I kind of ignored Radiohead for a long time. In fact, they were pretty easy to ignore. They haven’t made a straight-up rock record since 1997‘s OK Computer, and they haven’t had much of a presence on commercial channels since. Yet their records have continued to sell...
I’m not much of a Smashing Pumpkins fan, but I absolutely love Siamese Dream. In fact, I was shocked by how much I liked this album the first time I heard it. The song I had most associated with the Smashing Pumpkins was “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” a song I found...
My introduction to Bon Iver came from the most unexpected of places: therapy. I suffer from an anxiety disorder, and after I graduated from college and moved out to Los Angeles I struggled with the enormity of being on my own in a huge city where I didn’t really know...
About two weeks after I moved to Los Angeles in September 2010, I was at the Bed, Bath & Beyond on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City and I ran into Adam Carolla's wife Lynette at the checkout. Adam's famous for his radio work, particularly his ten years as co-host...
Nevermind is one of those albums that I heard almost all of before I actually sat down and listened to it. The singles — “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “In Bloom,” “Come As You Are” and “Lithium” — are still played regularly today on alternative rock radio, and “Breed,”...
The first Steely Dan song I ever loved was “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” I was in 10th grade, just getting into classic rock, and I absolutely fell in love with that song when I heard it on the radio. Luckily for me, my dad’s a Steely Dan fan, and he had their...
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot turned out to be one of the most heavily praised albums of the '00s, and with good reason. This is about as ambitious as anything you'll find these days in popular music, and it proved to not be commercially viable enough for their label, Reprise,...
If you're most people, you're thinking this must be the wrong Let It Be. But no, this is an alternative rock classic from the 1980s. In fact, this is the first of very few entries from the 1980s on my list; if you're like me, you try to forget the '80s ever happened....
Many nicknames have been given to Temple of the Dog over the past twenty years, including "Pearl Jam's first album" and "the first great grunge album," neither of which is inaccurate. Every member of Pearl Jam's current lineup (Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard, Mike...
In 2001, the Strokes released Is This It to great acclaim, kick-starting the garage rock revival of the early 2000s. A lot of other bands followed in their footsteps, including the Hives, the Vines, Jet, and a whole bunch of others I haven't thought of in 8-10 years....