My Back Pages, Vol. 4: Fleetwood Mac - Rumours

Welcome to My Back Pages, a new collaborative staff feature that will survey a landscape of renowned classics and unheralded gems alike, most of which no one around here ever writes a word about. The rules are simple and loose: we won’t cover anything from this millennium and we will avoid all or most AP.net favorites—though we might make an exception if something is nearing a milestone anniversary. Beyond that though, anything is fair game. So if you have an album, artist, or genre you would like to see discussed in this feature, feel free to throw us a few recs.

This week, we are taking a look at Fleetwood Mac's legendary, radio-approved 1977 LP, Rumours, which is currently back in heavy rotation thanks to a recent 35th anniversary reissue. So check the replies for our thoughts and a full Rdio stream of the record, and feel free to jump in with any comments, anecdotes, or discussion questions you may have.

Craig Manning: I must confess that, even though we’ve done three weeks of these features now, and I strongly like and respect each album we’ve covered, we have yet to hit upon one that I consider an all-time favorite. Looking back at Rain Dogs, War, and Tim, it’s easy for me to instantly distinguish my favorite songs from each, along with a few I don’t care for much out of context. But with this week’s album, Fleetwood Mac’s career-defining, stratospherically popular 1977 magnus-opus Rumours, we’ve at last come upon an LP that I could put on repeat for days and still be reveling in just how much I love it. I’ve often said that Born to Run is the only legitimately “perfect” album I’ve ever heard, but it’s hard to look at the tracklist for Rumours and find a flaw. This record is stacked, a wall-to-wall slate of pop bliss, timeless rock ‘n’ roll, and internal tension that sounds as fresh now, I’m sure, as the day it was released. I can’t pick a favorite song from Rumours because every time I push play, it’s a new song defining that particular listening experience. There are no specific highlights on this record; they’re all highlights.

Last week, in my review of Josh Ritter’s latest release, I talked briefly about the mythical status of the break-up album, how artists who have previously seemed larger-than-life tear down the walls between themselves and their audiences with these displays of universal human emotion and instantly humanize themselves in the process. And Rumours might be the granddaddy of all break-up records. In the Fleetwood Mac lineage, Rumours is the band’s eleventh proper album, but in reality, it’s more like their sophomore effort. Major players Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks came on board for the 1975 reboot that was Fleetwood Mac, helping the band towards major singles like “Rhiannon” and “Landslide,” and forever re-defining their sound. But while the self-titled record helped to get Fleetwood Mac back into the good graces of their label, the members themselves were moving into a period of personal turmoil. Looking back, it’s almost remarkable how many things hit at once: the six-year relationship between Buckingham and Nicks began to fracture, John and Christine McVie dissolved their eight-year marriage, and Mick Fleetwood discovered that his wife had been cheating on him...with his best friend, no less. But rather than calling it a day and breaking up the band, the members channeled their relationship woes and emotional strain into song, and damn, I’m glad they did.

Where we have largely come to expect raw, spontaneous performances from a break-up record, to further emphasize the emotion of the subject matter, Rumours is honed and pristine. Meticulously recorded, re-recorded, and produced, Rumours is a pop album through and through. These songs were meant for the radio waves as much as they were meant for the human heart, but remarkably, the studio sheen robs them of none of their power. “Second Hand News” gallops out of the gate, Buckingham reveling in a limitless landscape of his newfound, post-relationship opportunities, and then Nicks fires right back with the dusky “Dreams.” “But listen carefully to the sound of your loneliness, like a heartbeat drives you mad/In the stillness of remembering what you had and what you lost,” Nicks sings on what remains the band’s sole number one hit. It’s a handsome smash, to be sure, and one of the album’s best songs. Rain tumbles from the sky on the immortal chorus, gorgeous and wistful harmonies buoying the arrangement alone, but the driving force is Nicks, whose conviction lands between haunting nostalgia and defensive resignation. How do you sever a relationship with someone who you still have to see every day? Rumours poses that question, among many others.

But while Nicks may get the album’s biggest hit, Buckingham proves to be Rumours’ dominating force, at least for the duration of its first side. “Never Going Back Again” shows off the songwriter’s indelible guitar skills, and he sings Christine McVie’s “Don’t Stop”—another ubiquitous classic—like a new man. The song, an anthem for the power of optimism, was probably the first or second Fleetwood Mac tune I ever heard, and certainly the first from Rumours. Both in and out of context, I still think it’s one of the weakest numbers here, though the sing-along bop of the chorus is an earworm if there ever was one. But it’s almost hard to believe such a sunny, forward-looking song comes from the heart of an album so mired in heartbreak and resentment. In my early years, as I was just beginning to discover the roots of folk music and classic rock, I found the song shallow, if catchy. On Rumours though, with the force of the album surrounding it, “Don’t Stop” gains some serious electricity: it’s the heart of the storm.

But the storm breaks hard and heartache and resentment come flooding back to the forefront as the album charges into its unparalleled mid-section. “Go Your Own Way” is another one of the album’s pillars, and Buckingham’s finest contribution here. An opening dialogue of acoustic and electric guitars gives way to the arena-scraping chorus, and Mick Fleetwood beats the drums like a man possessed, but it’s the tension between the lyrical content and the chorus harmonies—provided by Nicks—that makes the song one of the greatest break-up anthems of all time. Because Buckingham is so clearly singing about Nicks, taking shots at her, even—“Tell me why everything turned around/Packing up, shacking up’s all you want to do,” he sings in the second verse—that having her actually sing the song with him turns it into a nail-biter. Legend has it that, during the making of Rumours, the two divided couples would only come together when the music demanded it. The McVies weren’t on speaking terms, and the arguments between Buckingham and Nicks saw no end until the studio tech pushed record. “Go Your Own Way,” though, is Buckingham bringing the argument into song, where his ex can’t refute him or fight back, and it’s both wicked and brilliant.

Christine McVie’s “Songbird” closes out Rumours’ first half, and it’s the most sobering moment on the record. A Spartan piano ballad, “Songbird” is lonely and revealing, but also tender and gorgeously melodic. Flip the record over, and it’s the one-two punch of “The Chain” and “You Make Loving Fun” that completes the hat-trick middle segment. The former is the only song on the record for which each band member gets a songwriting credit, and the partnership radiates in the mesh of vocal harmonies, sung partially in a round, that give the song its burning intensity. The latter is the album’s most deliriously catchy composition, another McVie number with a sugary chorus and a funky, synth-driven dance beat. But while Rumours has its fair share of hooks, it ends instead on a haunting note, first with McVie’s “Oh Daddy” and then with Nicks’ “Gold Dust Woman.” The latter is an ode to the destructive force of cocaine, and it’s an almost ritualistic end to an otherwise fairly straightforward pop record. “Did she make you cry, make you break down, shatter your illusions of love?” Nicks asks, over an eerie array of folk instrumentation. “And is it over now? Do you know how to pick up the pieces and go home?”

But perhaps the greatest thing about Rumours is how instantly accessible it is. Some albums and artists need time to breathe before you can really love them. This one hit me on first listen, and has never let go. It’s relatively lean, clocking in at just under 40 minutes, and every trace of filler or fat has been methodically burned away. Even the album’s weakest moment—the Nicks-penned “I Don’t Want to Know”—has its place, providing the necessary bridge between the sweet rush of “You Make Loving Fun” and the crushing darkness of the final two tracks. Out of the entire Rolling Stone 500, where it sits stately and preserved at number 25, it’s likely my third favorite record—behind the twin Springsteen classics Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town. The balance between different voices, songwriters, moods, emotions, and even genres—McVie relies more on pop sensibility, while Nicks and Buckingham were clearly birthed from the hippy rock culture of the 1960s—not to mention the faultless sequencing of the disc, makes for a listen that never drags or grows repetitious. And of course, the theme, the break-up album conceit, the personal turmoil the band poured into these songs back in 1977, it all ties the whole thing together.

