With the new year a day away it's a good time to think about music from the past that holds special meaning. With music, it's easy to get stuck in the past. We have such a visceral connection to music that it often defines entire periods of our lives. A few bars from a distant tune and suddenly we can recall all the feelings of that time. It's really quite extraordinary.
There are a couple of albums from the recent past that I still play constantly because, to me, they represent a sort of pinnacle in the history of chill music. The first is Mezzanine by Massive Attack. The album became the commercial breakthrough for an entire genre of music. And, although it went on to become massively overplayed (due in no small part to the song Teardrop being used for the TV show House), it's still an incredible album 13 years later (has it really been 13 years?!). But to me, the absolute best record from that time period has to be The Mirror Conspiracy by Thievery Corporation. When this album came out, I wished that it would be playing from speakers mounted on lampposts everywhere I went so it could be the background music to my life. I often wonder if Rob Garza and Eric Hilton appreciate how incredible this album is. I often find that artists are often blind to their best work (I know I'm ALWAYS wrong about which songs people will like). The Mirror Conspiracy may be going on 12 years old, but to me, it sounds as fresh today as it did back then. So much for being suck in the past!