Ten collections of late-20th-century music that summon desirable mood states

This post goes best with "perms" on dudes and an open enthusiasm for cocaine

With the obvious exception of those deprived of the ability to hear, all humans with access to music—including creating some when none can be provided—use it to enhance their lives. The right music is a mood-changer, a mind-expander, an experiential flavor-enhancer, a pharmaceutical-grade motivator, a stabilizer of listing emotional vessels, a relationship-cementer, and the perfect medium for transcribing memories that span decades and, when stitched together, are one way to try to interpret how each of us processes life. Et cetera. Even Hannibal Lecter could be moved nearly to tears by the right composition, even while appearing perfectly blasé about the blood on his face from having chewed another man’s face to shreds moments before.

In reflecting on how so much information, or at least audiovisual input, is now delivered to our brains in the form of discrete micronarratives—tweets and other social-media postings, cable-news attention-grabbers, speeches about who is and is not a civilization-reaming demon regarding their handling of COVID-19—I decided that everyone is like me and no longer listens to entire albums. (I’m calling all collections of songs produced contemporaneously and released as one unit “albums,” even those too recently born to have ever been etched onto vinyl; “CD” takes too long to type, and cassette tapes are somewhat passé.) Instead, ever since the option to easily copy fixed bits of existing music arose with the advent of those cassette tapes, most people have leaned toward assembling long playlists from scratch consisting of at most two or three songs by the same artist. And if you’re too lazy to go to the trouble of deciding exactly what morsels from the musical buffet will produce the most satisfying plate overall for your temporal lobes, Spotify will even do that for you.

In spending a lot more time trying to play music myself over the past two years than ever before, I have unconsciously trained myself to listen to the arrangement and chord progressions of songs that I don’t necessarily like but can still appreciate for their craftsmanship. In thus returning at times to a frame of mind that no longer demands that every song I choose to listen to either be a favorite or on the fast track to becoming one, I produced a list of ten studio albums that I long ago came to cherish consuming in their entirety, even if I haven’t done this often.

In some cases, this level of immersion happened as the album was still climbing the popular charts; in others, I was too young to really dig into the concept of anything longer than a song at the time the albums were released, or merely didn’t find myself captivated by them for a few years. But with each of the collections below, I reached a point where I could no longer hear an included song without framing it in the context of that collection—the track number, whether there was unfiltered noise between or even within tracks thanks to now-dated studio-recording technology, and so on. In a way no single song could compel, I associate these with events like a special bus or car trip, or organizing and cleaning my room as a teenager, or pretending to study in a dorm room with a “boom box” going at high volume and drunkards in my midst.

If you are under thirty or perhaps even under forty, this list may look as hazy and quaint as my grandfather’s assortment of Glenn Miller Orchestra albums did to me as a young child in the 1970s. After all, the mid-eighties were over thirty-five years ago; make a similar jump back in time from that point to 1950 and the concept of “rock music” didn’t even exist. On the other hand, among the mustier genres, Eighties music in particular seems to have retained an odd cultural persistence, more so than the styles bracketing it in time.

#10. The Joshua Tree, U2 (1987). U2 has never been one of my favorite bands. Bono is not among my favorite vocalists (but perhaps should be). The Edge is not close to my favorite guitar player. But put it all together and add in compelling lyrics, and man, this is one band I wish I had seen live, which is where they really went to town.

My favorite U2 song, “Pride,” is not on The Joshua Tree, but as an opus, especially side one, this is perfect for solo open-road driving, or anywhere people can’t see you crying. It was released shortly before the start of my junior-year outdoor track season, but although my teammates all worshiped the band, I didn’t really listen to this much until I was in my twenties.

#9. A Momentary Lapse of Reason, Pink Floyd (1987). Almost everyone my age lists a Pink Floyd album among their favorites, but no one I know chooses this one. After Roger Waters left the band—it was that or just have a public duel with David Gilmour—fans thought that Pink Floyd would suffer for it.

Not in this case they didn’t. “Learning to Fly” recalled for me the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster that had taken place a year and a half before A Momentary Lapse of Reason was released at the start of my senior year. I also don’t get into concept albums in general, and most of Pink Floyd’s earlier work met that description (and Styx forever ruined that con…that idea for me, anyway, with Kilroy Was Here).

#8. Jagged Little Pill, Alanis Morrissette (1995). Although an album made up of a series of extreme grievances should not have the capacity to produce a desirable mood state, something about this one works. It’s angry, but kind of folksy-angry. Morrissette paints music as much as she sings and composes it, because it’s all her and all of her.

Maybe without the harmonica solo in “Hand in My Pocket,” none of this happens. But either way, Morrissette hit one forty feet over the top of the Green Monster at Fenway Park with this line-up. The tracks keep you wavering on different emotional edges, the whole series of ‘em, and therefore should not be listened to while playing chess except against pitifully weak opponents.

#7. Boston, Boston (1976). I was starting first grade when this album basically took over all of FM radio. Sure, there were fewer bands at the time, and sadly, almost all of them played disco or worse. But the way Boston instantly jackhammered its way deep into popular culture was at least somewhat evident to me as a young child. It was impossible to not hear every one of the eight songs over and over.

