...Most Anticipated Albums...

Top 10 albums in my lifetime that I anticipated the release of:
10 and 9 are tied…and not that monumental:

Nine Lives by Aerosmith. I was excited about this one, a lot, but I didn’t think it’d be awesome. It wasn’t awesome, but I did go out and buy it almost as soon as it came out to be honest. And the other is Bed by Juliana Hatfield. The first album I could get access to after Only Everything. However, by this time, I had no illusions that Bed would be better than Only Everything, it just wasn’t possible. So I was excited, but not as excited as my top 8:

8. New Adventures in Hi-Fi (Fall, 1996) – REM
Monster was the biggest turnaround album in my life – I didn’t like it at first in the fall of ’94 and it grew, by the summer of ’95, to be a powerful force in my summer. I still listen to it a lot, it has to be in my top 10 all time album rotations outside of Oasis & The Beatles. I am pretty pumped about the place it ended up having in my music memory. There wait felt like forever between Monster and Hi-Fi, and that was partially because I had a lot of stuff going on in my life from 94 to 95 – powerful moments and memories on both ends of the happy/sad spectrum.

But when Hi-Fi was released, the choice of the Patti Smith collaboration as the single made me very curious what the album was going to be all about. Heading out to the Holyoke Mall with Trav in his Pathfinder is my most memorable anecdote from grabbing this album, and listening it to a few times immediately got me way, way into it. The fact that it was recorded live, around the country in various stadiums and sound checks, is one of the more unique aspects and certainly helped it stand out in my own mind.

This album, with the exception of #1 on my list, is the only one I think could rival or beat its predecessor. Hi-Fi is aging very well, much better than almost all of REM’s albums, with the possible exception of Monster, but even Out of Time and Automatic have some odd appearances. Bottom line, I was pumped for Hi-Fi.

7. OK Computer (Summer, 1997) – Radiohead
I didn’t really listen to The Bends a ton – at least not before OK Computer came out. But in terms of advancement from Album 2 to Album 3, I don’t think anyone can argue that this was a monumental leap. Paranoid Android came out and it was a great song, and it def. got me excited to look into buying the album…I have a hard time remembering what else jarred me into complete “I NEED THIS” status, but maybe it was friends who heard it and told me it would change the way I think about music and musicians – and it did.

If this was a list of “Top 5 albums that I discussed more than any other albums in my life” it would be #1, with pretty much zero discussion, aside from #1 on this list as a possible close runner up.

6. Fairweather Johnson (Spring, 1996) – Hootie & The Blowfish
Wow. I remember painting my house with my dad in 1994, looking him in the eye and saying this, with 100% certitude: “Hootie’s Cracked Rear View is the best album of all time.” I thought I actually knew that. I thought I had that perspective. No question it was a big one more for me. Song after song was a hit.

Soundtrack of a summer or two – an album that is interwoven into memories of my friendships and good times in high school and even college.

I bought Fairweather Johnson, their follow up album to Cracked Rear View, through BMG Music Service, so it took a while for it to get to me. I listened so gosh darned much, and I wrote a lot of emails to Marc about what it may have meant to us in terms of its place in our musical historical context. I saw Hootie that spring in Columbia, SC, their hometown in a big free concert with my college friend Kirk. I was underwhelmed by the album over time, but that doesn’t diminish how much I couldn’t wait to hear it. Honeyscrew was one of those “always repeat when it’s finished” songs.

5. Beatles Anthology V. 2 (Fall, 1996)
As someone who got into the Beatles in December of 1992, the Winter of 1995 was the first time I was brought into the realm of “something new by the Beatles is coming out, and you can be a part of it” fever. By 1995 I had gone through buying as much Beatles vinyl I could, purchasing cassettes of Beatles albums, then moving on to gathering the entire catalogue on CD.

The miniseries that aired in November and December of 1995 was something I remember sitting in my dorm room at Coker College watching, on my little white TV (which was such a fixture in my entire life from the first days I have memory until about 1996). The miniseries was released in conjunction with CD’s that came out as well. I purchased the 2 disc Volume 1 I think through a CD Columbia House type CD club, and it was good, but nothing earth shattering.

However, the version of “Real Love” that I first heard in the Anthology Volume 2 miniseries was something that I couldn’t wait to get my hands on. This was pre napster, pre lala, pre itunes, pre anything. This was a time in our lives when we had to actually want to hear something, wait for it, hope to hear it on a radio, and buy the album. It was pretty legendary, and honestly could be a big reason why music doesn’t excite me anymore – there is no more anticipation.

When this album was finally released in the Spring of 1996, I wanted it immediately but couldn’t afford it and that pissed me off. Early in the 1996 school year, I remember vividly walking down to the UMass bus stop to take the PVTA to the Hampshire Mall to buy the album at Media Play. It was that important to me. The trip probably took 2.5-3 hours total, but I wouldn’t be denied. “Real Love” is one of those songs that always drives me back to this memory, but also really makes me feel like I have an honest to goodness connection to what it must have felt like to be waiting for Sgt. Pepper, post Revolver.

