back and listening to billy joel it wasn’t like now i continue to go back and listen to that album so i do now first of all it’s timeless music it was timeless when it came out it’s still timeless so it does hold up uh some of the songs do but i don’t know it’s just something it does i don’t connect with it in the same way that i that i used to and my kid in in shepherd will like listen to like shepherd still listens to elton john as an example like and he’s incorporated elton john into his cool songs playlist on spotify nice but he hasn’t incorporated maybe maybe piano man i think maybe is on that list but like he hasn’t gotten a lot of yeah a lot of billy joel in the on the list i’ll talk to him about it maybe it’d be better coming from uncle link not that he would ever ever calls me that can you get him to call me that no okay i can’t even get him call me dad uh so i’m at my number six this is gonna be where i bring in the fleet foxes and i’ve i’ve picked helplessness blues from 2011. oh look at that look at that cover boy that’s hipster boy look at that look at the back look at these hipsters right there even got father john misty playing the drums on this album what the crap yeah man for real right down there yeah that’s him in the corner i believe um so i was introduced to fleet fox’s uh keena grannis yeah you know start started out on youtube as a musician she covered uh the white the white hymnal song it’s i’m missing a word from the title i can’t remember it but that was on a previous album and i’m like this song is amazing why do i not know about this and like i discovered fleet foxes and then but this album is special to me because um when it came out in 2011 we were i was i was anticipating it because i just gotten into them and there’s nothing more thrilling than really getting into an artist that a has a body of work that you can get into or if they’re a current artist that they’re about to release a new album so it’s like i’m getting in and the wave is still crescendoing this album is is great yeah um from from from start to finish i can’t tell you the names of any of the songs i can’t tell you half of what he’s talking about but it’s it’s it evokes nature and it evokes uh on a unlike uh a gut level i is how i describe it and you know he’s he’s from seattle he’s um robin pecnold the guy who’s like basically writing these songs and and orchestrating all these harmonies and everything but for me i associate this with our our move to california i remember when this album came out we were filming commercial kings and we had shot the episode with chuck testa and then we had to get up the next morning and we had rental cars it was like me and you and daniel are like director and still good friend daniel strange he was in the back seat me and you were in the front seat we were talking about music this album had just come out i hadn’t had a chance to listen to it so my first experience of listening to this album was driving from ojai california on two-lane roads like winding roads through the mountains of california to try to get up to reno reno for the roller for the roller coaster and um so yeah just so you know the the chuck testa commercial and the roller kingdom commercial were both shot during the same like trip then four five days of each other yeah the same in the same five days but when we were driving it was like it kind of felt like you you put them you put your destination into google maps and then it sends you on this road that ends up being a private road that literally i felt we were driving through washes where the road would go down into whether i remember this when it was a flash flood like the stream would come across the the road and you would have to turn around if that happened and drive like four hours to go another route to get to where you were going but it was absolutely beautiful daniel got sick and had to go to sleep in the back seat because it was so the road was so windy but when i listened to this song yeah it already evokes nature but it evokes that imagery of driving through california we had just moved we were still even calling it temporary but this this sound is now associated to me with california because there’s so much nature that we’ve experienced here and i fleet foxes is always a part of that for me and um it really opened up that entire genre that is now like a bucket that i keep filling where like whether that’s you know going back to some bonivare or like really get into lord huron it it this this was the uh this is the watershed moment really this album and it that i can experience that drive that we had and we were being so creative and like there was so much of our future ahead of us and it was actually working we took a huge risk moving to california we were making a television show that we believed in and for the first time and it was so exciting so all of that is wrapped up in uh this album from me and puts it at number six yeah there’s a there it’s a it’s more of vibe yeah than it is uh an earnestness and a clarity which i think you’ll see once i get to my number one that like i i’m finding and seeing myself i love fleet foxes and lord huron and that vibe to listen to that music maybe more than anything besides like a jason isabel at this point but the cl the sort of the clarity and the earnestness of like what is being said and like you can understand the lyrics yeah as a value for me that i don’t that i think that i have underestimated until i put the list together right because this is for me this is a vibe and musically it’s like some of the best music that’s been made in the past 20 years but i didn’t put you know it’s not on the list because it feels like i can’t tell you what he’s talking about and yeah and i don’t know why that that’s how i interpret it and that that is a difference like for me it’s like having having a vibe and the melodies and definitely having a hook and definitely having especially if you’re throwing in harmonies uh then i’m done it’s like i’ll figure out what the what the message later taking a little bit of it or never a left turn um and again this is th this is the disclaimer of when i begin to get self-conscious about my list but i cannot and i had to put him at number five garth brooks garth brooks that’s the album self-titled 1989 is that so that’s his first album what’s on that so this is like it’s not no fences no so i couldn’t it got down to garth brooks and no fences and because no offenses is huge like friends in low places yeah garth brooks he was like mega star but i was trapped in that but but i looked at both both track lists and i was like which one did you really end up listening to the most and i think it’s garth brooks garth brooks it’s a little bit unpolished now first of all you know there’s a lot to say about garth brooks and chris gaines uh we won’t say anything about chris gaines but wow i never saw garth in concert and i understand that like oh he puts on an amazing show i don’t care it’s i i would we didn’t care we went to some shows but we didn’t care about i wouldn’t care about garth brooks concert i don’t care that he’s going to be like on a harness like is this slightly dad bod dude like going up a ladder and coming down on a harness i’m not shameless up here on this cable there’s a whole lot about garth brooks that is embarrassing to me and embarrassing to this day and i mean you’re not a fan of the man you’re a fan of the music well no and there’s this whole thing i don’t know if you’ve seen it you know uh oh i’ve seen we were on tom segura’s uh podcast i love what he’s and you know what he’s doing tomorrow’s like whole army has flooded all the garth brooks of social media with like theories about garth hiding bodies and murdering people because garth has this obviously somebody was getting him to do social media kind of feel to all his stuff anyway i find all that hilarious but garth is inclusive go go i i think he’s coming out i mean i think i saw him on a billboard talking about inclusivity and the lbgtq all that stuff yeah i don’t know about it i mean i don’t know anything about modern garth i think the way i said it is the way that garth is saying you know all that stuff if that’s true that’s true that’s awesome i think he’s four but i’m talking about the fact that growing up listening to country music that was on the radio and not really being a fan of anybody who was really doing anything currently and again some sometimes people come along and there’s this seminal moment where all of a sudden you’re like this is different this is being done on a different level now you go back and l i don’t go back and listen to any garth brooks mostly because he’s not on spotify i mean the dude’s not even on spotify you got to go to amazon and this is like relatively recent like just in the past few years you can listen to him on amazon unlimited music which i don’t i guess if i’m prime do i have i don’t know i’m not interested i don’t that’s not how i do it so he’s kind of held out so i don’t really listen to him my suspicion is you know garth has never been an incredible singer you know that’s not what he’s known for uh again i wasn’t impressed with the performance it’s just something about the time the place that i was at as a kid you loved it you know in 1989 i’m 12 years old you know i’ve been sitting in my room singing billy joel for years i’m ready to sing something else and i remember uh this isn’t on that album but there’s a dream is like a river that song which is no fences or one after i don’t know he made a bunch of stuff in the 90s and like i would be driving with my family and the song would come on and like my dad would be like right sing this one for us like literally like i’d be like in the back i’d be in the back seat singing for the family another dream is like a river like really trying to get it just right ever changing it as it flows you know and it’s like the dance is there’s just yeah the dance is a hard song to sing even for garth but it just it was just just you know it’s that timing of something that immediately you’re like find yourself thinking about these songs singing these songs on a regular basis there was an emotional quality to it yeah that had no one had really done in country country was about bar rooms and drinking and all of a sudden you got this guy who comes along and he’s like i’m going to talk about how this the life the life of a cowboy but from this introspective place and maybe people were doing it before that but i didn’t hear it until garth yeah his name was garth do you think it was a little more writerly i do think that yeah i i knew that you would have garth on your list man all right so my number five we’ve already talked about uh he’s a dj i’m the rapper which brings me to my number four well should i didn’t do my number four so we can keep it the pace to go because because we’ve also talked about my number three already okay so you’ve talked about my number four so i’ll just i’ll just um yeah give me your number give me your number four my number four now okay so we talked about this ahead of time so i don’t know i thought the plan was we were each gonna pick a merle haggard album right so this is my merle haggard album that i have chosen okay all right so one of the things that we we talked about the fact that we were