@rambo @missy
I've been wrestling with this question since the weekend. It's a hard question, not only because you gotta narrow it down to one record, but since EVERYONE (even your grandmom) should hear it, it can't be too out there. Believe me, I'd love to recommend The Jesus Lizard's "Goat" or Black Flag's "Damaged," but 95% of people would shut it off before the first song ended. Also, you don't want it to be an album everyone and their mother's already heard, because that kind of defeats the purpose (sorry, Beatles). And finally, it has to be fucking great, start-to-finish. So it needs to be a somewhat obscure, yet mostly accessible album of staggering genius. Kind of a tall order.
So after briefly considering Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska" (too well-known), Neutral Milk Hotel's "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" (a little too weird for meemaw), and Uncle Tupelo's "Still Feel Gone" (just missed by a hair), I'm going with Okkervil River's "Black Sheep Boy."
It is a record of profound beauty, a perfect showcase of a monumental songwriter at the top of his game. There is not a wasted moment on this album. It is 47 minutes of beauty, sadness, anger, anticipation, relief, phantasmagoric imagery, heart-sinking turns of phrase. It is both the perfect album to put on and let wash over you, and the perfect album to pick apart layer-by-layer. It's an album everyone should hear before they die.
You can listen to the whole thing here:
