1998 in music. • Page 3

the eve 6 guy’s twitter resurgence made me dust that album off last year and i was surprised how much i enjoyed myself

 

1998 mix

track 14 should be Hoobastank - Our Song, but I guess that album isn't on spotify

 

their second album, Horrorscope, is my favorite from them but the debut is great as well

 

Nice shoutout for Hey! Album. I generally classify it as a '99 album, since the version I'm most familiar with came out then, but I think you could put it in either year.

 

I almost caveated that post with “and perhaps the biggest single song to overall band quality disparity oat” but stopped myself as I haven’t heard enough of their discography. But my gut feeling based on what I have was that that might indeed be the case.

 

1. Silver Jews - American Water
2. Lucinda Williams - Car Wheels On A Gravel Road
3. Black Star - Mos Def & Talib Kweli are…
4. Eels - Electro Shock Blues
5. Lauryn Hill - The Miseducation of

 

1. Catch 22 - Keasbey Nights
2. Gang Starr - Moment of Truth
3. Less Than Jake - Hello Rockview

ALSO
Lauryn Hill - The Miseducation of
Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
Smashing Pumpkins - Adore
Outkast - Aquemini
Lagwagon - Let's Talk About Feelings
Strung Out - Twisted by Design
Black Star - Mos Def & Talib Kweli are...
Eve 6 - Eve 6
DMX - It's Dark and Hell is Hot
Elliot Smith - XO

 

Stunt is a great album filled with richly nuanced songwriting and is unfairly marginalized by "One Week"

 

yep, yep,yep

 

Have always really loved this song:

 

Agh you even reminded me a few weeks ago and I still forgot to put this on my list. Will spend some time with it this week. I've always LOVED "Someday We'll Know".

 

Yep, and I mean, come onnnnnn with this one

 

1. Goo Goo Dolls – Dizzy Up the Girl
2. Sheryl Crow – The Globe Sessions
3. Fastball – All the Pain Money Can Buy

What happens when two guys who have spent a decade making scrappy Replacements homages turn out to be some of the best pop songwriters on the planet? You get Dizzy Up the Girl, a splendid radio rock record that gleams with massive hooks and big production values, but still bears some of the dust and dirt of the band’s earlier records -- like a spit-shined hubcap. Pair a Hall-of-Fame-worthy run of '90s hit singles (“Iris,” “Slide,” “Black Balloon,” and “Broadway”) with a crop of album tracks that are just as good (“Bullet Proof,” “All Eyes on Me,” “Acoustic #3,” “Hate This Place”) and you’ve got a goddamn classic. If John Rzeznik sang all 13 songs, this album would be in my top 25, ever. Even acknowledging that I skip the Robby Takac songs half the time, it’s still my 1998 favorite, easy.

I typically slot Tuesday Night Music Club as my favorite Sheryl Crow album, in part because it has this adventurous who-knows-what-the-next-song-will-sound-like vibe that you can only really get from a debut album. And then her self-titled record from 1998 has my favorite Sheryl Crow song. But The Globe Sessions is maybe her most consistent, cohesive, impressive album. She’s such an effortless songwriter at this point, and on her second album producing herself, she’s really figured out how to use the studio as a tool to breathe this really unique vitality into her songs. It’s such a dynamite-sounding record (I was unsurprised to learn that it won the Grammy for Best Engineered Album). I’m especially fond of the percussion on this record, which has a real “banging on shit in the studio” vibe. “There Goes the Neighborhood” and “Anything But Down” are my favorite tracks.

All the Pain Money Can Buy is an extremely nostalgic album for me. Growing up, it was an album that everyone in the house could enjoy, so it got a lot of play, especially on family road trips. Fastball did a really good job of pairing the modern pop-rock sound, circa 1998, with classic power pop and Beatles influences (probably even more so on the follow up, The Harsh Light of Day, which I actually think is the better record). Everyone knows the singles (remarkable how many rock records from this era that had strings of 3-5 ubiquitous songs), but my favorites are the deep cuts. “Warm Fuzzy Feeling,” “Slow Drag,” “Good Old Days,” and “Nowhere Road” are catchy, dynamic songs with a lot of personality and charisma.

Also killer:

Dixie Chicks – Wide Open Spaces: I actually like them more as they become a little less country in the 2000s, but this one and Fly are packed with fun, smart, gorgeous country songs that underline how well this group did vocal harmonies and how good they were as instrumentalists.

Green Day – Nimrod: I’m really not very fond of Insomniac, which I think loses a lot of the effortless melodic charm that Green Day had on Dookie. Nimrod brings that back in spades.

R.E.M. – Up: For a long time, this was my least favorite R.E.M. record. I still think it’s a little “too much” in terms of how deliberately they pivot their sound and how all-in they go with the drum machines and electronic flourishes. But it also some of their best songs – especially “Hope” and “At My Most Beautiful.”

Also shouts to two of the best b-sides collections ever (Springsteen’s Tracks and Oasis’s The Masterplan), and maybe my all-time favorite live album (Counting Crows’ Across a Wire, which showcases that band and their live chops in two decidedly different modes).

 

i used to cover black balloon a lot in my college band, that tuning was so dumb lol

 

Johnny loved his alternate tunings.

 

bad news, you're a year off, this was 1997

 

oh, that doesn't really bug me, the tunings he uses just are used by almost no one else on the planet so it's completely setting up a new tuning for only one song lol

 

and while we are talking about years, yeah this does make it difficult. I tend to lean toward "first release" as being the definitive year that it lands in with very few exceptions, but your reasoning definitely would make sense

 

Weird, I had it marked as 1998 in my iTunes for some reason.

Yeah, I think that usually makes sense. In this case, though, it's a pretty different experience to listen to the 1998 version versus '99. The track order is different, "Write It on Your Hand" and "Vampires in Love" aren't on there, there are two songs that got cut from the '99 version ("Just Wanna Go Home" and "Fastboat") and "Cold As Hell" got scrapped until Readysexgo! So, I'm going to go ahead and count it as a '99 album, for those reasons.

 

Broadway is the best GGD single, it's so good.

Feel like I'm running out of time to ask - anyone listening to 60 Songs That Explain the 90s?

 

yes, it's my favorite podcast lol

 

I should have figured haha

 

That podcast is the bomb. The "Smooth" episode was incredible.

 

The first five minutes of the Third Eye Blind episode were five of the funniest minutes I lived in 2021

 

“You are walking, breathing, living cheese.”