not introduced to merle in album form we were introduced to merle through a compilation uh marlboro country my dad had which was literally an album that a cigarette company put out and it had a couple of merle songs on it i think okay from muskogee and rambling fever is what i remember maybe that’s not right i remember i wish a buck was still silver and so then we ended up getting murl albums but then making merle compilation albums which we talked about in the book of mythicality where i would sit there and like come up with like merle wall-to-wall wall-to-wall merle wall and so that’s how i’ve always experienced merle and he’s got so much music that even to this day when i go back and i look at an album that comes out in that era that’s my favorite era which is late 70s early 80s i’ll be like oh there’s like two songs on this album i don’t think i’ve ever heard right but so but i have made an effort in the past few years to be like okay spotify makes it easy i can just listen to the whole album yeah and so in my effort to narrow it down to what i think is my favorite merle album i waffled back and forth but i landed on 1979 serving 190 proof can’t argue with that one man that is i would agree that is his that is my favorite album of merle’s it’s a it’s a great album of course footlights is on that which we covered on on our our mythical society record and we we performed on tour uh with britain playing the yeah nailing the guitar solo um yeah i mean i i got more to say about merle i want to save it okay because it’s you know i it’s a higher number for me and i want it to be commensurate with that discussion since you stole my thunder for both of these now i’m giving you my number four which for me is continuum so i didn’t talk about it when you did because i didn’t know that’s what we were doing oh wow i chose continuum because uh when we it this is about family for me like when you’re talking about jason isabel and how your family all listens to him and is a fan of his because that’s what’s playing in the house for for us that’s definitely john mayer i mean we went you we went to the his show uh pre-pandemic at the forum and um coach you were there yeah and Britton was there but uh all of my family was there except for Lando because he really didn’t want no Lando was there and he fell asleep it’s like my whole family was there because we were all such big fans of i think my kids were there too john mayer i think at least one of them Jessie wasn’t there Jessie didn’t come yeah um going to that show represented how important like his music was to our entire family and then when we got there what we didn’t know was on that particular night it was like an anniversary of the release of continuum so he played the entire album from start to finish and that was the only night as far as i know that he did that on the entire tour even though he was playing the forum again the next night he didn’t do it again there either right so that was like a huge treat and it was something that we experienced as a family and then when we you know over the course of the pandemic he was doing his instagram live stream show current mood and lily and i especially connected over that and we would build our schedule around watching it and i we just connected so much with what he was doing and the fact that he was talking about his experience and connecting with people’s experience you know dealing with coronavirus and what that meant socially and emotionally uh mentally but yeah i had to pick this album and i put it at number four because it’s meant so much to me and lily’s relationship and uh really our entire family and so now when i go back to this album it not only takes me to that show but it takes me to our experience as a family going through uh quarantine and i kind of if i have my way i could i would bookend it with the cybrok album which kind of you know this is this is on the front side of the pandemic for us and then and it was something i was already passionate about but then on the back end he releases his new album and that’s something we got to experience too i had already recommended it my number four wow okay well i i get that i and if i was talking if we were talking just best music like from a musical standpoint that’s it that’s got to be top five um okay so we’ve already talked about my number three which was the meta modern sound coaching music search did you know that so then i need to talk about my number three yeah did you know that uh i didn’t i actually just saw it last night uh the stevie wonder had an album called modern sounds and country and western music so sturgill’s uh album ray charles yep ray charles yeah so uh it’s a reference yeah i didn’t know it was a reference to that i thought he just came up with it uh yeah i didn’t know about that album until like over the past year somebody was writing about it and i was i need to check it out yeah he’s he he plays it’s a country album that ray charles does that’s like critically acclaimed so we should both listen to it all right so my number three is not de la soul’s balloon mind state but i’m just making the point that in this slot this is the album i would pick as one of my favorites of all time but what i’m putting as my number three is a tribe called quest low end theory this is an amazing album it came out in 1991. cole had it and while we were listening to young mc and m.c hammer i would go over to his room and he would be listening to this and i bought it and i got obsessed with this album and i just feel venerated uh all these years later that like apparently i did have good taste because this is an absolute it holds a classic um i wouldn’t say that it holds up in every single way if i was being picky but like it’s an ab i mean it’s it it basically does and it’s it’s a classic musically to say anything negatively yeah there’s a couple of like there’s a couple of uh ways that they talk about things mostly mostly but may he rest in peace right yeah um the thing about the low end theory for me is we we were living history like this album came out cole bought it right then i heard it i went on and got it i became obsessed with it and now all these years later when there’s all these hip-hop documentaries coming out and analysis it people point to how important this excuse me i’m not i’m not getting emotional at this point i’m just literally getting choked up um people talk about how classic it is and we lived it i mean it wasn’t our experience i’d never been to new york city i’m i’m not a young black man and i never was and but it was it was a privilege to even be well outside of the circle of that experience as just some clueless white boy but i’m glad that i could say that i did connect with it now part of it at first was that it wasn’t explicit so i didn’t feel guilty about listening to it and memorizing it and wrapping it and it so it took the place of a dj jazzy jeff and the fresh prince in that way because i was older and i wasn’t going to be that guy anymore but so i could with my conscience intact i could i could really get into this album but it really was like that’s when i started started to understand how samples worked and how hip hop was constructed which was really it’s i’m still fascinated by it i think with the way that my brain works i’m more of a an editor and i don’t like to create something from nothing i like to create something from something and i think that’s why i have such a deep connection to hip-hop because that that’s how they did it they took what they had and they made it into something else and they made an absolute masterpiece and so now it’s again just the living the history of it and going back and being able to celebrate it it’s kind of like saying wow i was there for it at least in my own experience you know and it i don’t know it just it ends up meaning so much that i’m gonna pump that thing all the way up to um number three and it informs how i listen to music now because once you have an experience of discovering a classic album along with when it’s released you have this expectancy that like this this can happen again people are releasing albums all the time and so it’s like if to pimp a butterfly comes out and you’re listening to it before you people tell you that it’s an instant classic you’re part of a you’re part of the experience yeah so i i think because of how i experience low end theory now it is how i experience music in general with an expectancy to find those moments where um like i described with sturgeon simpson or the first time i listened to golden hour by casey musgraves that was like this this is going to be a part of my life forever yeah and i love that feeling and i give and that’s what this album means to me number three um that was an honorable mention didn’t make my list because i didn’t feel like i dug in is deep enough to for it to but it was that was the sort of the fuel for our uh talent show uh tribe called quest was yeah the fuel for our talent show performances that’s right my number two 1994 weezer oh the blue album uh again this is a this is very much middle-aged white guy of you yeah this is uh again i there’s that but there’s also again i think 94 was probably the year we started the band um yep and again like the way that they were thinking about music and it was it just felt so different than anything that already happened like you know nirvana nevermind is on my honorable mention it would never make my top ten yeah because it just didn’t feel like it was for me it felt like it was too rebellious for this little conservative christian little white boy in bowie’s creek yeah but weezer felt like okay yeah i can you take your car to work it’s like i’ve never surfed before but like i feel like this is this subject matter doesn’t seem like he had either right um embracing the nerdiness and the sense of humor it was very accessible to us and exciting for us in that way it was some it was simple yeah it was melodic and that’s what drew me to it it was melodic i i loved what they were they were doing with you know rhythmically on the guitars and then subject matter was it’s like i don’t quite understand my name is jonas like i don’t i don’t think i’ve ever you know i’m sure i could listen to it but like i don’t know exactly what’s happening here but like i i could write down what he’s saying and you know you know what i’m saying yeah you can just so there was a hear it there was a there’s a sort of an earnestness to rivers approach to writing lyrics but again not something i would have said before this list that like i end up kind of connecting with um but really it was musically what was happening and it felt like it was a little bit of a safe manageable rebellion in the midst of the where i was again we’re listening to sort of rap and country uh rap obviously felt like a rebellion but country felt like obviously garth brooks was a super super safe thing that like my dad could say i like that as well why don’t you why don’t you sing this one rhett but my dad’s not going to ask me to sing weezer in the backseat i’m just singing the sweater song song what is that what is that racket you know but as this as a southern kid in that setting who was beginning to play music and just bought himself this electric guitar sitting there and thinking like this feels