“What really matters is what you like, not what you are like.”
– Nick Hornby, High Fidelity (1995)
Readers who have enjoyed our interviews from time to time know that we typically ask artists to share their five favorite albums of all time at the end of our conversations with them. No matter who the artist is, it’s always fascinating to discover which long players have impacted their personal and professional lives. A few of our interview subjects have even scoffed at the standard five-album limit, rattling off upwards of a dozen or so titles and second-guessing if they’ve made the right choices.
And now, we’re excited to reveal our writers’ respective lists of their 25 all-time favorite albums. We all reserve the right to change our minds about these choices in the future, but for now, here are the indispensable albums that we can’t live without and the reasons why.
Explore Mark J. Marraccini’s 25 favorites below, click the “Next” button to browse the lists or return to the main index.
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Bear’s Den
Red Earth & Pouring Rain
Communion (2016)
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This is one of those albums I always tell people to check out. Its sprawling journey of personal stories surrounded by emotive guitars and sleek synths remind me of how late summer sunsets would sound if you could hear the colors of the horizon.
Beyoncé
RENAISSANCE
Parkwood/Columbia (2022)
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The moment I finished my first spin of Beyoncé’s RENAISSANCE, I knew I’d want this album in my vinyl collection forever. It’s meticulously produced and sequenced so perfectly that I’ve never shuffled it and rarely want to hear any of the songs out of context of the album journey.
RENAISSANCE is referential without cringe, buttery with aural pleasure, and when I sing songs like “HEATED,” “CHURCH GIRL” or “PURE/HONEY” in the car or on a run—their wordplay serves up a yummy mouthfeel that I’ve never experienced with an album before.
Blondie
Autoamerican
Chrysalis (1980)
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I was in sixth grade when Blondie released this album and I remember bringing my vinyl copy to my elementary school’s “Show and Tell” day while my other classmates brought their favorite toys. That’s how into Autoamerican I was at the time. I love dipping back into this album because it’s so all over the place in its mix of new wave, reggae, swing, rhythm & blues (the list of genres they played with goes on…), yet it still possesses that subtly distanced Blondie “cool” that unifies the entire collection. Also, “Europa” is one of the finest album openers ever.
Mariah Carey
Butterfly
Columbia (1997)
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Every time I want to hear some Mariah, Butterfly is always the first of her studio albums that I turn to. It’s the actual “Emancipation of Mimi” where she broke free of a doomed marriage and a tightly controlled artist image that surely would have pegged her in the Céline Dion lane for a majority of her career. On Butterfly, she was finally unleashed and, without fully abandoning the balladry that catapulted her to stardom, leaned into more rhythm & blues and hip-hop with songs that were playful, thoughtful, flirty and definitely “grown.”
Elvis Costello & Burt Bacharach
Painted from Memory
Mercury (1998)
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It’s so odd that I ever fell in love with this album in 1998 because I never really listened to either Elvis Costello or Burt Bacharach before. But the drama within the lyrics and the wrought emotions wrung out by the arrangements keep me coming back to this collection repeatedly.
Enigma
MCMXC a.D.
Virgin/Charisma (1990)
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Horses, heavy breathing, planetary swirls, Gregorian chanting, sensual backbeats and glimpses of new jack swing imbue Enigma’s debut album with a romantic combination of erotic adventure and religious refinement.
The hypnotic contradiction between the sacred and the profane on MCMXC a.D. always makes me feel like I’m floating in space whenever I pull up this album. What a trip.
Everything But the Girl
Amplified Heart
Atlantic/Blanco y Negro (1994)
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I’ve written previously about how Amplified Heart is an album that has shown up for me whenever I’ve needed it most. It’s an album that never ages and always can drown out the chaos of the world and quiet my mind. Gotta put on emotional scuba gear for this one because it goes deep, but always brings you back to the surface in the end.
Patty Griffin
Living with Ghosts
A&M (1996)
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The first time I heard “Moses”—the opening salvo on Patty Griffin’s 1996 debut album Living With Ghosts—I cried. I had never heard such unadorned and immediate desperation in a song before until I played that song and the rest of this album.
Living With Ghosts is sparse by design; it’s just Griffin and a guitar. No drums. No background singers. Nowhere to hide. But it packs a powerful punch that always sets me back on my heels.
Janet Jackson
Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814
A&M (1989)
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This album will always remind me of living in the top floor of my fraternity house in 1989 and blasting this CD constantly. I had come of age during the rise of 24-hour cable news and was blown away by an album that seamlessly integrated songs about how fucked up our country was with songs about love, longing and escaping to have a good time. It’s that rare artistic range in one collection that keeps me coming back to this album time and time again.
Labrinth
Imagination & The Misfit Kid
Syco (2019)
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This album came out in 2019, but I know I’ll be returning to it years from now. There’s an unrestrained theatricality in its intricate stories and wild pastiche of arrangements that play like a soundtrack to a movie I’ve yet to see. I always find myself dreaming into the scenes and characters behind each song.
Lady Gaga
Born This Way
Interscope/Streamline/Kon Live (2011)
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I applaud this album’s messy excess and grand excursions. It’s exactly what I wanted from an artist like Lady Gaga who’s a little rough around the edges herself. Every time I listen to Born This Way (a lot of times at the gym or on a run), the songs all remind me of rooms of the hotel in Madonna’s “Justify My Love” video—each room has a little something different for whatever you’re into, but the hotel is definitely the place to be.