What’s interesting to me is that the influence of Rumours can’t be traced quite as clearly as some of the other albums we’ve been discussing in here. We talked extensively about how The Replacements did a lot to forge the scene this website belongs to, and we still see tons of U2 imitators—along with new Dylans, new Springsteens, and all manner of other emulators or pretenders—but I don’t think I’ve heard anyone classify a band as “the new Fleetwood Mac” in quite some time...if ever. The break-up album ideal is still very much alive and well, and sometimes artists even borrow its structure. I would argue that Adele’s 21 was made very much in the tradition of Rumours, and its commercial success and Grammy haul mirror those that Fleetwood Mac experienced following the release of this record. But it’s rare now that we see a band with as much teamwork mentality as these ladies and gentlemen exhibited in the late-70s.

However, Rumours remains very much embedded in the pop culture consciousness. These songs still play on the radio waves—a few summers ago, I think I heard “Go Your Own Way” three times in one afternoon of work—and the album’s legacy lives on. I’ve heard a dozen different covers of “Dreams,” cropping up on b-sides collections or in live shows, over the past two years alone. And hell, Rumours remains the only standalone album to ever constitute its own theme week on Glee, something that many left-of-the-mainstream music listeners might shrug off, but still a significant milestone for a show—and for a wider music industry—which now relies more on the rush of a three-and-a-half minute single than it does on a cohesive collection of tracks. For me though, the album sales, the ubiquitous singles, the hallowed legacy in music history, and the continued modern presence are ultimately superfluous: for me, Rumours is like an old friend. And if someone asked me for three albums with which to start delving into older music, I’d put this one on the list without thinking twice, sandwiched between Born to Run and The Beatles’ Abbey Road.

Chris Collum: The last three records have all been ones for which Craig and I share some degree of fondness. However, for some reason I have never been very into Fleetwood Mac, and while Rumours is a really cool album, it has never been a record I've returned to consistently. It's full of instantly accessible pop jams, but for some reason, nothing has ever stuck with me that much. I know the story behind the album concerning Buckingham and Nicks, and while it makes for an interesting listen, Rumours has still never exactly thrilled me--maybe it just isn't my cup of tea.

I think a large part of why I don't return to this record, however is exactly what Craig alluded to in his piece: its influence isn't easily discernible. I tend to be the type of music-listener that discovers older music by discovering what artists influenced his favorite artists, so for one reason or another, this record has never been on my radar as much as other classics of similar stature. Maybe, however the issue is that pop music that has been influenced by Rumours is so ubiquitous that I don't even realize how influential the album actually is. Maybe I'm taking Rumours for granted.

One way or another, this is definitely an album that I need to re-visit several times more, so I suppose this week I fall into the role of discoverer alongside our readers. I'm sure there's something I must be missing.

Craig Manning: Bummed you don't dig this one much Chris. You could have told me before I wrote a novel! In any case, I hope you and our readers will give this a few plays today so we can have a conversation below. Also, those who enjoyed the piece or who dig Fleetwood Mac should head over to Made of Chalk this Thursday, where other Chris (cshadows) will be rhapsodizing about the (almost) equally great follow-up to Rumours, the double-album that is Tusk.

Josh Ritter - The Beast in Its Tracks

Josh Ritter - The Beast in Its Tracks

Pytheas, 2013
8.5/10

After Josh Ritter’s last couple releases, I was beginning to wonder if his music would ever connect with me again like it had in the old days. His finest albums, 2006’s The Animal Years and 2007’s The Historical Conquests of... were both loaded with terrific melodies, astounding lyrical content, and emulations of musical influences that sit directly in my wheelhouse, from Bruce Springsteen to Bob Dylan to Leonard Cohen. 2010’s slow-burning return, titled So Runs the World Away, largely sought refuge in a sunnier folk-pop vein, a la Paul Simon, but despite a few stellar stand-outs, fell short. And last year’s EP, Bringing in the Darlings, failed to connect with me on any level.

But heartbreak has a way of bringing about creative rebirth. It did for Dylan in 1975, when his break-up album masterpiece Blood on the Tracks reignited a decade that otherwise failed to reach the heights of its creator’s heyday; it did it for Springsteen, who wrote what was arguably his most unique, introspective, and confessional set of songs with 1987’s Tunnel of Love, just before his marriage imploded; and it has done the same for countless artists across the landscape of music history, from Italian opera to classic rock ‘n’ roll to modern emo. In that case, the recently-divorced Josh Ritter is hardly unique, but the fact doesn’t make his latest album, The Beast in Its Tracks, any less striking. In fact, Beast is Ritter’s most engaging and consistent record since The Animal Years...and probably his best as well.

Ritter has never lacked for great lyrical content. His signature song, 2006’s “Thin Blue Flame,” thrived on nine-and-a-half minutes of illusion-heavy verses, while the finest songs on So Runs the World Away were sprawling narrative epics. The songwriter’s propensity for dense poetic imagery and well-fashioned turns of phrase are very much intact here, but they’re also accompanied by more welcoming musical textures and stronger melodies than we’ve heard from Ritter in quite awhile. Witness the tremulous explosion of strings and acoustic guitars that opens the rollicking and biting “New Lover” (“But if you’re sad and you’re lonesome, and you got nobody true/I’d be lyin’ if I said that didn’t make me happy too,” Ritter croons over the song’s final moments) or the classic folk harmonies that give “In Your Arms Awhile” its heaven-bound grace. Meanwhile, it’s the enveloping mix of organic instrumentation and ambient sonic textures that lend more innocuous album tracks, such as the intimate “Nightmares” or the country-whine of “Bonfires,” a sense of cohesion with the rest of the record.

But The Beast in Its Tracks wouldn’t be a Josh Ritter album without at least a few home-runs, and luckily, the hits here are plentiful. Early-album triumph “Hopeful” is Ritter’s “Tangled up in Blue,” a winding relationship narrative that relates the stab of watching the person you love pack up and walk out the door better than almost any I’ve ever heard. “The sunlight corroded and the days started to fail/The rocks in the road sharpened shadows to nails,” Ritter sings, his very world turning against him as life spirals out of control. The aforementioned “In Your Arms Awhile” takes heartbreak to near-anthemic heights, while the chiming first single, “Joy to You Baby,” is the record’s most immediate stand-out. The redemptive penultimate number, “Joy to You Baby” is a flawless freeway slow-burn, a thoughtful evening song with bittersweet flickers of forgiveness floating through its glorious strains. “There’s pain in whatever we stumble upon/If I never had met you, you couldn’t have gone,” Ritter notes. “But then I couldn’t have met you, we couldn’t have been/I guess it all adds up to joy in the end.” Simple. Universal. Beautiful.

So many of my favorite musical works are break-up albums: there’s something about an artist baring their soul on record, tearing down the walls and letting their fans see them bleed and break, that has always felt so noble and romantic to me. I suppose it’s the relatability factor, or maybe the fact that I’ve always been partial to emotionally charged songwriting, but there’s a reason that Blood on the Tracks or Tunnel of Love or Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours or Butch Walker’s Letters land so high on my all-time favorite albums list. The Beast in Its Tracks offers the same kind of catharsis, and just like each of those albums, Ritter finds a silver lining in these songs. This is no pity party; in addition to his divorce, Ritter’s tumultuous past three years have seen his second marriage and the birth of his child. So when light breaks through the clouds—something that happens, appropriately, on the lush, acoustic number, “A Certain Light,” and the organ-drenched, slowdance closer, “Lights”—the results are both comforting and viscerally satisfying. And Ritter, one of the most gifted songwriters of his generation, guides the whole thing with a steady hand, giving us love, hate, loss, rebirth, resentment, redemption, forgiveness, and nostalgia, and encapsulating it all into 43 minutes and 28 seconds of smooth folk bliss. 2013’s bar has just been raised.