like i could do it like i feel i can do a bar chord here and then here i think i’m weezer so so many kids who were starting bands at that time it begged thought they were weezer and thought that they could do what those guys did every once in a while i can kind of pick something fast you know so i just think it was so influential in what we were trying to do musically which again a lot of this translates to the way i think about my own music and songwriting you know what i’m saying which is which is like how does it translate into the way that i think about melody and i think about rhythm and not like i’m not saying like hey i’m working on a weezer album but at the time that was if i came to you with like this little riff i either had 311 or weezer in mind yeah i was ripping both of them off with a regular on a regular basis we never gave pinkerton a chance but i do think that the blue album holds up it it rocked my world when i found out again this is like two weeks ago that okay well i don’t i don’t have this album this is not on my list but okay but i am thinking about buying this album because it i’m now expanding it is a meaningful album to me for all the reasons that you said um what does the front of the album look like just from memory all four guys just standing on a blue background with their hands in certain positions like behind them remember anything about their shoes in my mind they’re all cut off cowboy at the bottom of the record but maybe i’m wrong about that you’re they’re cut off at the ankles okay yeah there’s a version and i couldn’t i i don’t think i could have told you that but i have no way of knowing because the thing that rocked my world was the existence of an album where you can see their shoes there is a version that if you want if you’re a collector it’s like an overseas version it’s the same exact album nothing’s different at all except the picture on the front you can see their shoes and let me tell you it was not it’s worse like something about cropping it at the ankles was brilliant well they all probably had on like converse all-stars no it was like it was more fuddy-duddy shoes it’s like the shoes weren’t cool and i don’t know if that’s the reason you guys cut your shoes off they were they were uncool and that made them cool but even they were was so somebody was somebody somebody figured out somebody was like your shoes aren’t on so uncool they’re cool they’re just so uncool that they we need to cut them off of them really actually uncool i would love to get one of those like that’s that’s the hazard of of being a record collector with my no you got the way that i think now i got to get that one my number two is released in 1991 rel i think it was released basically the same time as low end theory like there’s a whole there’s a whole thing about 1991 and the albums that were released that year like the classic albums uh i mean you knew i was gonna pick blood sugar sex magic by red hot chili peppers because you know from the moment like give it away came out on mtv and then and then under the bridge came out and david rogers performed it at our eighth grade talent show but he had to stop the tape abruptly before the like all the the backup singers came in because that would just be weird i’m done i’m done that’s it guys i i was i was obsessed with this album and it was it was it was so off limits like i mean i’m sure there’s there was parental advisory on it and it wasn’t that we didn’t listen to a bunch of rap that way but to listen to a rock album and to really get into the funk of it yeah because the only thing we could have on that list was sugar right you know we definitely couldn’t have sex or magic i think this is crazy i think this is the chili peppers fifth album definitely definitely their fourth but it was the first one we got into and then i i was i’ve been a dedicated fan ever since even though you you rip his lyrics his lyricism apart and i can’t argue with that i just again i love a vibe and i love a few incredible and this this this this means this is my 16 year old experience like there’s this forbidden world out there where you you’re covered in tattoos and you’re embracing sexuality and it all comes through bass guitar and funk and it references rap but it does it in this way that only a guy like rick rubin could bring together i mean it’s an absolute classic people people might argue that there are better chili pepper albums came after this but just the raw creativity that went into this thing these guys were kids i mean i went back and listen and and watched the documentary that um they went into harry houdini’s the house that he used to live in and they lived and recorded this whole album there and uh you know they were you you look at the documentary and they’re just kids just trying to push on their wieners coming off the streets of la and just going like going hard on instinct and if you want to just it’s it’s a it’s it just transports me to being 16. and i think that they they really if you take weezer 311 and you have a third ingredient to what we were trying to do as a band red hot chili peppers easily easily now we they were the most difficult to pull off so we never actually did it this was all you know i was i thought going into this that a red hot chili peppers album might be on my list and then i when i looked at him i started realizing that i had you don’t actually like you’re not actually a fan i had experienced red hot chili peppers in single form and i looked at this album and i was like man there’s probably like five or six songs on this album that i don’t even know if i’ve ever heard so i could i could never say that i