Its Better than I Ever Knew

Some of my co-workers and I started sharing some of our favorite music. We’ve been doing it for a while, but now we’re actually reviewing them and sharing those reviews with one another.

This week it wasn’t an album. It was a mix of 10 songs from our senior year of high school. For some of us these would have been literal mixtapes. My list has songs which were big the summer before my senior year through graduation. And they are songs I liked at the time. For other people they might be older songs which they liked while they were in high school (if I would have done that, The Beatles would have made the list)(spoiler: The Beatles weren’t on my list). For others, they might be songs which were popular, but they didn’t like them until later. Whatever.

I’m pretty sure this post has more tags than any other I’ve ever written.

Tim’s mix (1996-1997)

“While I did graduate in 1996, my graduating class was 1997, so I am pulling from music all the way to ’97. This includes songs popular then, and songs recorded around then, or songs I just liked and listened to a lot. I thought it would be fun to arrange them in album style, by where I think the best listening order is. So, while the same artist might be listed multiple times, I think it is more enjoyable to listen to in the order below:”

Jump off Van Halen’s 1984

All the Things We Think We Might be Missing

Some of my co-workers and I started sharing some of our favorite music. We’ve been doing it for a while, but now we’re actually reviewing them and sharing those reviews with one another. So here are the four albums that were suggested to me this week.

A note on how I rate things. One star means I don’t think it qualifies as music. Five stars mean I wish I wrote the thing. Most music for me is a three.

Sting – The Soul Cages (1991)

Sting’s dad died in 1989, and this was him coming to terms with his father’s death. Apparently it’s a concept album that focuses on death, burial, and reconciliation.

I’ve always been a moderate Police/Sting fan, but even objectively this album was pretty darn good. There were two songs that really stood out to me as highlights.