Welcome everyone to the latest edition of Top Five Fridays! Since I forgot to do one last week, I’m giving you two for the price of one this week.
One of the biggest inspirations for this blog is the movie High Fidelity. If you’ve never seen it, make some time to check it out in the near future. One of the first lists that the group goes through is a pretty basic one: Top Five Side Ones, Track Ones. Keep in mind this is purely my opinion so maybe you have some different choices and that’s fine.
5. Tom Sawyer by Rush (Moving Pictures)
I can remember hearing Moving Pictures for the first time back in high school and being blown away because I had never heard anything like this before. The drum solo by Neil Peart is still one of the best of all time and I’ve done more than my share of steering wheel drum solos to this song, probably way more than In the Air Tonight.
A general rule of thumb when it comes to making a good playlist or a mixtape (remember those?) is to start out strong and really set the tone. The same can be said when you listen to a good album. You don’t want to come out the gates with a slow tempo track. This album made me a fan of Rush, but it was the opening salvo that truly hooked me in.
4. Black Dog by Led Zeppelin (Zeppelin IV)
Going back to that rule of thumb, I think Zeppelin could have gone with Rock and Roll as the opening track and it would’ve been just as good. However, it’s something about Black Dog that makes me want to get up and groove.
It’s got that signature blues style of Led Zeppelin in an album that changed musical stylings more than the amount of times I changed the order of this list. One of my all-time favorite albums and it starts off with a banger. Sure there are other Zeppelin albums I could’ve chosen, but this was an album that I listened to on a loop back in the community college days. For what it’s worth, it was between this and Whole Lotta Love off of Zeppelin II.
3. This Is Who We Are by Hawthorne Heights (If Only You Were Lonely)
If you went to high school in the mid 2000’s, odds are you went through an emo phase. It’s justifiable considering the music scene at the time with Panic! At the Disco, Fall Out Boy, and others dominating the scene. While most grew out of it, I recently rediscovered my love for the genre before my ten-year reunion.
I still have their first two albums and they’ve been a band that just stuck with me for a long time. While I enjoy The Silence In Black and White a lot more, this is the superior opening track with the driving guitars at the beginning of the song. It just establishes the tone of the album being just a little bit heavier and it worked for them. Sadly, the group wasn’t the same after Casey Calvert passed away in 2007.
2. Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana (Nevermind)
All it took was four chords to change the landscape of music in the 90’s. It started the grunge movement and was the opening track on another one of my personal favorite albums.
When I heard this song playing one afternoon in middle school, it hit all the right notes and made a fan of not only Nirvana, but a fan of all things hard rock. It sets the tone for the rest of the album and gets you in the right mode.
1. Elevated by State Champs (The Finer Things)
After a lapse in enrollment, I went back to school at UL and one of my first friends mentioned State Champs to me. Did a quick Google search of them and was immediately hooked. While most of these songs are just songs that really set the tone of an album, this is a song that I’ve listened to constantly the last few years.
I’ve had it in solid rotation on my phone and on my computer, but one set of lyrics I keep going back to in the second verse: “I’m finally acquiring the state of mind that everything is gonna be alright”. The first time I actually heard those lyrics, I wasn’t sure about a lot of things. I wasn’t 100 percent happy with the way things were going in my life, but started to change my perspective on things once I heard those lyrics. Fast forward a little more than three years later, that attitude helped me get here.
-Clint@1063RL