Madonna
Ray of Light
Maverick/Warner Bros. (1998)
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If you weren’t old enough to have started with Madonna in the early ‘80s, then you’ll never organically understand why Ray of Light is the most important album of her career. In the mid ‘90s after Madonna worked with Babyface and David Foster, aimed for serious performer cred with Evita, and released the ballad compilation Something To Remember, many of us who had been with her since the beginning felt she was on her way out. But Ray of Light proved she wasn’t done—she was just looking inward a bit more and gifted us a stunning, twilight-hued glimpse at the woman she had become.
Madonna
Music
Maverick/Warner Bros. (2000)
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Whenever I want to hear Madonna, Music is the first album I return to. It’s loose and colorful and always reminds me of long nights on the dance floor at clubs like Roxy and Twilo in New York City or The Pavilion on Fire Island in the summer of 2000. The remixes off this album were EVERYWHERE during that time. The whole campaign surrounding this album era was flawless.
Madonna
Confessions on a Dance Floor
Warner Bros. (2005)
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There’s a reason why this album is constantly referred to as a standard-bearer for dance pop albums: there are NO SKIPS (even “Isaac”—which I know some of you click right past). A course-corrector after American Life (which has aged really well), Confessions brought us full-circle back to the ’82 Madonna we danced with in “Everybody.”
Metallica
S&M
Elektra/Vertigo (1999)
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I listen to this album in the gym ALL THE TIME and I’m not even a big Metallica fan. But I’m always quite moved by the absolutely cinematic arrangements between Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Pairing these two seemingly disparate music genres actually pushed the emotion behind Metallica’s songs to the forefront.
Alanis Morissette
Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie
Maverick/Reprise (1998)
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This Alanis Morissette album is way more confessional and meditative than its predecessor, the record-breaking Jagged Little Pill (1995). I always return to Supposed because it laid the groundwork for the complicated and empathetic spiritual seeker that Morissette has become over the last couple decades. The album always felt like a big F-U to the Jagged era and I totally love that.
Pet Shop Boys
Very
Parlophone (1993)
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Sure, I remembered “West End Girls,” “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” and “Always on My Mind” as a teen in the ‘80s, but I didn’t really connect with Pet Shop Boys until 1994 when I got a waiter job in a Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, restaurant owned by a gay couple. That’s when I first heard this album and began to appreciate the storytelling in Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe’s songs. It’s also when I began to connect with myself and start my journey of coming out—with Very soundtracking those first tentative steps.
Prince and The Revolution
Around the World in a Day
Paisley Park/Warner Bros. (1985)
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Around the World in a Day gets repeat spins from me because it reminds me of the more playful and sonically exploratory side of Prince. While Purple Rain may get all the attention, and rightfully so because it showed how hungry Prince was, I’m more inclined to spin this follow-up because it presents what inspired him after he became massively famous.
Charlie Puth
Voicenotes
Artist Partner/Atlantic (2018)
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It’s only two years old, but Voicenotes is a rare contemporary pop album that feels timeless to me. So many of the songs on Puth’s sophomore offering sound like they were conceived bassline first and it’s nearly impossible for me to ever play this album without singing along. No wonder why I own it on vinyl.
Sade
Lovers Rock
Epic (2000)
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Sade’s return in late 2000 was such a surprise to me. I went through high school and college while they released their first four albums, so when Lovers Rock arrived eight years after Love Deluxe, I felt like I had lived several lives during their hiatus. Lovers Rock arrived like an old friend. It soothed my soul during a fun but frenetic time in my life that was filled with chaotic excursions, risky adventures and high bpm’s on dance floors.
Lovers Rock slowed down the clock for me at that time with beautiful acoustic guitar and languid beats. Sade Adu’s warm vocal balm smoothed out the edges after frantic nights and weekends, while reconnecting me with the voice I fell in love with years prior when I was a much more innocent teenager.
I return to Lovers Rock often because it connects those two foundational eras of my life and provides respite whenever I want to get lost with a peaceful album.
Duncan Sheik
Humming
Atlantic (1998)
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I think it’s the slight cynicism in many of the songs on Duncan Sheik’s sophomore effort that hooked me originally when this album first came out. But over the years as my musical palette has broadened, it’s the string arrangements that I find myself constantly exploring further in depth every time I spin it.
Britney Spears
Blackout
Jive (2007)
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Blackout is Britney Spears at her most unbridled—a short-lived period of creative freedom sandwiched between two very controlled chapters of her career. The beats, her snarly and sensual vocals, and the sex that drive this dance album never lose their punch—no matter how many times I play it. And I play it a lot.
Barbra Streisand
The Broadway Album
Columbia (1985)
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I didn’t discover this album until the mid ‘90s, and even then I wasn’t a fan of musicals. I’m still not, but I love every song on this album because it introduced me to Barbra Streisand and her legendary talent as a lyric interpreter and performer. Because of this album, I grew to appreciate her voice, her career and her sense of humor.
Donna Summer
Live and More
Casablanca (1978)
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I was nine when this album came out and remember carrying my vinyl copy of it around to places—that’s how much I obsessed over Donna Summer and this concert album. I definitely loved “Last Dance,” “I Feel Love” and “Love to Love You Baby,” but I remember being really moved by her ballad performances of “The Way We Were” and “Mimi’s Song” —both of which taught me at a very young age that there were more layers to Summer than just the “disco diva” label that she was given.
U2
The Unforgettable Fire
Island (1984)
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I have a strong bond with this album because my first concert was U2’s “The Unforgettable Fire” tour in 1985 (April 9, Pittsburgh Civic Arena). There’s an intelligence and a thoughtfulness throughout this entire collection that, compared to their previous releases, are finally given room to breathe. This was the album that forced the 16-year old me to pay closer attention to lyrics and sonics. It laid the groundwork for my eventual love of thought-provoking bands like R.E.M. and storytelling artists like Bruce Springsteen (who I ended up seeing live four months later).