Thread by @trwhitmire_OBT

So here we go. Song #1, from 1970: Let It Be - Remastered by The Beatles
open.spotify.com/track/5V1AHQug… #52Songs

Had to get one from The Beatles in there, given that they broke up in the fall of '69. Gave some thought to "Get Back," but there's a nice resonance here with some of the #wisdom that midlife brings. #52Songs

Song #2, from 1971, is "Tiny Dancer" from Elton John's "Madman Across the Water," his "Coming to America" album. open.spotify.com/track/2TVxnKdb…

Definitely some reverse-engineering here, @RickGiovannelli. As iconic as TD has become, "Levon" was the best known track from this album for almost 30 years - - the one included in the great "Two Rooms" album of Elton John / Bernie Taupin covers from 1990.

But then TD became the centerpiece of the most iconic scene in 2000's "Almost Famous." As Cameron Crowe explains, now Elton has to play the song at every concert. rollingstone.com/movies/movie-f…

It makes my list because: 1) "Madman" was a staple of my dad's record collection throughout my childhood; 2) It's my kids' favorite Elton John song; 3) It's set in LA (which will be a recurring theme); 4) Cameron Crowe movies (another thread in this list).

That "Two Rooms" compilation is sadly not available on Spotify or iTunes, probably b/c of permissions. This Spotify user cobbled together some of the highlights, including Oleta Adams' great version of "Don't Let the Sun Go Down On Me." open.spotify.com/playlist/0D4Js…

Moving ahead to 1972 for our third song on the list, we come to my man Neil Diamond and "Song Sung Blue."
open.spotify.com/track/4FZ8wtTa…

You're going to hear a few '70s songs that trace back to my Dad and his life on the beach at Marina del Rey after he left my Mom for good in 1975, but this one's for Mom...

She was #rideordie for Neil Diamond back in the 1970s. There was this album ("Moods"), "Serenade," "September Morn," "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" and the live "Hot August Night" double album from the Hollywood Bowl. I think she said maybe she and Dad went to that show?

The only things I ever remember on her turntable are Neil and her record of Handel's "Messiah" that she played at Christmastime, so this one's for you, Mom.

It's 1973 now. My brother is an infant and the Watergate hearings on TV. We're living on Greenhill Road in Pasadena, home of Caltech and the Rose Bowl. The song pick is the Rolling Stones' "Angie."
open.spotify.com/track/1GcVa4jF…

The Stones I first was conscious of were the Tattoo You-era, "Start Me Up" Stones. The Stones I first loved as a teenager were the Hot Rocks Stones of the '60s and "You Can't Always Get What You Want." But in my lifetime, this is the one I love the most.

Not to mention it's @SarahWPW's favorite Stones song, and that counts a lot.

The choice for 1974 is a song I first heard via Whitney Houston's amazing full-ownership cover from The Bodyguard. When @SweeperBoyCNC & I did a Covers episode @LinerPod, I got to know @DollyParton's original and came to love it even more. open.spotify.com/track/77bNe6jY…

Here's a link to that episode of the pod:pca.st/episode/e411a9…

And here's a playlist of songs we discuss in the episode. open.spotify.com/playlist/3I7lZ…

No one could ever have taken the song as big as Houston did, both in terms of her rendition of it and the massive hit it became. For me, the original is a reminder that incredible songwriting is the foundation of the greatest music.

And here's Dolly right on cue, making the news yesterday. As @tommytomlinson notes, someone needs to form a Dolly cover band called Little White Asses ASAP.

https://twitter.com/billboard/status/1294061479918997504

Moving on to 1975... We've got a string of California Sound songs coming up here, because this was the soundtrack of my childhood. First up, from the album that turned Fleetwood Mac from a lightly regarded Brit blues act to titans... open.spotify.com/track/05oETzWb…

I've always been fascinated by the way the Laurel Canyon sound of the mid-late 60s shaded into country-rock of the early-mid 70s, then into yacht rock by the late 70s and early 80s. The extended dominance of the Southern California sound is incredible.

If it's 1976 and we're talking California Sound, it must be the Eagles. I went back and forth between "Take it to the Limit," which came out in '75 and charted in '76 or the title track of their next album, which came out in 12/76.
open.spotify.com/track/40riOy7x…

The sense of the curdling and dead end of the 60s is all over this song... "you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave"; "some dance to remember, some dance to forget"; "we haven't had that spirit here since 1969."