experienced it as an album it was more like there’s like 10 songs from there like the 90s that are like i really really like and kind of influenced us but yeah it just wasn’t an album it wasn’t an album experience i mean as a as a fan to this day i don’t you know i i would put them definitely notches above what what weezer accomplished but you know i mean in terms of a harbinger for 90s alternative rock and everything that everything that came from that movement they were definitely on the on the they were ahead of that yeah but um i love it i play it in the house and really loudly sometimes and everybody just kind of leaves the room um okay my number one okay and by this point you know what my number one is so we can get into that well essentially you’re self-conscious actually i don’t i i i i feel like i don’t oh it’s got it’s got to be the merle album uh yeah i didn’t put again the reason i didn’t give that spot though even though merle is my all-time favorite artist is because again it was difficult to narrow down to an album yeah this is gonna be a head scratcher for you i think then you’ll be like oh okay i mean i don’t have a guess uh and again this is like asking me what my favorite food is and then it was kind of like process of elimination and this ended up being in number one so this is not a strong number one but i think my favorite album of all time for like all the reasons together is emotionalism ava brothers okay all right all right i did okay now all right let me let me hear you okay so first of all uh again it goes back to what i really value in music uh the avett brothers have an earnestness in their music that my honest assessment of where it has gone to in the past couple albums is that it’s actually gone beyond something that even i am into yeah like i don’t consider myself a fan of their most recent work too much like i had to let go because it got too earnest but this you know and they do they did some stuff really early on that was a little bit like all over the place musically they were figuring themselves out emotionalism uh represents for me the beginning of an era in which they had it kind of now this is pre rick rubin but it was like they had it all locked in in terms of what the sound was and what the message was and what the harmonies were i’m a big fan of them love seeing them live i’ve seen them live like on new year’s eve a few times they’re from north carolina my family has probably played more avett brothers music in the house than anybody else on this list um and again there is this sort of like window of time in which it’s like this is when they were really doing it but i remember it was actually greg our friend greg hartsfield who introduced us to the everett brothers and he did it with this album and the first song on emotionalism die die die die die which at the time you know it so you’re probably better remembering the exact lyrics but like nobody knows basically nobody knows what happens before like they phrase it in a funny way this basically nobody knows what happens after you die yeah but the way that they were talking about these existential issues in a way that there was this sort of reverence for this understanding of god but also this sort of bold questioning of certainty around those things which again this is i mean 2007 i was beginning to ask some of those questions and my faith was beginning to unravel even that long ago right um but i don’t know it’s just the the the heart for me it i’m i’m a huge you know i’m a musician myself so i definitely am a like when you talk about the different elements of something musically coming together that gets me excited but i think i’m more of a songwriter than i am a musician and so that’s that’s why i’m going to connect mostly on an emotional level with when i’m thinking about the songwriting when i’m thinking about the message behind it then if you can bring in a great packaging for that message that just makes it better and just something came together on this album a little banjo ain’t never heard that i just felt like i just felt like it was for me you know what i mean like this this is me kind of personified musically and they’re they’re from similar places as us they’re of a similar age they’re they went through similar phases too because you know had this really like hard heavy metal sort of like punk phase yeah like just as you know musically on their own not as they as the averett brothers just being brothers who had a band you know they were ecu and they were kind of doing that thing and then they kind of were like let’s go a little bit back to our roots and let’s when me and you sing harmonies that are serious harmonies or even most of our armies are stupid harmonies stupid songs like we end up we’ve been heavily influenced by the way that they approach that’s my favorite part is the production and like the blood harmony yeah i think was something that like it it did blow me away when i first heard it and i was like i absolutely love what they’ve done um the first in the first half of that album is great second half loses me a little bit because it’s like it gets a little aggressive well there’s so many songs on that album that towards the end it’s kind of like it fizzles out you guys were just kind of throwing demos on the first half oh i mean especially if you if because i love those harmonies so much it’s like it really does it didn’t make my list i think i’m overly influenced by it was a special time in our lives when it’s like they brought me back out to seeing shows too it’s like i wanted to see these guys they’re great and it was like oh yeah i should see other people yeah so but yeah it was an obsession at a certain point uh and i and that’s the reason why i own that record because it it it doesn’t mean something to me it’s an honorable mention i for my number one i had to put once i started to think about merle i was like i mean who are we kidding here and i know you agree with this that like he’s he means so much to us and to our friendship that uh i i had i had to put it on there um it we channeled our passion from music in high school into merle like we were so and i think it it it coalesced our friendship you know for sure because because we would we discovered it and then i remembered like my aunt vicki had albums i would borrow those we started going on when when you started driving and then i got my license we would go on excursions to find another one of his tapes that we hadn’t found yet and some i remember i remember sometimes i would i would come home with the tape and the fir and then i couldn’t wait to get home and call you and tell you i found a new merle album we there was no we had no way of finding out how many moral albums existed or what they were called there’s no like there were ways but we didn’t know any of them so i would just the only way was to go to a store and find it i remember calling you i found a new merle tape that i’ve never seen it’s a it’s and it’s a complete album it’s not a compilation it’s not a retread it’s called out among the stars and the cover looks horrible it’s like an illustration of him and then we listened to it and it was and you try and you’re trying to figure out where it fits in with in this in his body of work and i’m giving it to you so that you can add it to compilation tapes and you’re right we didn’t end up listening to the tapes we would transfer those to compilations and leave out the songs that we didn’t like so that we could listen for wall-to-wall meaning uh from the as long as a tape would allow we would cram three albums worth of songs on like one of those extend play right once you take out a few of the duds but at a certain point we did i mean i i eventually started collecting merle albums so that we could hang them on the wall and it was a representation and a continuation of the experience that we had in high school like i don’t even know if i understood that’s what i was doing when i was collecting those moral albums off of ebay and hanging them in every single studio that we’ve ever had including our office right now but yeah it’s my collection but it’s definitely it represents our friendship and something that became a permanent part of our identity i mean definitely our brand you know um but also who we are as people like we love merle so much that like i could get i can easily get emotional right now talking about it when he died i remember the meeting that we were in and i remember thinking am i going to have to walk out of this meeting and then like not walking out of the meeting and then saying okay i can compartmentalize this but it’s the it’s the musical focus of our friendship in a way that all of our experience with the wax paper dogs and i’m so glad that you like applied that filter to incorporating a number of albums into your list from that because it was so important and it’s it’s only overridden in our friendship by i think our moral experience where it was like it was just about the enjoyment it wasn’t it wasn’t even about what we were going to create it was about the experience of being together and we would talk about the experiences from the albums from the songs the fact that he chose to write about certain songs the album i picked is i’m always on a mountain when i fall i somehow i still have this tape now i remember that you your dad had this tape and then i got a copy of it because yeah he had that uh it has my favorite merle song which this was released in 1978 my favorite song is i’m always on a mount when i fall the title of the album too incidentally it’s it’s a song that he didn’t write which makes me feel weird about it being my favorite but it is what it is the production on this is the album you read about the album now and it didn’t do well it was one year later is when he released servant 190 proof and everybody that was like a renaissance for merle and but i listen to this and the the production and the subject matters that he talks about i mean this has the immigrant on it that’s i mean that’s relevant today uh all of these songs are so many of these songs are so good but like on the b side life of a rodeo cowboy and there ain’t no good chain gang are great but the best song of this album it’s been a great afternoon yeah i mean the fact that he’s he’s he’s got a radio hit out of a song where he’s talking about being hung over and the only way he can get over his hangover is to have an enthralling sexual encounter in the in the early afternoon and the celebration of that is something that was hilarious to us as conservative high schoolers it was it’s like he snuck things in that we were like what couldn’t show my i couldn’t let anybody know i was listening to chili peppers or uh if it was dr dre but he snuck it on the radio and talking about all this kind of stuff well and that’s that’s interesting because and then that’s just that’s essentially just racism at that point right the fact that yeah old white country dude you can talk about things that are pretty explicit but it was veiled language it was veiled but but you know but i mean not very you know yeah it was the fact that like yeah i can sit here and listen to this with my dad but you know if a guy’s gonna be rapping about his sexual exploits that’s uh that’s a different that’s off limits that was that was just