Melissa Etheridge - Melissa Etheridge

Back in the day I had two of Melissa's albums: this one and her follow-up Brave and Crazy. I was a rocker (at least I said I was, but I still liked Christopher Cross, so go figure) and not hearing anything else as captivating as "Bring Me Some Water," I stopped listening to her stuff. It didn't help that the radio stations I liked didn't seem to play anything of hers, so I just moved on.

Of course she'd go on to have one hell of a career I know little to nothing about. Despite me thinking her debut was as good as it got for her, history tells another story. If you're a fan, I mean a REAL fan, you know more than I do. So I'm going to just listen to this one in a vacuum and contain my commentary to the ten songs on her debut. Seems like a reasonable compromise and it'll keep me contained and hopefully on track.

The album opens with "Similar Features" and man is it a great track - it still sounds so good. I bought the album because "Bring Me Some Water" was jaw dropping. Looking at the track list, the first side was all new to me. It was inevitable that I was going to be weighing everything I heard against the song on the radio. Even now as I get reacquainted with the album, I find myself almost falling into the same trap I set for myself all those years ago. To be honest, when I found the record again I bought it again so I could get that one song ... call me a sucker.

Admittedly, back then and even now, it was a terrible way to listen to the record. I still inadvertently focused my attention on one song, but I was determined not to miss out on a whole album worth of great songs. I had been looking through the wrong end of the telescope, I wasn't going to do that again. Having said that, back in '88 I didn't dismiss the entire album, but I had passed judgment early and moved on to other things before I was able to really let this one sink in.

It happens ... it still happens.

However, here I am decades later with another chance to revisit an album I always thought was good but still associated with a single track, and while after the dust has settled I still think the centrepiece is "Bring Me Some Water," it is not the heart and soul of the record. It is an album that is at its best when listened to in a sitting ... in my case I played it over and over for a couple of days.

What stands out is the interplay between the core trio of Etheridge, drummer Craig Krampf and bassist Kevin McCormick, who co-produced and arranged the tracks. Niko Bolas served as the other co-producer and also recorded and mixed the album. To help flesh things out, they brought in Waddy Wachtel on guitar along with some others (they're names I don't recognize, but their contributions sounded great). However, it is the core trio who anchor everything, and they ... are ... awesome, and the record still sounds so good.

I only had those first two albums of hers, and while I don't have a lot of knowledge with respect to her later output, this one will forever cement her place as one of the greats.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

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