On their second album, the trio honed their virtuosic interplay to a sharper edge and added a more modern sensibility spiked with psychedelia.
Author: Sam Sutherland
Sam Sutherland
Sam Sutherland has worked both sides of the music biz street as music industry journalist at Billboard and Record World (as well as freelancing for Phonograph Record, Musician Magazine, High Fidelity and Rolling Stone), and in the label trenches with Elektra/Asylum, Windham Hill Productions and Discovery Records. In the ‘90s, he was beamed up to the digital rapture via software and early online projects for Microsoft and Amazon’s original music and video storefronts. He’s since produced entertainment content for Windows Media and, most recently, MSN Music. Nevertheless, he still prefers vinyl to digital. A New York ex-pat, Sutherland lives near Seattle.
Petty called it his favorite album. Its generous song list only hinted at the virtual torrent of material he was creating during this period.
After an eight-year odyssey of releasing concept albums, the original quartet put together a set of unrelated songs that found favor with their fans.
The LP was the band’s long-awaited breakthrough, the Heartbreakers now matching the caliber of their front man’s writing with their focused musicianship
The album restored the band’s platinum stature with a more expansive style verging on prog rock while retaining retro accents
His only #1 LP, and an Album of the Year Grammy winner, this 1975 release offered definitive proof that he was not going back to the past.
The album is a quiet masterpiece, a portrait of a young singer-songwriter already fully formed and crafting songs for the ages.
“Sultans of Swing” was immediately distinctive in both sound and story. The album proved the band to be one of the most refreshingly creative of its day.
On his debut solo album, cut during Steely Dan’s ’80s hiatus, Fagen trades cynicism for nostalgia in a song cycle.
Expanding beyond their trademark jingle-jangle folk-rock, the band created their most diverse, experimental recording to date.