We also played this song endlessly during my senior year in HS in San Francisco, so it has that association for me, particularly having left California that year and never returned as a resident.

We were talking in replies yesterday about music documentaries and at the top of my list to see is the one on the Eagles. But if you like a good parody, the @DocumentaryNow "Gentle and Soft: The Story of the Blue Jean Collective" is classic.
google.com/url?sa=t&sourc…

Twitter didn't like that last link, so let's try again. Bill Hader and Fred Armisen are amazing in "Gentle and Soft" - - they give a level of acting performance that is above and beyond what you expect in a satire. rollingstone.com/music/music-ne…

For 1977, I'm going with the last two cuts from Jackson Browne's "Running On Empty," "The Load Out/Stay."
open.spotify.com/track/0Bk7XD1U…
open.spotify.com/track/6l2O4hX0…

Browne is another mainstay of the California Sound and probably no album ever recorded quite captures the "on the road" ethos quite as memorably as "Running on Empty," appropriate since it was mostly recorded live and on the road in August 1977.

I was introduced to this album by a college girlfriend and it's always been a great listen, especially those last 2 tracks. Nothing says '70s like: "We got disco/In eight tracks and cassettes in stereo/We've got rural scenes & magazines/We've got truckers on the CB."

1978 brings us to the last of the California Sound entries (for now, at least...) and I had to have the Doobies on here because they were so essential to that mid-late 70s sound.
open.spotify.com/track/2yBVeksU…

@Whitmja1 & I were living with our mom in Santa Rosa in those years, but our dad had a classic late 70s beach lifestyle going on back in SoCal.

He lived in a beachfront condo in Marina del Rey, just south of Venice Beach. He had a fancy stereo system, a big-screen projection TV, a 35mm camera, a growing wine collection, a live-in GF (later his second wife) and a waterbed with a mirror over it.

He was too old to be a Boomer, but boy did he make up for lost time once he bailed on our mom. And the soundtrack was Elton John, the Eagles, the Doobie Brothers, Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac, ELO and all the others I haven't gotten to include.

It's 1979 and time to leave the California Sound behind for now and move onto New Wave. My pick here is one of the ultimate one-hit wonder songs (though not the one @DianaRuggOnTV wants me to select...).
open.spotify.com/track/6t1FIJlZ…

VKTRS was, famously, the first song aired when @MTV went live in August '81. In addition to being a total earworm, it perfectly set the stage for the way those of us born in the 70s would experience music during our formative teen years.

And when I made an 80s Awesomeness mix for my kids a few years back, VKTRS was one of the songs they really latched onto. It also seems to perfectly capture so many aspects of that New Wave sound that came and went so quickly between 79 and 83.

Another New Wave stalwart is my choice for 1980, Talking Heads with "Once in a Lifetime."
open.spotify.com/track/1Tr4K5MU…

While it doesn't quite rise to the heights of "Gentle and Soft," @DocumentaryNow's parody of "Stop Making Sense" is a great tribute to the Heads and to this era of music.
indiewire.com/2016/10/docume…

I love the lines "Into the blue again/After the money's gone" and "You may ask yourself, 'My God, what have I done?'"

No song has ever done a better job for me of capturing the dislocation of adult life, of realizing how a million conscious and unconscious choices convey you to where you end up.

Another bit of trivia: After "Video Killed the Radio Star" kicked things off, the video for "Once in a Lifetime" was among those in Day 1 rotation on MTV in August 1981.

For 1981, the choice is one of the great unbridled "I'm in love" songs ever.
open.spotify.com/track/44aTAUBF…

I don't feel like it gets talked about much now, perhaps because there's been such a long tail to Sting's solo career, but the five-album run the Police had from 1978 to 1983 was unreal.

Outlandos d'Amour, 1978 (debut)
Reggatta de Blanc, 1979
Zenyatta Mondatta, 1980
Ghost in the Machine, 1981
Synchronicity, 1983 (final true album before breakup)
The last four albums all went #1 in the UK.

And I'm not sure any song in my remembered lifetime being as ubiquitous as I remember "Every Breath You Take" being in the summer of 1983. To me, that's the Ur-Song of the Summer.