The Tower & The Fool - How Long

The Tower & The Fool - How Long

Run For Cover Records/Earshot Media, 2012

4.5 stars

Every once in awhile, an album comes along, out of nowhere, and just stops you in your tracks. It's a rare but beautiful thing when you can listen to a record for the first time, completely free of all expectations, and have it knock you down. Last year, a pair of records landed in my top ten from artists that I had known nothing about prior to my first listen: the first was Charlie Simpson's Young Pilgrim, a gorgeous folk-pop effort that was right up my alley from the get-go. The second was Mansions' Dig Up the Dead, an emotionally intense set of break-up songs that wormed its way into my consciousness as the year moved on until I couldn't ignore it: I expect that a similar fate will befall How Long, the excellent full-length debut from Rhode Island-based rock band The Tower & The Fool, a break-up album that encompasses some of the best melodies, the most emotional vocals, and the most stunningly heartbreaking lyrics that I've heard all year (or, perhaps, all decade). 

In the realm of musical statements, I find a well-executed break-up album to be among the most fascinating. Undoubtedly, some of the greatest art of all time has been the product of personal disaster. When artists let the world in to see them bleed, put all of themselves and their lives into a musical work, the result is the rawest, most unadulterated portrait of them that we can ever glimpse. Its why so many of my favorite records have this associations: albums like Butch Walker's Letters, or Will Hoge's Draw the Curtains, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours or City And Colour's Sometimes, Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel of Love or Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks. Each of these records, whether or not I consider them the best the artist in question has to offer (which, except for Springsteen and maybe Dylan, I do), has a raw honesty that is truly enrapturing, and each of them include some of the greatest songs I have ever heard. Were it not for Springsteen's protest-album masterpiece Wrecking Ball, which will very likely be my album of the year, I could say that none of those artists ever again reached the dizzying heights of their break-up masterpiece. There's something electric about a break-up album, something real and fleeting that is impossible to re-capture, but difficult to walk away from, and few artists are ever able to achieve that emotional apex more than once. Here's hoping that the guys from The Tower & The Fool don't succumb to that curse, but from the moment frontman Alex Correia references "Tangled Up In Blue," the definitive break-up anthem from Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, on album-highlight "Broken," it's clear that he's not kidding around.
 

The band isn't kidding around with their list of influences either, which reads like a 90s-throwback compilation and includes artists like Counting Crows, Whiskeytown, and The Gin Blossoms. There are shades of those bands' folk and alt-country leanings all over How Long, but Correia's whiskey-drenched vocal tone is a bit rougher around the edges than those groups' respective frontmen, and some finest moments here veer closer to more recent artists like Jimmy Eat World and The Dangerous Summer: emotional lyrics, set to sweeping melodic choruses and devastating verses. It’s a formula that never lets the band down, and there isn't a moment that even comes close to being weak across the record's ten tracks. Anthems of heartbreak, like "Dive Bar" and "Broken," give way to more pensive numbers, such as the title track, "My Heart is Dead in NYC," and "Breach," with Correia delivering a handful of lines in each that hits like a ton of bricks. In "Dive Bar," the album's rousing opener, it's "maybe you fell in love with a feeling and not a girl," while in "How Long," the album's elegiac centerpiece, it's lines like "And at night when I sleep, her ghost crawls in my sheets/I hear her voice calling out my name" that will transport us all back to those moments when we were forced to get over a person we had no interest in moving on without.

A swell of B3-organ keys and a scorching guitar solo are the cornerstones of penultimate cut "Die Alone," which serves as the climactic peak of a heartbreaking record. Desperation cuts through Correia's voice as he belts out the song's chorus ("And I'm praying to God that her love keeps me afloat/'Cause man, I don't wanna die alone") but we feel distinctly like there's no end to his suffering here, and the closer, though it reaches resignation, is one of the album's hardest-hitting moments. Set to the backdrop of a single acoustic guitar, softly finger-picked in a swirl of intimacy, "Who Does She Think She Is?" lands very much in the tradition of great break-up album closers. It's a slow-burn of regret and resignation, where Correia sounds tired and broken, and just like many of his predecessors in this tradition, like he has nothing left to give or to say. "Love is a horrible thing," the album concludes, and though The Tower & The Fool may be inviting a pity party of sorts with this record, that's an important part of the tradition as well.

