The 80S

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The album didn't come easily to Springsteen. "I search for that internal logic that connects everything," he said later. "And if it comes real naturally, it's great. With The River, man, forget it. It took many months. Years, you know?" If I see someone cute," Aretha Franklin told producer Narada Michael Walden during an initial telephone conversation to discuss working together on an album the singer was planning, "I may wink. Then he may wink, and it's like 'Who's zoomin' who?'" At that pivotal juncture, Bush decamped to a farmhouse in the country—not to fade into obscurity, but to make hits without compromising her idiosyncrasies. The result was Hounds of Love, which remains both the best Kate Bush album and the most Kate Bush album. A paean to love of all kinds—and, most of all, to love of life—it reeled in listeners with an opening half stuffed with buoyant singles like “The Big Sky” and “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” which dreamed of empathy across lines of identity and circumstance. She also found room to explore her literary obsessions amid the ringing choruses: “Cloudbusting” draws on a memoir by the son of Freud acolyte Wilhelm Reich, wrapping its allusions around pliant vocals that soar like birdsong and curl in on themselves with feline grace. And she ran with the freedom those frontloaded hits gave her: Side B is a suite about a sailor that revels in the uncoolness of Irish jigs and the campy call-and-responses of musical theater. But even this highly conceptual sprawl is grounded by arresting images: “There’s a ghost in our home just watching you without me,” she breathes on “Watching You Without Me.” With Hounds of Love, Kate Bush ascended from oddball genius to master alchemist, transmuting her most outré impulses into something irresistible. –Judy Berman Other songs examine related aspects of the album's political theme. The haunting "Soldier of Plenty" indicts the paternalism of America's attitudes toward its Latin neighbors, while "Lawless Avenues," with touching Spanish lyrics by Jorge Calderón, explores the impact of American foreign policy on life on the home front — specifically, in this case, in the Hispanic ghettos of Los Angeles. And, intriguingly, amid all the hard-hitting sociopolitical commentary stands "In the Shape of a Heart," one of Browne's finest love songs. Nothing Like the Sun, released shortly after that tirade, was everything but the kitchen sink, a double-album banquet of seductive Hispanic and Brazilian rhythms, exultant reggae, big-band jazz and melancholy Euroballadry featuring an all-star, genre-busting crew: Branford Marsalis, Mark Knopfler, Eric Clapton, Rubén Blades and Andy Summers.

Rolling Stone Best 1980s Albums - Rolling Stone

Weaving these diverse influences into a deeply moving album were producers Lenny Kaye (formerly Patti Smith's guitarist) and Steve Addabbo (Vega's manager), who brought modern touches to Vega's straight-ahead style, enhancing the singer's sparse sound with subtle electric guitars, graceful violins and even New Age synthesizers, all of which added gentle textures to her haunting material.Aside from some remixing and minor overdubbing, the tapes were virtually released as is. Brown helped Lovett select ten songs (the rest have appeared on subsequent albums) with an ear to country radio. Four made the C&W Top Twenty. And Gang of Four's revolutionary pop rhetoric not only infiltrated the dance floor — it also invaded the corporate world, as the band was one of the few early postpunk outfits to sign to a major label. It was a situation some found hypocritical, but as Burnham says, "If you've got something to say, and you want people to hear it, what's the best thing to do? Make as many people hear it as possible."

The 50 best albums of the 80s | Louder The 50 best albums of the 80s | Louder

Ian Curtis was only 23 when he died by suicide, but his wife Deborah noted years later that, in his lyrics, “Ian sounded old, as if he had lived a lifetime in his youth.” In a sense, he had: Married as teenagers, the Curtises were raising a baby girl. Ian had worked a numbing 9-to-5, led a brilliant post-punk act, fallen into an extramarital affair, been diagnosed with epilepsy and seen his affliction worsen. His premature aging manifested itself in his elliptical verses and a bellow whose timbre was as dignified and distressed as a Shakespearean actor on his deathbed. Second Edition also features three instrumentals, including the beautiful "Radio 4." But according to Levene, dropping vocals wasn't a conceptual statement. "Nobody was around," he says, "and I had to do something with the bloody studio time."Let's Dance grafts brassy, big-band swing onto a solid, contemporary R&B foundation. Bowie tapped Nile Rodgers, guitarist for the stylish New York dance band Chic, to produce Let's Dance. Excluding Texas blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, who was Bowie's suggestion, the musicians were drawn from Rodgers's circle. "Except for Bernard Edwards, no person had influenced me more," Rodgers says of Bowie. Yet the collaboration was nothing like what he had had in mind. A warmer, more open Bowie was evident at every turn on Let's Dance, whose bright, upbeat exterior and approachable lyrics celebrate "modern love" and sensual romance beneath "serious moonlight."

80s Albums: 20 Classics That Defined A Decade - Dig! Best 80s Albums: 20 Classics That Defined A Decade - Dig!

