Blue
1971
Mitchell was so exposed making it that she asked visitors to leave the studio. Kris Kristofferson told her to keep something back for herself.
★ 9.1
The Albums canon
Sourced and spun.
Every record chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 542 records or filter by genre, artist, and year.
Browse all 542 records or filter by genre, artist, and year.
Astral Weeks
1968
Morrison sat in an isolation booth and barely spoke to the jazz players hired to back him. The whole thing was done in three sessions.
★ 8.9
Bringing It All Back Home
1965
One side plugged in, one side not. A few months later Dylan took the electric half to Newport and the folk crowd turned on him.
★ 8.9
Bridge Over Troubled Water
1970
Simon wrote the title song and gave it to Garfunkel to sing alone, and spent years regretting it. They had broken up by release.
★ 8.6
Tapestry
1971
King had already written dozens of hits for other people before anyone heard her sing. This one sold twenty-five million copies.
★ 7.9
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
1963
Dylan was twenty-one. The cover photograph was taken on a Greenwich Village street in the snow, and four songs were pulled at the last minute.
★ 7.9
American Beauty
1970
The bassist Phil Lesh wrote Box of Rain while his father was dying, and sang it himself. The Dead had never written this plainly before.
★ 7.7
Court and Spark
1974
Mitchell hired a working jazz band to back her and made the best-selling record of her life without simplifying a single thing.
★ 7.7
Grace
1994
Buckley's voice covers about four octaves and he uses most of them. He drowned in the Mississippi three years later, aged thirty.
★ 7.6
Nebraska
1982
He taped it alone on a four-track in his bedroom, carried the cassette around in his pocket, and it ended up released as it was.
★ 7.5
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
1998
Williams spent six years on it, scrapped a finished version, and fell out with two producers before she would let anyone release it.
★ 7.0
Bookends
1968
Side one runs from childhood to old age, and the voices in the middle of it are real people Garfunkel recorded in nursing homes.
★ 6.1
Five Leaves Left
1969
The title comes from the warning near the end of a packet of cigarette papers. A college friend with no professional credits wrote the string parts.
★ 6.0
Pink Moon
1972
Twenty-eight minutes, recorded in two late-night sessions with nobody else playing. Drake left the tapes at his label's reception desk and walked out.
★ 6.0
Songs of Leonard Cohen
1967
Cohen was thirty-three and already a published novelist when he made it, and he disliked the strings the producer added behind him.
★ 5.9
Sweet Baby James
1970
Taylor was the first American signed to the Beatles' Apple label, and had already made a record there that nobody bought.
★ 5.9
Bryter Layter
1970
It sold fewer than three thousand copies. John Cale played on two songs, and Drake barely performed any of it in public.
★ 5.5
Tracy Chapman
1988
Chapman was busking in Boston a year before this came out. A last-minute set at the Mandela concert at Wembley sent it to number one.
★ 4.8
Dust Bowl Ballads
1940
Guthrie wrote the long Tom Joad ballad overnight after seeing the film of The Grapes of Wrath. Just a voice and a guitar throughout.
★ 4.4
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme
1966
The last track lays a Christmas carol over a real news broadcast, so the two get harder to separate as it goes on.
★ 4.3
Sounds of Silence
1966
Their producer added drums and electric guitar to an old acoustic track without telling them. It became a hit and the duo reformed.
★ 4.3
Benji
2014
Mark Kozelek uses real names throughout, and the deaths in it are real deaths in his family. Almost nothing is dressed up as metaphor.
★ 4.0
The Bluegrass Sessions
1999
Fleck plays banjo in styles bluegrass had no name for, surrounded by the best acoustic players alive, none of whom show off.
★ 2.8