Ultimately, How Long earns itself the rather dubious honor of being the saddest album of the year (at least so far), and while the constant surge of heartbreak and bitterness that Correia sings about may grow tiring for listeners who aren't going through a similar situation (such as myself), we've all been through a romantic disaster at least once, and these songs express those feelings perfectly. It's the kind of record you can disappear into, an album full of lyrical gems and musical triumphs that build to a sublime catharsis, and the overall impact is breathtaking. Only time will tell whether or not anyone will construct a better ode to a relationship or a more emotionally intense record this year, but for now, The Tower & The Fool is in about the best position any 2012 release could be: in my number two slot, right after Springsteen.

The Grammy Post

There aren't a lot of hardcore music fans that take the Grammy Awards seriously these days, and it's not terribly difficult to figure out why: the Grammy Awards have always been a chance for the music industry to pat themselves on the back, often awarding the albums that spawned the most pop hits, or handing out sentimental trophies to old veterans or recently departed legends to pay tribute to them. There is nothing wrong with this practice as, it's worth noting, the Grammy Awards have rarely handed the Album of the Year prize to a legitimately bad album. Indeed, a handful of my all time favorite albums have won the prize, from The Joshua Tree to Rumours to Sgt. Pepper. That said, the Album of the Year award's history, for the most part, is a study in curious decisions. Like the fact that the Beatles only won the award that one time, or that Bruce Springsteen lost to Lionel Richie in the year that he took over the world with Born in the U.S.A. (or the more depressing fact that Born to Run didn't even score a nomination). And recent years have seen the award go to either country-pop crossover stars (Taylor Swift, the Dixie Chicks) or to legendary figures in music (Ray Charles, U2, Allison Krauss, Herbie Hancock): none were poor choices, but it would be hard to argue any of them as the best album released in their individual years.

I really thought that last year, Grammy had turned a corner. Rather than handing the Album of the Year award to a huge seller (Eminem's Recovery) or a newly minted pop music icon (Lady Gaga's The Fame Monster), the Academy opted for Arcade Fire, a critically acclaimed indie-rock act from Canada, and their concept album The Suburbs. In my eyes, that victory was truly magnificent: rather than going for something that was just a collection of singles, the Academy went for a true album, with recurring themes, sounds, ideas and characters. In an age where many have proclaimed that "the album is dead," that album defended the format, and it proved why it not only works, but why it will always be more artistically relevant than the single. Those people who were championing the rise of the digital single as the predominant musical format do have a point, though, since iTunes has indeed rendered the album obsolete to casual listeners. But it's still Album of the Year that is announced at the very end of the Grammy ceremony, and Arcade Fire's victory last year, backlash and all, was a poetic defense of the format that has defined the music industry since the 60s.

After that, I must confess that this year's nominees disappointed me a bit, even though two of them landed on my best of the year list. Still, the Academy is likely to avoid adding to their list of "curious decisions" this year (unless you count the nominees, which no one seems to remember after the fact anyway). Below, I list my thoughts on the nominees for the evening's biggest categories, as well as my reasons for tuning in again this year (however distractedly) and my predictions. (Spoiler: Adele).

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1. Record of the Year

Adele - "Rolling in the Deep"

Bon Iver - "Holocene"

Bruno Mars - "Grenade"

Mumford & Sons - "The Cave"

Katy Perry - "Firework"

Will win: "Rolling in the Deep"

Should win: "Holocene"