part of the sort of the white culture that we were in could you have predicted that this was this is my picture i knew that i knew that would be your album okay okay because i for me it got down to uh that 790 improve in big city it was kind of like that that he was just doing so many amazing things at that time i think that was eight and uh so yeah i kind of again i was like i got to pick one and i went with uh you know 790 proof just because i was like i think that i have more favorite songs on this it made me feel bad that i didn’t put it in number one but again the re i stand by not putting it in number one i agree with everything that you just said but because there’s not margaret is my all-time favorite artist but it’s just i never really experienced the albums i would take him and make him do the compilations and so it just didn’t it didn’t come together oh my feelings don’t hurt um well this is like i know your station one of the things that kind of came clear to me as i was speaking of racism uh that that kind of came together for me as i was looking at this is i was like and again i actually it registered with me and then i made the decision to not go back and change it to try to present myself in a different light because i was i wanted it to be an honest assessment of what i’ve connected with over my life all 10 of my albums are from men and 9 out of 10 are from white men i’m a white man which might explain some of it um but to me it was this message of like hmm okay this is these are these are the albums that i’ve kind of connected with or have like influenced me and been meaningful or been my favorite musically again there was lots of different reasons that went into it and it’s you know you well you might ask yourself like okay well why isn’t lionel richie on the list lionel’s not on the list even though he would make my top 10 favorite artists he’s not on the list again because i experienced lionel in compilation and greatest hits and it wasn’t so much i would expect the albums when they came out because it just i wasn’t i i found lionel later found lionel in college but ultimately it to me it was just a little bit of a wake-up call it’s just like oh you know i’m kind of moving into your second half of life here as a middle-aged white man thinking about being more intentional about not just falling into the music that is obviously made for me by people like me and just being more intentional seeking seeking out uh thinking about the representation in my musical taste essentially it was a little bit of a a wake-up call for me i mean obviously i’ve been in a hip-hop for a long time and that made my honorable mentions and that kind of thing but it isn’t like something that i have been as conscious of as i would like to be yeah well i think because of the criteria of these are just like meaningful moments in in my past i think it is indicative of like having a narrower view like yeah i mean i was i was very narrow in how i approached music uh for for a long time i would only listen to one i was only into one genre in like middle school and high school you know like especially those times right as a kid but i mean for me now i think i’ve got a pretty diverse listening palette so but but that’s this list doesn’t represent that yeah i agree with that because it’s not it’s uh it’s it’s more about a timeline of experience for me but i would love to make uh um just favorite albums and i think that i think that that would come to come to bear in a in a good way on that but um before you give you a wreck just because you already had all this figured out with your your list i i want to just quickly run through ones that didn’t make the list that i still recommend as albums okay fuji’s the score oh yeah uh uh honorable mention is miseducation for me i didn’t put for obvious reasons i didn’t put michael jackson on the list but michael jackson’s thriller was obviously one of the most influential albums for me personally but yeah he’s disqualified himself all your favorite bands dolls uh awaken my love childish gambino one of my favorite like from the past like 10 years under the radar kershaw branches david bazan uh which if from a deconstruction standpoint i highly recommend it means a lot to me jackson brown jackson brown mark cohn mark cohn illinois sufjan stevens oh yeah uh and then i already talked about never mind nirvana low in theory tribe called quest was on my and then blood sugar sex magic was a was a those were the ones i had to move out of the top ten yeah i mean i don’t think my i don’t have any honorable mentions because that’s just i have so many favorite albums it’s just a different list for me the overlap is just so little that i’m not gonna do that and i’m also not going to make a recommendation because with this whole album yeah that’s what the whole thing was my recommendation is a reminder to go to the retin-link spotify and look at the playlist there that we’ve created so you can listen to some of this music and then you can drill down and like go to the album that that the song that we picked for the playlist is on if you want to listen to the whole album if you know how spotify works uh that is how it works so you can do that thanks for listening tell us um where you crossed over with us and where you diverge the power of music your biscuits to watch more ear biscuits click on the playlist on the right to watch the previous episode of your biscuits click on the playlist to the left and don’t forget to click on the circular icon to subscribe if you prefer to listen to this podcast it’s available on all your favorite podcast platforms thanks for being your mythical best