I think when seemingly every media outlet lavishes something with effusive praise, I go into it with a certain expectation that causes me to be disappointed sometimes.
In that situation, I feel like my ability to take the thing on it’s own terms is compromised.
I also think time/place and how I’m exposed to something effects how I feel about it. If something is associated with a very negative experience, it’s hard for me to appreciate it.
With these particular LPs, they were released a decade before I was born, so it wasn’t like, “oh, Joni Mitchell and the Rolling Stones have new LPs out.” I just sought them out from the perspective of “these LPs came out 30 years ago,” or whatever. They were obviously not contemporary releases.
In that scenario, I just thought they were both absolutely brilliant.
With Exile on Main Street, not only do the songs seem to attain a unique, hard-to-define kind of soulful, scuzzy majesty (‘Tumbling Dice,’ ‘Torn and Frayed,’ ‘Let it Loose,’ ‘Soul Survivor,’) but there’s real diversity between something like “Rip This Joint” and “Torn and Frayed,” between “I Just Want to See His Face” and “Sweet Virginia,” between “Ventilator Blues” and “Let it Loose,” etc. etc.
Blue is just genius to me.
The combination of highly sophisticated harmonic composition with such intense emotion and poetry is just masterful to me.