And if you wonder why they broke up after all that success, just read the Wikipedia entry on the making of "Every Little Thing"... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Lit…

I picked 1982 for my Springsteen selection, but it took me a long time to settle on a selection from "Nebraska." The late nod goes to "Atlantic City."
open.spotify.com/track/1Vp8U39Y…

One indicator of a great song is the range and diversity of other artists who cover it. Here's a small sampling from @Spotify.

I love this one from @theholdsteady, a band that will show up later on this list - - particularly the a capella repetition of "Everything dies, that's a fact / and maybe everything that dies / someday comes back" toward the end.
open.spotify.com/track/2UzOixrK…

And here's The Band, from 1993:
open.spotify.com/track/4JwjzS9W…

And a 1:50 instrumental jam by the indie band @realestateband, from 2009:
open.spotify.com/track/0EMTHwEc…

And one more, from YouTube, of the late, great @chriscornell doing an acoustic version - - as one commenter notes, great song writing meets one of the most distinctive American voices ever.

The other cut from "Nebraska" that I thought long and hard about was "Highway Patrolman," such a great story song that Sean Penn turned it into a film for his directorial debut.
open.spotify.com/track/408tTuSD…

Here's a 2018 piece about that movie, "The Indian Runner," which has a pretty impressive cast that spans generations.
theverge.com/2018/12/14/181…

The album The Replacements released in 1983, "Hootenanny," is probably my least favorite from them but includes one of my single favorite songs by the 'Mats.
open.spotify.com/track/7dnuiF2N…

Production was a double-edged sword for the Replacements, nowhere more so than in the way the original version of 1989's Don't Tell a Soul was sweetened to chase radio tastes of the day.

But there are other songs where a little engineering and production wizardry worked magic, like on "Can't Hardly Wait" and here.

"Within Your Reach" also reunites us with @CameronCrowe, who we last saw making 1971's "Tiny Dancer" iconic in his film "Almost Famous." WYR is one of two songs from his "Say Anything" soundtrack that makes this list.

A couple other relevant links for The Replacements, the iconic great 80s band that never Made It Big. This live cut of "Answering Machine" from a Wisconsin set is brilliant.
open.spotify.com/track/1V2Iw2Dr…

This excerpt from a great 2016 book about The 'Mats, Trouble Boys, retells the story of how they got themselves banned from Saturday Night Live after a disastrous 1986 set.
rollingstone.com/music/music-ne…

Also great in Trouble Boys are the stories from when the band opened for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on their Full Moon Fever tour. Well worth a read.
replacementsbook.com

As promised, with some bands I've got off-the-beaten-path selections, and that's certainly true for 1984, with my U2 selection.
open.spotify.com/track/3tF8QmI7…

"The Unforgettable Fire" was shortly overshadowed by the monster acclaim of "The Joshua Tree," and within the album, EP&A was overshadowed by "Pride" and "Bad," the song U2 played at Live Aid that really put them on the map.

I've seen U2 live 8 or 10 times and they've never played EP&A live, probably because it's not possible - - the instrumentation is a slowed-down backing track from "A Sort of Homecoming" and Bono's lyrics are improvised.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_Pre…

As with The Replacements' "Within Your Reach," this is studio engineering at its most magical - - and why Brian Eno is a freaking genius.

I've probably listened to "With or Without You" more than any single song in my life and "The Joshua Tree" more than any single album. U2 was That Band for me at the height of adolescence. Age has given me a little skeptical remove...

Particularly around the singular phenomenon that is "Bono." Regardless of how they age, though, I think we all know you never really get over That Band, and they were that for me and @Whitmja1 and several of our closest friends in high school. Here's to @U2.

1985 was the hardest year so far in which to make a pick. It may be Adolescence Bias, but I consider the '80s the Last Great Pop Music Decade and 1985 as the high water mark. I mean, look at this @billboardcharts Hot 100:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard…

I went back and forth among so many different songs that I made a playlist of my favorites that I *didn't* pick for the 52 Songs list.
open.spotify.com/playlist/72VDX…

In the end, though, the pick is a song made unforgettable by its use in one of the most beloved teen movies ever, "The Breakfast Club." (And yes, of course Anthony Michael Hall is my Breakfast Club spirit animal...)
open.spotify.com/track/3fH4KjXF…

Other notes from that Hot 100 list - - 5 appearances on there for Phil Collins. Between "No Jacket Required" and his soundtrack work, the dude was ubiquitous.

