Pork Chop Willy's Finest Hour: My Favorite Albums, 15-10

He also demonstrates his remarkable imagination and wisdom as a songwriter. Jim relishes playful storytelling and comical character studies, as expressed in “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim,” “Hard Time Losin’ Man,” and “Rapid Roy (The Stock Car Boy).” But Jim also makes space for reflection: he battles conflicting feelings about where and with whom he should be in “New York’s Not My Home,” “Operator,” “Walking Back to Georgia,” and “Box #10”; he lovingly thinks to the past in “Photographs and Memories” and “A Long Time Ago”; and he imagines a better future in “Tomorrow’s Gonna Be a Brighter Day” and “Hey Tomorrow.”

The tune that makes the album stand apart packs the greatest emotional punch. “Time In a Bottle” is a touching but tragically prophetic love song that carries new meaning given Croce’s death in a plane crash at age 30, only a year and a half after this album was released.

13. The Beatles, The Beatles: Because, SPOILER ALERT, I may be discussing this band more in later stages of this countdown, I will be brief with The White Album, whose dramatic history and extraordinary artistic legacy are certainly worth studying on your own time. This ranking may suggest that I’m not as sky-high on this record as your average Beatles aficionado, but the truth is, I’m still growing into The White Album. Only in the past year, really, have I begun to hear what they were doing on a deeper level, shifting from my childhood avoidance of their less accessible tracks to a more mature and holistic immersion. Although some of those abstract tunes still don’t quite do it for me, the songs I do like I absolutely love (among my favorite Beatles tracks); and I am a devoted appreciator of music, so I recognize the monumental importance of this album in which these four inventive musicians explored their diverse musical influences and introduced revolutionary sounds.

I’ll quickly run through the tunes I deem iconic: “Dear Prudence,” “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” “Blackbird,” “Rocky Raccoon,” “Why Don’t We Do It In the Road?”, “Julia,” “Cry Baby Cry,” “Good Night,” and the short but sweet Paul McCartney masterpiece, “I Will.”

First, this album came out five months after the 2016 election and emerges as a distinctly post-Drumpf cultural artifact. Throughout these tracks, Kendrick responds subtly and explicitly to the onset of the Drumpf administration with both visceral and intellectual contemplations of what it means to be black in America. He critiques and even directly counters the mainstream conservative discourse while demonstrating a bleak but accurate understanding of entrenched structures of dominance that not only perpetuate inequity and injustice but also harmfully warp subjugated populaces’ visions of themselves. It’s not a place, Bono sings alongside Kendrick’s incredible third verse in “XXX.,” this country is to me a sound of drum and bass. You close your eyes to look around. That second sentence leads to my second point: what separates this album thematically is Kendrick’s deeply existential conception of the self and society as one and the same. Throughout these tracks, he explores and challenges himself and the world he inhabits simultaneously, as if to suggest that there is not and never can be any true distance between the two. Hence the album’s finale, “DUCKWORTH.,” begins with, It was always me vs. the world, until I found it’s me vs. me. Third and finally, this is one of a few albums on this list with which I had an especially powerful and memorable listening experience. In eleventh grade, my AP Music Theory class took a period to listen to this album shortly after it came out, and I remember sitting for fifty minutes in our small classroom in back of my high school’s music office on that pleasant May morning, with the lights off and Kendrick blasting on the speakers, and finding myself floating off into the music like I perhaps never had before. I can’t give words to how exactly that listening session was one of many turning points in my young adulthood, but I know it was one.

10. Charlie Parker, Charlie Parker with Strings: I don’t have nearly as much to say about this album: the singularly remarkable Charlie Parker plays over beautiful string arrangements of jazz standards. What’s not to love? The reason why this album ranks so high, for me, is simple yet significant: if I had to choose just one album, of the millions released in the history of music production, to be the soundtrack for my life, it would be this one, without a doubt. In other words, if my everyday life were a movie, with background music constantly playing, I would want this album to supply said soundscapes. That endorsement speaks partly to the emotional versatility of these recordings, but also to the masterfully executed musical collaboration between Parker, his rhythm section, and the strings. It’s far from the most groundbreaking or influential of the saxophonist’s collective works, but Charlie Parker With Strings is soothing in its simplicity.