4. X&Y (Summer, 2005)
My brain goes directly to a memory of a new cell phone I had purchased which could utilize songs as ringtones – something new, remarkable, and exciting. A Rush of Blood to the Head was such an awesome album, and Coldplay had knocked its first 2 albums out of the park. In retrospect, I don’t think X&Y is as good as either of the first 2 albums, but Speed of Sound is as good as any song Coldplay has written.

I found Speed of Sound in the available catalogue of ringtones I could purchase, and I did. I remember loving when my phone rang, b/c it gave me a taste of what the whole song would sound like, and when the single was released, I was able to download it. I don’t remember where I purchased X&Y, it may have been digitally by that point, but I do remember very vividly wanting that album more than any album since the next two I’ll talk about.

As a side note, Coldplay is the band that comes to mind for me as the most painful and sad reminder that I don’t enjoy new music. They were the last “new” band that I connected with, felt moved by their music, and after listening to an album felt like they had more to offer. X&Y was the end of that road, and I hope not forever for me.

3. Be Here Now (Summer, 1997)
Without question, Oasis’ What’s The Story Morning Glory was THE album for me, in my life. THE album. I will always connect this album with a very specific January of ’96 night – home from Coker College, enjoying my time in the house on Green Street, in our room we called the Parlor, and playing this album over & over again. Every single song on Morning Glory connected to me – it was like the album was one of those monsters in Avatar that you jam your ponytail into. Once I was locked in, I was locked in.

I got a full 1.5 years out of this album before any hint of “maybe I’ve heard that song enough” started to pour in. D’You Know What I Mean was the first single, and it was a pretty big anthem for Oasis, and it led nicely into my anticipation of this album. I purchased this either 1 day or 2 days before a trip to Seattle with Trav, and this album was completely my soundtrack. I listened to it on my discman on the plane, and a few times in my parents house in Seattle.

The album itself was something I put on a very high pedestal, and a few of the songs like All Around the World, and Stand By Me are really terrific Oasis songs. They are songs my kids won’t understand or like, and I don’t really care. But the anticipation for this album was really overpowering. They clearly went downhill during and after this album, and the band wasn’t the same in my head or my heart – or on the charts – but they were & are the most important band to me in my lifetime.

2. HIStory (Summer, 1995) – Michael Jackson
I liked Black & White a lot. A LOT. I listened to that album A LOT. A LOT. I listened to it when it got too dark to play basketball with Neil Lansing, and we totally jammed out to it, as much as a few dorks could.

But as HIStory approached, I started to get monumentally fired up. I knew it would be an album that really mattered to me and it was. I wanted this album so badly that during my 40 minute lunch break I sprinted out of my job at MIJA working on an assembly line, drove the 10 minutes to the mall to pick up the CDs, then another 10 minutes back to work, during which I had no time or ability to actually listen to. I just wanted to hold the thing in my hands and know it was my own.

There were 3 or 4 songs on this that completely and totally were sealed into my “this is awesome” vault when I hear them on the radio or when they come up on my iPod’s shuffle setting. This album led to amazing things like Dance Parties and the enhancement of Michael as a larger than life figure, but for the purpose of this list, the single-day dedication I had to going out and getting this album as soon as possible really vaults it into my pantheon of most anticipated.

1. Mellon Collie & The Inifinite Sadness (Fall, 1995) – The Smashing Pumpkins
This appropriately titled album was a behemoth. A fixture for myself and Greg during our years at UMass together, and beyond. Every once in a while we still exchange notes about some of these songs, and how big they were. If you were friends with me during this time, it was a given that you had this album. This album is noteworthy in terms of anticipation in 3 parts:
a) Siamese Dream, the predecessor to Mellon Collie, set the bar so unreasonably high for SP, that I couldn’t even imagine an album living up to that potential.
b) I was living in Hartsville, SC the day this album came out, and I was missing all of my friends a lot. A huge amount. No band tied me together with my best friends like The Smashing Pumpkins did. I went with 2 of my friends, one of which was kicked out of school for too much drug use, the other is someone I still keep in touch with, but we drove to the Florence Mall and I bought this double disc set at BYE or one of those chains, maybe Strawberries. On the ride home, it was immediately a huge, huge pleasant surprise.
c) Going back to point (a), this album can easily be argued was better than the one before it. The anticipation I felt for it really was overwhelmed by the actual enjoyment I had listening to it. It is a remarkable album and a remarkable achievement, I think.

Something has to click for me in order for me to be excited about any album release, I don’t know what it will be, but I literally cannot imagine this happening again my life. I know it was a function of my age, and most of these albums fall within the same few year span, but this is just how it is.