Rick Moody, Marc Woodworth, and Adam Braver at Salmagundi:
I will start by saying that I have always been drawn to the early solo era – something that in my mind runs from McCartney to Red Rose Speedway. Such an assessment is more visceral than logical or analytical, no doubt a function of being a child in a household that got excited about these albums as they came out, and the way that that excitement slowly became my own with each new release, the records and songs becoming my songs, my moments, and in a way, I suppose, the nascent connection of an inner me, one completely reliant on others for survival, to the independent consciousness and joy of someone else expressing himself. Ask me any day which was my record of that time and I’d immediately tell you Ram, an album that I can’t remember not loving, one of those albums in which every note, every beat, every nuance, playful and affecting, feels like it is part of my wiring. A close second, if not a tie, would be McCartney. There is a unifying tone over that whole album that, for what has been nearly my whole life, has been one of warmth and welcome – not to mention so many incredible songs that still hold up, from those that we later learned had been rehearsed with the Beatles as possibilities for Get Back, to “Maybe I’m Amazed,” arguably one of the best songs of all time, from melody to arrangement to lyrics to performance. And yet, as I sit down to write this, the record that asserts itself for this moment is the third in the early line-up, 1971’s Wild Life.
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