My dad was in a hard-rock cover band at the time, and its boozy fans at proms and cabarets would have gone wild over any attempt at a Boston song. But Sweet Leaf had no keyboardist, and, well, you really kind of need keys to remotely mimic the Boston sound. I am not really into heavy metal, and Boston’s music is often on the edge, but Tom Scholz is a perfectionist and there is no wastage whatsoever in anything he writes or produces. “Foreplay” remains my holy grail in terms of raw keyboard playing.

#6. Urban Hymns, The Verve (1997). In the first half of the 1990s, I was in graduate school and paying little attention to the latest music, either because I was too busy or because most of the latest music sucked. I think it’s mostly the latter—Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and all those low-serotonin flannel bands never did anything for me. (The Red Hot Chili Peppers are grossly overrated as well.)

But despite the Verve emanating a morbid, overly drugged vibe of their own, and breaking up every other week, this album is a masterpiece of superior songwriting. Richard Ashcroft is an egomaniac in the perfect, unapologetic way he needs to be to render ordinary songs memorable and repetitive sounds addictive. “Bitter Sweet Symphony” gets all the notoriety, but “Lucky Man” is the MVP of the collection.

#5. Who’s Next, the Who (1971). Pete Townshend is the only reason thousands of hacks like me now have had to run out and buy synthesizers if we want to re-create certain sounds with any fidelity.

With “Baba O’Riley” as the lead track and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” as the final one, the meat in between would not have to be especially high in quality to make the whole meal at least passable. But the meat is great, with “Behind Blue Eyes” my favorite tone on the album (it pains me to imagine how many younger people believe that Limp Bizkit, which covered the song in 2003, managed to turn out anything that good on its own).

#4. Led Zeppelin IV, Led Zeppelin (1971). One amazing 1971 release by a British Invasion foursome with a one-of-a-kind drummer who drank and drugged himself to death less than ten years later is never enough, so this one gets a nod as well.

If you don’t understand what Led Zeppelin did for rock music, other than introduce a near-pathological amount of Norse mythology, it’s of a piece with what Mark Twain did for the American novel. They are the only reason, for example, that I can remotely appreciate the influence of blues on modern rock.

“Stairway to Heaven” was dismally overplayed for a very long time, but after “When the Levee Breaks” wraps up the set, you feel like you can start again from the beginning with no sense of band fatigue. (Physical Graffiti is almost as good.)

#3. Songs from the Big Chair, Tears for Fears (1985). Tears for Fears is regarded, for good reason, as an enormously successful Eighties band, with a distinct and iconic Eighties sound. But as much as I fell in lust with almost every song on this album from the beginning, it would be decades before I appreciated how doggedly experimental these fellows were.

The first time I heard “Shout,” or the first time I remember hearing it, I knew within the first minute that it was one of those orchestral-caliber pop songs that would instantly stamp itself as a global anthem. And it did exactly that. But “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is a superior song (as is “Sowing the Seeds of Love,” my favorite Tears for Fears tune and not released until 1989).

Well after the band had sunk from prominence, I liked watching Curt Smith appear on the USA Network show Psych as a recurring character just to get good-naturedly tooled on by friendly and evil characters alike, like Kenny in South Park but with no dying.

#2. Brothers in Arms, Dire Straits (1985). This one helped me through multiple break-ups. Wait; I think it was the same breakup over and over with the same person or group of people. More likely, it was just a streak of subpar races.

“Money for Nothing,” a song I played incessantly before races for a very long time after its release, contains one of the most memorable guitar licks (not solos) of its or any era. But alone, it could not be the centerpiece of a truly great album with only so-so songs as garnish.

I can’t explain why I find everything here so soothing; as with other Dire Straits work, some of the lyrics strike me as jocular, almost mailed in. But none of that is distracting, as Mark Knopfler is simply a virtuoso.

#1. Secret World Live, Peter Gabriel (1993). It’s not even close. Is it ever, with this guy? He was great before he left Genesis. He was even better before he started exploring world music. And that was all a long time ago.

Secret World Live is an assortment of individually superior songs arranged and played in a triumphant way. You should pick a time—maybe this weekend—to remain undisturbed for about two hours, turn out all the lights, lie back (maybe on the floor) and watch the whole performance from beginning to end.

I saw Peter Gabriel, Paula Cole, Manu Katché et al. at the Worcester Centrum in the fall of 1993, on the Secret World Live tour. I wanted this performance to go on forever, and when I watch it again, I feel the same way. “Peter Gabriel is the best” is a cliche, but it needs to be. He has done nothing but roll out irresistible reasons for people everywhere to sing, dance, move and smile for over forty years.

There should be five Peter Gabriels walking the earth for every mortal, and “Shaking the Tree” is absolutely the most amazing song ever written. The lyrics and theme represent an interesting complement to those of “Sledgehammer,” which was my cross-country anthem exactly thirty-five years ago.

There. We* really can all agree on at least some things.