'85, of course, was also the year of "We Are the World" and the song widely acclaimed as the worst pop hit ever (and a source of eternal shame for Bay Area residents), "We Built This City."
gq.com/story/oral-his…

There's another song from that Hot 100 that's going to make an appearance later on the 52 Songs list, so stay tuned.

Finally, if you want to listen to me & @SweeperBoyCNC wax nostalgic about the golden age of 1980s soundtracks and "Don't You (Forget About Me)," check out this episode of @LinerPod.
pca.st/episode/84477d…

In the summer of 1986, I was a rising high school junior, and Peter Gabriel's "So" was the cassette tape I wore out. "In Your Eyes" was the best song on that album and is my pick for '86.
open.spotify.com/track/4qN7nSAV…

"So" was like nothing I'd ever heard. The album was released about three months before Paul Simon's "Graceland" and together the two brought a whole new world music accent to mainstream pop.

But "So" was also supremely weird for a mainstream pop album. Go back sometime and listen to "We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)" and "This Is The Picture (Excellent Birds)." The album was this insane, brilliant surprise box of stuff.

And then, three years later, Cameron Crowe used the song for *the* iconic scene in the *other* (after "The Breakfast Club") iconic teen movie for Gen X - - Lloyd Dobbler holding the boombox over his head outside Diane Court's window in "Say Anything."

As we we seen several times in this list, no one's ever done music in movies like @CameronCrowe. According to Rolling Stone, it was actually Fishbone playing on the box when they filmed...
rollingstone.com/movies/movie-l…

But something tells me "Skankin to the Beat" wouldn't have had quite the same impact in that spot.

It kills me a little not to have Crowded House's "Don't Dream It's Over" as the pick for '86, simply because it's one of the most beautiful & enduring pop songs ever. I'll make up for it by coming back for CH with a deep cut from a later album.
open.spotify.com/track/7G7tgVYO…

In 1987, I was a senior in high school and starting to dig into New Order and their roots in Joy Division. This cut from Substance is my pick for '87.
open.spotify.com/track/5uyJ7fbj…

I started paying attention because when I saw @U2 live and on all the bootlegs I collected, Bono would sing a final verse of "With Or Without You" that didn't exist on the album version and that would segue into the chorus of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart."

The Substance compilation is amazing but isn't available on @Spotify. Luckily, more than one user has made the effort to recreate it via playlist.
open.spotify.com/playlist/3XMZL…

For 1988, it's the only Top 40 hit ever from the Australian alternative band The Church. "Under the Milky Way" is such a moody, amazing song - - no wonder it spoke to me at 17 going on 18.
open.spotify.com/track/1RCtHLyq…

Since the start of the pandemic, @TheNational lead singer @Mattberninger has been curating a great, eclectic @Spotify playlist he calls Social Distancing Distortion. I was really pleased to see "Under the Milky Way" make the cut.
open.spotify.com/playlist/1LAvJ…

Both @TheNational *and* Social Distortion will be making appearances later in my list!

So as we know, I grew up in California, then went to college "in Boston" (HT @donmillenjr), so the first time I ever heard @connellsmusic was when "Something to Say" went into rotation on MTV in the early summer of 1989.
open.spotify.com/track/7CuZNZLs…

And almost immediately I bought "Fun and Games" and then "Boylan Heights" and "Darker Days" and turned into a total fanboy.

Saw them live after they released "One Simple Word," opening for The Replacements at the Tower in Philly in the spring of 1990. It was The Mats' last tour; Westerberg threw a temper tantrum and left the stage briefly during Skyway.

Seeing them live in Boston in the winter of 1993-94 on the "Ring" tour, one of the darkest periods of my life, helped keep me afloat.

And @SarahWPW & I saw them in NYC in '97 and again at #SpeedStreet in 2000, the first year we were in Charlotte.

And of course living here for the last 20 years has put me in the middle of all kinds of Chapel Hill folks who were OG @connellsmusic.

So it was honestly one of the coolest nights in my life two years ago when my friends @TheBalsaGliders opened for @connellsmusic at the National in RVA and I got to hang around with everyone.

Doug McMillan was sick and his voice was shot, but he soldiered on like the pro he is and all us old people in the audience knew all the words and filled in for him and it was really cool.

