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Seven Songs from a Magical Year in Music
They don’t write them like this anymore
It’s been almost a month since my last Rate-A-Record installment, something I never would have thought possible (I’ve written 115 of the damn things over the past three years, after all). I explained the reason here, but even as I wrote that piece I was sure a Rate-A-Record would follow within a day or two. I was wrong.
I’ve gone back and forth for the past week trying to decide how to get back on the music-writing horse. The most obvious cure is Springsteen, but nothing new came to mind; as much as I love mentioning “Born to Run” in stories that have nothing to do with Bruce, it just didn’t seem like the right direction at the moment. Nor did The Smiths, songs about Spring, or the best political protest songs for our current madness.
The answer finally came from the most unlikely source: the comment section of a story about the 50th anniversary of the Joan Baez album Diamonds & Rust. I was thrilled that so many others love the record as much as I do, but something else stood out in the comments: multiple people commented on how great a year 1975 was for music. That is an obvious fact, as it’s the year that Born to Run (aka The Greatest Album Ever) was released, but there was far more than just Bruce that year.
