Winner and still champion
Sep. 5th, 2008 03:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurOne of the best things about getting the huge new iPod for my birthday is that it gives me carte blanche to rip our whole huge CD collection. But me being me, I'm going through it all, listening to each disc as I go and rating all the tracks. I don't actually tend to listen to albums much on the iPod: instead, I have three main playlists titled "Good", "Better" and "Creme de la Creme", based on how each track is rated. I leave the thing on shuffle, and pick which playlist I want depending on whether I'd prefer more variety or higher quality.
My musical tastes have gradually shifted over the years -- I do a lot more electronica and metal than I once did, following my fondness for kicky and loud music. But having inventoried something like 500 discs so far, I find that the head-and-shoulders Best Album of All Time in my book is still Between the Breaks... Live! by Stan Rogers. I mean, I am *very* strict about the Creme de la Creme list, but this one album has four tracks for it (Barrett's Privateers, The Mary Ellen Carter, The White Collar Holler and Rolling Down to Old Maui). The best album by one of the greatest musicians ever, still more powerful and beautiful than just about anything else out there.
(Just to drive home how eclectic my musical tastes are, my number-two album is Aqualung -- not nearly as pretty, but perhaps the best channeling of raw anger I've ever heard in music.)
So turning this into a good Friday conversation: do you have a favorite? I mean, the One Best Album Ever?
My musical tastes have gradually shifted over the years -- I do a lot more electronica and metal than I once did, following my fondness for kicky and loud music. But having inventoried something like 500 discs so far, I find that the head-and-shoulders Best Album of All Time in my book is still Between the Breaks... Live! by Stan Rogers. I mean, I am *very* strict about the Creme de la Creme list, but this one album has four tracks for it (Barrett's Privateers, The Mary Ellen Carter, The White Collar Holler and Rolling Down to Old Maui). The best album by one of the greatest musicians ever, still more powerful and beautiful than just about anything else out there.
(Just to drive home how eclectic my musical tastes are, my number-two album is Aqualung -- not nearly as pretty, but perhaps the best channeling of raw anger I've ever heard in music.)
So turning this into a good Friday conversation: do you have a favorite? I mean, the One Best Album Ever?
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Date: 2008-09-05 09:56 pm (UTC)Since it came out, I've considered Laurie Anderson's Strange Angels to be The One True Record Album. Occasionally, a new album will capture enough of my attention to make me wonder if it might be the new TOTRA. Probably the closest any came to supplanting Strange Angels was Cowboy Junkies' Lay It Down.
If I look at my iTunes library, though, and count how many songs on an album have star ratings, I got some different, and surprising, results.
I should mention that after I rip an album, I delete the songs I don't care for after a few listens. Just being in my iTunes collection means I think the song is worth listening to. My ratings range from three to five stars, and are applied to those that are well above that base threshold. I have some greatest hits albums that place in here, but I'm not counting them, since they skew the results a bit.
Looking at albums with the most star ratings gives:
The Phantom of the Opera (London Musical cast) soundtrack: 8
Great Big Sea's Something Beautiful: 5
Great Big Sea's The Hard and the Easy: 5
Eddie From Ohio's This Is Me: 5
Stan Roger's Fogarty's Cove: 4
Peter Gabriel's Shaking The Tree: 4
Indigo Girls' 4.5: 4