Robertson wrote passionately about saving the planet ("Showdown at Big Sky"), the price of fame ("American Roulette") and romance ("Broken Arrow"). "I never wrote about the environment before," says Robertson. "I feel very strongly about this stuff, but [in the past] I felt like I'd be jumping on the bandwagon. Now I felt like I couldn't help it." Having taught herself guitar at the age of eleven, Vega began writing her own songs when she entered her teens. After graduating from Barnard College in 1982, she began playing small coffeehouses in Greenwich Village — the same area of New York City where nearly every Sixties folkie first tuned up his Gibson. But Vega, a child of the Eighties, hardly fit the protest-singer mold. Even though she carried an acoustic guitar, her hero wasn't folk icon Bob Dylan but punk godfather Lou Reed. There were other differences as well. After years on the Northeastern club circuit, she had developed a direct, emotionally tempered style that she has said was inspired as much by novelist Carson McCullers and painter Edward Hopper as by romantic balladeers Leonard Cohen and Laura Nyro. He sent the tape around to record companies. They liked the material but wanted him to re-record it, which he refused to do. Finally, the tape found its way to singer-songwriter Guy Clark, who recommended him to Tony Brown at MCA. "When I first heard the demos," says Brown, "I thought, 'How could this tape have been around for more than a week without somebody putting it out?' This guy was so developed, so focused." In hindsight, though, these failures make some cosmic sense, because Tim is an album by, for, and about underdogs. From “Left of the Dial,” a stirring ode to tiny-watt college radio, to “Bastards of Young,” a generational anthem for those embarrassed by the idea of generational anthems, to the hymnlike closer “Here Comes a Regular,” which wrenchingly flips over the band’s debauchery to find shame underneath, the record finds its place out on the fringe. Like a beaten boxer who just won’t go down, Tim wrings glory from defeat. –Ryan Dombal In the early Sixties, several township styles — jazz, penny-whistle music and marabi (honky-tonk music) — coalesced into a dance musïc that became known as township jive. With a steady beat adorned by droning acoustic guitars, tinkling electrics and rich vocal harmonies that are joyous, gritty and real, mbaqanga became party music played in shebeens (illegal bars ignored by the government), at workers' parties, on the street and in the recording studio, where groups often united for one-shot recordings. Herman theorizes that the strong beat came from American groups such as the Supremes. "Also, a lot of players were listening to the Beatles," he says. "Not so much the music but the instrumentation."We started out as rank amateurs with a belief that you could use technology to make up for the fact that you hadn’t acquired any skill, that you could use computers to make up for the fact that you hadn’t any keyboard players, that you could use sequencers to do rhythms rather than employ a drummer,” Human League vocalist and songwriter Phil Oakey told Musician magazine in 1982. Although he'd begun a spiral of booze and drugs that would lead to a bout with alcoholism and a temporary split with his wife, Karen, Townshend pledged in "A Little Is Enough" to make the best of their fitful marriage. "I was able to very easily put into words something that had actually happened to me when I was a thirty-four-year-old," he said. "It's very emotional, but it's also very straightforward and clear." One can spot a clear Gang of Four influence in R.E.M., INXS and U2, as well as countless other bands. Unfortunately, Gang of Four never quite matched Entertainment! again and underwent a gradual and messy breakup, leaving behind this postpunk masterpiece as its legacy. Critics loved the album, and it sold well. Crenshaw's single of "Someday, Someway" briefly hit the Top Forty, peaking at Number Thirty-six.

80s (Top 1980s Albums) - Music Grotto 51 Best Albums Of The 80s (Top 1980s Albums) - Music Grotto

On Empty Glass, his second solo album, Pete Townshend chronicled the personal tumult he was experiencing and initiated an adult style of songwriting that helped reenergize the singer-songwriter tradition in the Eighties. In My Tribe is more than a successful record — it is a poetic, heartfelt message about social concerns such as alcoholism, child abuse and illiteracy. The band's first two albums had achieved critical raves but miserable sales. Things became so dismal after its second album stiffed that the band came dangerously close to permanent not-was status. With the group in complete disarray, Weiss says he was doing "lamentable" home-video scores, while Fagenson produced "sexual deviants" like transvestite singer Marilyn. Bowen worked with the O'Jays, and Atkinson was "probably watching the soaps and pimping," Weiss says jokingly. We gave Mutt songwriting credits because this time he actually helped us structure the songs," singer Joe Elliott said in 1985. "They weren't written songs that he changed. He sat down with us as a sixth member of the band and participated in the whole thing." In the final analysis, it's inspirational music. "Maybe they're living in hell," Herman says of the mbaqanga players, "but when they get down to the music, it's something from themselves, something from the heart, something that gives them strength."I probably would have chosen fewer country songs and weighted it more toward the blues-oriented stuff," Lovett says today. "But it ended up being more representative of my songwriting." And as a homespun sampler of a rookie off the street, it has few peers. But it turns out that the album wasn't so easy to make after all. "It's remarkable to me that it sounds like a really simple, easygoing album," says Crowded House leader Neil Finn, "because there was quite a large amount of angst involved in making that record." Newman is clearly one of pop music's preeminent songwriters. But with Trouble in Paradise, he also mastered the art of great record making. Today it stands as one of the best albums of his career, a fully realized collection of story-songs in which Newman's dark take on the world is fully fleshed out. Tom Waits was a hard 35 years old when he wrote Rain Dogs in a small rented room in Manhattan. He had always sounded grizzled, even when he was a teenager, but on these strange industrial Americana tunes, his husky voice is less of an affectation. It’s intensely world-weary; he’d been cultivating that seen-it-all persona throughout the ’70s, but somehow he truly grew into it during the decade of Reagan and yuppies and neon.\