A lot of people don't understand the difference between the Record of the Year and Song of the Year categories, but really, they're miles apart. One is simply about the songwriting at hand, while the other is awarded not only to the performing artist, but also to the producers, sound engineers, and other important team members who turned it into a stellar recording. As a result, Record of the Year is far more in recognition of the studio work done on a song than it is of a particular performance, unless the artist someone like Butch Walker who writes, performs and produces the track, which doesn't usually happen in mainstream pop music, and as a result, doesn't usually happen in this category. This year, though, there is one artist in this field who did all of those things, and the resulting recording is one of the most outstanding achievements in production of last year. That artist is Justin Vernon, the mastermind behind Bon Iver, and his song, "Holocene," which builds from a simple acoustic arrangement into full band ambiance. It's not the most sonically spectacular song on the album (that title would belong to one of the album's bookends, but it is, fairly easily, my favorite work here. That said, "Rolling in the Deep" is the biggest hit and will walk away with this category fairly easily. I'm fine with that, since producer Paul Epworth (who also worked on Florence + The Machine's Ceremonials), did some of the best production work of the last year.

2. Album of the Year

Adele -21

Foo Fighters - Wasting Light

Lady Gaga - Born This Way

Bruno Mars - Doo Wops & Hooligans

Rihanna - Loud

Will & Should Win: 21

Now here's an embarrassment of a category. I had high hopes for this year's album of the year slate after the Academy defied the pop music world and gave the award to a record that not only had no hits, but a record by a band that many Grammy viewers had never even heard of. The ensuing backlash was one of the funniest things I've ever seen take place on the internet, and caused me to lose any faith I had left in the music consumerist population. This year's category could have been a really killer one too, with all of the records from last year that gained a ton of critical acclaim and a fair amount of success (Bon Iver and M83 come to mind), not to mention a handful of leftovers from the previous year, like Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which earned perfect scores from nearly every publication known to man and will likely go down as the most well received album of this decade. And it must be good, because I even like that record, and I've never enjoyed another rap album in my life. Or there was Taylor Swift's Speak Now, which actually does appeal to the pop music listener to me, and is a superior album to the one she won the prize for just two years ago. Kanye will get a consolation prize in the rap album category, but Swift isn't up for anything big tonight.

The biggest waste of a nomination here is for the Bruno Mars record, which I can say from personal experience is terrible. The singles are the only tracks worth hearing at all, and even those display pretty much every pop music cliche in the book. I've never liked Rihanna either, and I'd be willing to wager that her albums are just vehicles for a handful of chart topping singles, and are loaded with filler, but I've never listened to an entire Rihanna album, so I guess I will never know. And even my girlfriend, who loves Lady Gaga, couldn't find much to enjoy with Born This Way, though I personally find it to be a better than average pop music album with a couple of killer songs ("You & I" and "Edge of Glory") closing it out. The latter, which features a self-referencing saxophone solo from Clarence Clemons, was the last song the virtuoso ever recorded or played live, and is the kind of sonic feast that should absolutely be up for Record of the Year.

That said, the other two albums on this list both made my top 25 of last year, and both are terrific. Foo Fighters made their best album in at least a decade with Wasting Light, where the band sounds loud, rejuvenated and nostalgic, all while delivering some of the best tunes of their career. It's all water under the bridge, though, since Adele will win this category by a landslide, and it really is a deserved victory. Not only is 21 the best selling album of the last year (and it just recently had its strongest week of sales, almost a year after its release), it has also unleashed three terrific singles ("Rolling in the Deep," "Someone Like You" and "Set Fire to the Rain") and has truly moved a lot of people. The album's pop drenched break-up songs recall one of the best Album of the Year winners in the award's history: Fleetwood Mac's near perfect masterpiece Rumours, and I can easily see 21 becoming that album for this generation. I've heard way better break up records, but to hear pop music this great captivate the entire world in the way it has is a real triumph, and its hard to remember a winner of this category that defined its year more than 21 has. 

3. Song of the Year

Kanye West - "All of the Lights"

Mumford & Sons - "The Cave"

Bruno Mars - "Grenade"

Bon Iver - "Holocene"

Adele - "Rolling in the Deep"

Will Win: "Rolling in the Deep"

Should Win: "Holocene"

A long list of songwriters marks this album's one miss-step, proving that sometimes, too many cooks really do spoil the broth. That song is "Grenade," one of the most cliched and grating pop songs, not only of this year, but in the history of pop music. Rebecca Black's "Friday" is a better song.

