Top 10 Albums

Side one, track one: "Thunder Road." From that first piano note you know you're somewhere different. The production is enormous. The ambition is larger. The result is the best American rock album ever made.

Recorded in a villa in France, half-falling apart, sprawling and imperfect and completely correct. The Stones at their loosest, which was also the Stones at their best. A mess that has outlasted every clean thing they ever made.

The title track alone would make this list. Add "When Doves Cry," "Let's Go Crazy," and "I Would Die 4 U" and you have the most complete statement any artist made in the 1980s. Prince arrived and never left.

Recorded while the band was falling apart in real time. The tension is in every track. The songs are about each other. The result is one of the best-selling albums in history, which makes complete sense once you listen.

The best-selling jazz album of all time. Modal jazz explained in one session. So Cool. So Dark. So Right. Coltrane. Cannonball. Bill Evans. Miles. The album that convinced an entire generation that jazz could be meditative.

Q-Tip and Phife over jazz basslines. Hip-hop that trusted itself to be intelligent. The album that proved rap could coexist with acoustic instruments and that the collaboration would make both better.

The follow-up to Born to Run that got harder, leaner, and more desperate. "Badlands." "The Promised Land." "Racing in the Street." A blue-collar record that never condescended to its subject matter.

Paul Simon went to South Africa, listened, collaborated, and came home with something nobody had made before. The controversy was real. The music was realer. Twenty years later it still sounds like a discovery.

Twelve songs, twenty-five million copies sold, four Grammys. Carole King sat down at a piano and described what it felt like to be human in 1971, and the feeling hasn't dated a single day.

Recorded alone on a four-track cassette. No band. No production. Just a man and a guitar and some of the darkest American stories ever set to music. The album that proved the voice and the song were always enough.