The White Stripes achieved broader success with Elephant, specifically through its lead single “Seven Nation Army,” which has been played at every single sporting event since its release in 2003. I had snatched up both Elephant and its predecessor, White Blood Cells...
I’m actually kind of surprised that Back in Black has held up for me all these years, since it was one of the first classic rock albums I got into, and it’s arguably one of the most straightforward hard rock albums ever. But I’ve never grown tired of listening to it,...
Before Radiohead released In Rainbows, I was familiar with their work, but only just. Their breakthrough single “Creep” still receives a fair amount of airplay on modern rock radio even today, and I knew some of their other songs like “Paranoid Android,” “Karma...
It wasn’t long after I started listening to Bruce in high school that I stumbled upon a link to his work in the unlikeliest of places: my AP (i.e., college-level) Latin class. We spent an entire year reading Vergil’s Aeneid (in Latin and English) when I was a junior,...
When I was in college, the Guitar Hero and Rock Band fad (which has since come to a merciful end) reared its ugly head, beginning in the spring of my freshman year with the release of Guitar Hero II for the Xbox 360 and lasting through the fall of my junior year with...
While on the surface The Beatles (usually referred to as "The White Album") may seem like group effort, the name is a bit of a misnomer. The truth is that the band splintered apart during the making of this album, with each member going in a different direction. The...
I didn’t get into Stevie Ray Vaughan until I learned to play his work on the guitar. When I was a sophomore in college, I roomed with my friend Andrew, who has a Fender Stratocaster. He let me play it whenever I wanted, and I jumped at the chance. I had always wanted...
Steely Dan is one of the first classic rock bands I got into when I was fifteen or sixteen, and Aja was the first album of theirs that became a part of my repertoire. I didn’t listen to jazz at all back then, so Aja‘s abundance of jazzy textures and flavors was a bit...
The fall of 1991 turned out to be one of the most fertile and explosive phases of the all-too-brief grunge movement, as Pearl Jam’s debut Ten (August 20), Nirvana’s second record Nevermind (September 24), and Soundgarden’s third album Badmotorfinger (October 22) were...
L.A. Woman is the Doors’ final album with Jim Morrison, and it’s also my favorite. It’s easily the most blues-oriented of any of the Doors’ albums, and the psychedelic madness of their self-titled debut seems pretty far in their rear view mirror by this point. I had...