The rest of the category is actually pretty stellar (or as stellar as a Grammy category can get), though "All of the Lights" is a better record than it is a song, I think: there are far better songs on that album. I'm glad to see Mumford & Sons up for these awards, although the album "The Cave" comes from released in 2009 and really shouldn't be in contention for an awards show taking place in 2012. "Holocene" and "Rolling in the Deep" round out the nominations, with the former being the better song (Pitchfork agrees), but with the latter taking the prize. I'd argue "Someone Like You" will prove to be Adele's trademark (and her most iconic hit), but "Rolling in the Deep" was a hell of a breakthrough.

Best New Artist

The Band Perry

Bon Iver

J. Cole

Nicki Minaj

Skrillex

Will & Should Win: Bon Iver

This category is one of the biggest jokes in any awards show, as they routinely nominate artists for their sophomore album, or in some cases, much later. One of the funniest occurrences of this took place in 2004, when they nominated Fountains of Wayne for the award, following their one hit wonder success with "Stacy's Mom;" the band had been together since 1996.

Anyway, the obvious outlier here is Bon Iver, who released his first album under that moniker in 2007, a year before Adele released her debut, even though she won this same award three years ago. Regardless of the questionable way in which these voters define the word "new," it's better late than Bon Iver, who completely steamrolls over everyone else in this category. The Band Perry had a pop gem this year with "If I Die Young," but even attempting that holds a candle to Bon Iver's near perfect record is laughable.

Best Rock Song/Best Rock Performance

Coldplay - "Every Teardrop is a Waterfall"

The Decemberists - "Down By the Water"

Foo Fighters - "Walk"

Mumford & Sons - "The Cave"

Radiohead - "Lotus Flower"

Will & Should Win: "Walk"

People have trouble differentiating Record and Song of the Year, but these two categories are, right down to their nominees, exactly the same. Certainly one of the stronger categories of the night, with the Decemberists sneaking in with a solid track from their great record The King is Dead. Foo Fighters should be sitting pretty here, though, with both the best song and the only Album of the Year nomination backing it up.

Best Rock Album

Jeff Beck - Rock 'n' Roll Party Honoring Les Paul

Foo Fighters - Wasting Light

Kings of Leon - Come Around Sundown

Red Hot Chili Peppers - I'm With You

Wilco - The Whole Love

Will Win: Foo Fighters - Wasting Light

Could Win: Jeff Beck

This category often turns either into a consolation prize for a could be/should be album of the year winner (Quentin Tarantino presenting it to Green Day in 2005, when they had the best record but it didn't matter in the midst of the Ray Charles tributes) or part of a sweep on the way to the big prize (U2 taking it for the terrific How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb the year later). This year, I'm going with the consolation prize theory, as Foo Fighters have no chance at Album of the Year, but could do pretty well here. The questionable spoiler is Jeff Beck, a virtuoso veteran paying tribute to a recently departed figure of rock 'n' roll evolution. I'm split either way, but it's actually a really solid category this year, so I'm less inclined to care.

Best Alternative Music Album

Bon Iver - Bon Iver, Bon Iver

Death Cab For Cutie - Codes & Keys

Foster the People - Torches

My Morning Jacket - Circuital

Radiohead - The King of Limbs

Will & Should Win: Bon Iver

This is often one of the better categories of the night, and while I think this slate is less inspired this year, the fact that it's one of the bigger categories the Bon Iver will likely pick up keeps it on my list of ones to watch. 

But all of these categories and predictions aside, the real reason I'll be tuning in is quite simple: Springsteen and the E-Street Band will be performing. And really, I'm hoping for a Clarence Clemons tribute, though it seems likely he might get a bit upstaged by the recent passing of Whitney Houston. As predictable as that is, and as great as Whitney's voice once was (I'm pretty sure it wasn't anymore...), she didn't create the most perfect two minutes in the history of rock and pop music...

But Clarence Clemons? Yes, yes he did.