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 , ...

David Baerwald - Bedtime Stories

The little sticker on the shrinkwrap says, "You may remember David Baerwald from David & David's Boomtown ..." You bet, I remembered David Baerwald. Back in 1986 Boomtown was an album with moments of sheer brilliance. The whole album may not have been as top shelf as the first few tracks, but that didn't matter - it is an excellent album. I waited for a follow-up ... and waited, and then in 1990 it was a solo David, David Baerwald, who dropped Bedtime Stories . I snapped it up. "All For You," the opening cut, is still my favourite song on the album. It was mesmerizing. I'm not sure if the song got any airplay, it may have, but that may have been wishful thinking on my part as it was on a lot of mix tapes at the time and I heard it a lot in the car. The CD had a great booklet with all of the musician credits and lyrics. Oddly, when I found a sealed copy of the record (a great score), it just had a plain paper insert - the picture of David walking wit...

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continued to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self-titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner, who had been with Gary from the b...

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