The OGs all go with "Scotty's Lament" or "Darker Days," the Europeans all know them for "74-75," which charted over there, but for me it all started with "Something to Say," so that's my pick. And so many thanks to you guys, @connellsmusic.

1990 was one of the easiest picks on this list. Midnight Oil's "Blue Sky Mining" was the album of that year and "One Country" (the next to last track) is the statement song that echoes 30 years later.
open.spotify.com/track/2i65lsTv…

"Don't call me baby / Don't talk in maybes / Don't talk like has-beens / Sing it like it should be"
I saw them twice on tour that summer of 1990, once in Massachusetts and once in LA, and this song was a show-stopped both times.

The whole album is a masterpiece. The Oils were at peak power, coming off "Diesel and Dust." "Forgotten Years" is the other masterpiece, about a nation fighting over the story it wants to tell about itself.
open.spotify.com/track/6PrbbxJF…

Not to mention one of the great album covers ever. @SweeperBoyCNC and I have talked about needing to do a @LinerPod about this album and World Party's "Goodbye Jumbo" -- the two forgotten masterpieces of our college years.

Five days ago, back in 1986 when I passed over "Don't Dream It's Over," I promised a Crowded House entry further down the line, and here it is, from 1991's "Woodface."
open.spotify.com/track/6tXnRSvu…

I think most people stopped paying much attention to CH after that debut album and DDIO, but I fell in love with their sound and with Neil Finn's songwriting. "Woodface," which came out in the summer of '91 is top to bottom their strongest album.

I've always loved the first line of this song, "Walkin round the room singing stormy weather / At 57 Mount Pleasant Street." That summer of '91 I lived with a bunch of friends in a professor's house in Cambridge, Mass., very close to Mount Pleasant Street.

So this song takes me right back to there and then - - and of course the idea of being in love with someone being it's own self-contained atmospheric system.

I encourage anyone interested in the broader Crowded House / Neil Finn catalog to dig deep. Like I said, he's one of the great songwriters alive today. He and his brother Tim put out a great album in the early 2000s.
open.spotify.com/album/3aAnf4Th…

And he's done some great work with broader groups of artists, including Johnny Marr and Eddie Vedder, under the 7 Worlds Collide rubric.
open.spotify.com/album/7v0aq08G…

Since I seem to have struck a chord among the Crowded House/ Finn Brothers fanbase, I'll put a deep cut favorite out there - - a live cover of the Hunters & Collectors from a show at the Roxy in LA. A great, passionate love song.
open.spotify.com/track/4mYOPnNZ…

They put this out as the B side to the CD single of "Distant Sun" from "Together Alone" in the US and also included it in the extended greatest hits album a few years later. I absolutely adore it.

The pick for 1992 is the lead track off Social Distortion's second album, "Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell," "Cold Feelings."
open.spotify.com/track/2VKhgYet…

I'd first heard Social D's self-titled debut album in the summer of '90, with classics like "Ball and Chain" and their punk cover of "Ring of Fire," so I was fired up for this album to come out and it did not disappoint.

Saw them in concert that spring in Boston, my senior year in college, with my friend Dawn - - just a great show. And the band has continued to make great music for much of the 30 years since, even landing on a couple of @SweeperBoyCNC's X-mas Mix compilations.

It's 1993 now. My experience my whole life is that even with albums that later rank as Hall of Famers for me, I need at least 3-5 listens before something really starts to grab hold of me.

I don't know if other people are like this, but for me, it's almost like I need to "learn" the music or it needs to lay down pathways in my brain a few times before I can tell whether it's really speaking to me.

One of the only cases of love at first listen in my life that I can remember - - and that I remember very distinctly - - was Counting Crows' "August and Everything After," in the summer of 1993.

And it was every... single... track. I don't think there's ever been a debut album like it in my lifetime. "Round Here," "Mister Jones," "Omaha," "Rain King," "Sullivan Street."

And my favorite has always been the album closer, "A Murder of One," with the kick-ass opening riff, "Blue morning, blue morning / wrapped in strands of fist and bone, " and the "One for sorrow / Two for joy" recitation.
open.spotify.com/track/7ye3N9Ff…

Adam Duritz always brings his full self to this song in concert, and they've released some great extended live versions over the years.
open.spotify.com/track/6pBmvuvg…

But I'll stick with the original album version - - those opening notes and the initial kick-in of drums and guitar never fails to bring a smile to my face and a lift to my soul.

