Nick Lowe — Labour of Lust
As with so many artists, I came late to Nick Lowe. he was right there in my prime record-buying, music-listening years, and yet I paid him very little attention in his early solo years,...
Category: ’80s
John Lennon and Yoko Ono — Milk and Honey
Well, here’s another one I hadn’t listened to in decades, and didn’t really remember very well. There were a couple of tracks that had made it onto mix tapes at the time, and those...
John Lennon and Yoko Ono — Heart Play: Unfinished Dialogue
After John Lennon was murdered, I put together a tape of Lennon songs (both Beatles and post-Beatles). I had recorded a long-form radio interview he had done to promote Double Fantasy, and copied snippets...
John Lennon and Yoko Ono — Double Fantasy
Okay. It’s the fall of 1980, a time when my Beatlemaniac roommate and I were living in the apartment building we called The Embassy, on the corner of University and Harrison in Syracuse, just...
Christine Lavin — Good Thing He Can’t Read My Mind
How did I discover Christine Lavin, several years before my big neofolk immersion? I think it had to have been through NPR. In the mid-’80s, and especially in my grad school years, NPR was...
Cyndi Lauper — She’s So Unusual
It’s hard to express how big this album was in 1984, how ubiquitous it was, and how long it was on the charts (77 weeks). Released in October 1983, the single “Girls Just Want...
The Laughing Dogs — The Laughing Dogs Meet Their Makers
A silly name and cover concept, though I liked it at the time, which was 1980. This is also a promo and I’m honestly not sure whether I bought it used or got it...
k.d. lang — Shadowland
I’m not sure when I would have heard of k.d. lang were it not for a Warner Records sampler CD series, the “Just Say Yes” series. The first one came out in November 1987,...
Eartha Kitt — I Love Men
There is precious little dance music in my collection. That’s not to say I haven’t had some over the years – in the mid-’80s I picked up a bunch of dancey soul and r&b. Rock...
Things We Said Today