By 1994, I was living in Providence, RI, working for the @AP bureau there and listening to the alt-rock revolution on @WBRU. "Feel The Pain," the lead track off @dinosaurjr's "Without A Sound," was in heavy rotation.
open.spotify.com/track/28c4nfBH…

This song captures alt-rock in the '90s like no other for me. The only real competitor is Ben Folds Five's "Underground," which I love - - but a quarter-century later it doesn't stand up to "Feel The Pain."

@dinosaurjr and lead singer @jmascis continue to make great music to this day, so I encourage everyone to dig into their catalog. A personal favorite from their early years is this bonkers punk cover of The Cure's "Just Like Heaven."
open.spotify.com/track/0c3e1dqX…

And yes... The cover version is meant to end really abruptly. Also, it got the Robert Smith seal of approval. According to this online magazine, it's the second-best Cure cover ever recorded!
faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-10-best-co…

Wow! Like a time machine. Buddy Cianci is mayor, David Cicilline is a crusading defense lawyer and the General Assembly can't decide whether to build the Providence Place mall...

https://twitter.com/WBRU/status/1301314494568771585

For 1995, a little bit of a "cheat." Tom Petty's masterpiece, "Wildflowers," was released in November '94, but this track, "You Wreck Me," was released as a single and charted in 1995.
open.spotify.com/track/0YkbYk24…

Picking a favorite Tom Petty line is an impossible task, but for me, "I'll be the boy in the corduroy pants / You'll be the girl at the high school dance" is near the top of the list.

This was Petty's first and greatest collaboration with Rick Rubin and was so fertile that a bunch of songs that didn't make it on the album made it into the "She's The One" soundtrack that Petty did put out with the Heartbreakers in 1996.
open.spotify.com/album/0FVwC6le…

The movie is forgettable unless you're into peak Maxine Bahns, but there are some great tunes on the album, including *both* versions of "Walls." "Some days are diamonds / Some days are rocks... Half of me is ocean / Half of me is sky."
open.spotify.com/track/5yEpB2g3…

One thing that crushed me about Petty's death in 2017 was that he was still doing great work. "Down South, from 2006's" Highway Companion" is brilliant. "Impress all the women / Pretend I'm Samuel Clemens / Wear seersucker and white linens"
open.spotify.com/track/6p7KoBh8…

I'm looking forward to the release this fall of a long-awaited compilation of outtakes, demos and other archived material from the "Wildflowers" sessions. tompetty.com/wildflowersand…

There's a tendency when talking about REM to establish credibility by saying stuff like, "It was all downhill after Murmur," which I never bought into. So my pick for 1996 is "Electrolite," the last song on "New Adventures in Hifi."
open.spotify.com/track/6TU0zW9q…

The run from "Out of Time" through this album was just unreal - - one of the great four album peaks I've ever watched unfold. "New Adventures" was recorded mostly on the road during the "Monster" tour and has some incredible stuff.

I love this song for the piano line, for the LA references to Mulholland Drive, the rhyming of Jimmy Dean, Martin Sheen and Steve McQueen, and the brilliant line "20th century go to sleep."

And of course the line that closes the album, "I'm not scared / I'm outta here." Peak Michael Stipe, as far as I'm concerned.

Other album highlights for me are "Wake Up Bomb," "New Test Leper" and "E-Bow the Letter." If you're one of those people who quit on REM when "Out of Time" made them a Top 40 sensation, I really encourage you to go back and give this album a listen. It's awesome.

As a bonus, here's an under-rated cut from "Out of Time." You haven't lived until you've seen @TheBalsaGliders cover this one live.
open.spotify.com/track/7xHY1Rv4…

In 1997, I was living in Brooklyn and reporting for the NYC desk @AP. I had heard and loved @radiohead's "The Bends," but "OK Computer," which came out in '97, blew my mind. The pick is "Exit Music (For a Film)."
open.spotify.com/track/4Na0siMt…

Side A and Side B took on less meaning in the CD age, but I would propose that Side B of "The Bends" into Side A of "OK Computer" is one of the all-time great song sequences ever. - - "My Iron Lung" through "Karma Police."

As a soundscape and dread-laden vision of the digital future, "OK Computer" sounds better with each passing year, all the more so for having been recorded in the very earliest months of Internet 1.0, back when optimism and not doom was the prevailing sentiment.