Working in comic book stores has been both a blessing and a curse for me in this millenium, as I have amassed an increidbly large library of graphic novels and knowledge about the industry. In the 90s, I worked in record stores and had the same issue but with CDs and opinions. As a completist, both jobs fed into my craving for complete understanding of a band/series/author/artist.

I was in high school when Counterparts came out. I loved the first track, and thought the album was pretty good. And the next time I went down to the trendy CD store in Greenfield, MA, I picked up Roll The Bones, and then I just kept getting one album every time I went into town until I owned All Of Them. But it didn't stop there. In college, I briefly worked with a progressive rock band who asked me to join them because of two things 1.) I had a massive CD collection that included all of Rush and Dream Theater's output. and 2.) When they asked me to name progressive rock bands, I mentioned early Genesis, causing the drummer to shout "SOMEBODY ELSE GETS IT." which, um, sort of? We didn't make it to our first show.

I bought their three 21st century albums when their comic series, Clockwork Angels came out. I neither listened to the albums nor read the comics. I hadn't had an urge to listen to Rush since college. I didn't even plan on doing a discography for them because, hoo-boy, what do you say about a band that had 40 years of songs, a legendary reputation, but who very few people outside of college ever have the desire to listen to? Then I saw the video of the marching band who performed a Rush Medley at some football game and I thought "How visually cool, and musically boring. How is it that all marching band music just sounds like the same eternal song, no matter the source material?" Rush deserves better.

So here is a One Album Discography of Rush, despite their tremendous output because, oooof, so many of their songs are long and pretentious. And who wants to listen to Ayn Rand put to music? I mean even the Tolkien put to music is excruciating, and I like Tolkien.

Please listen to the album reponsibly.

1. It's Rush, so I feel like to properly prepare you for the experience, I can't just throw down one of their hits. Instead, you get the heavily instrumental (there is narration and the occasional verse) and incredibly long Tolkienesque The Necromancer. It's over 12 minutes of progressive rock from the 1970s that flirts with the ideas of Heavy Metal but never really commits. The different sections of the song are broken up by pitched down narration. The second section, which kicks in with drums before getting as Heavy as early Rush really gets (think really slow early Metallica with Led Zeppelinesque vocals), is probably the most satisfying part of the song. But it's all good if you're in the mood for this kind of music.  Just frenetic in its pace changes.

2. The first excellent riff of this album belongs to The Spirit Of The Radio. This song just throws everything at you right from the get-go. It's like three different great openings in a row. The lyrics are rarely the highlights of early Rush songs, and this is no exception. But it sounds like the kind of track you occasionally hear on a Classic Rock radio or streaming station and think "Do I know this song? I swear I've heard these riffs before."

3. One of the four Rush songs whose lyrics I've ever really remembered is Their Biggest Hit, Tom Sawyer. If you've only ever heard one Rush song, it was almost definitely this one. Again, a great riff, and again complex and noticably awesome drumming. It's got that whole sci-fi synthsound that places in the early 80s but the lyrics are pretty timeless. This is one of three songs that gets stuck in my head whenver I think of Rush.

4. I don't think Losing It shows up on many people's Favorite Rush Songs list, but it's a great example of their ballady synth work. It has a sweet narrative that's neither Tolkienesque nor Randish, and Geddy Lee's vocals are softer here than on any of the previous tracks on this album. If the guitars were a bit softer, it could fit into that Air Supply Early 80s Soft Alternative Rock.

5. Ok, here is the monster. Clocking in at over twenty minutes long, 2112 was the song and album that really drew the music nerds to Rush. It's so 1970s spacey. It's so epically long. It's so many parts. The whole album is the best example of Rush telling a single story on an album. And while it's never been my favorite Rush album, I get why it is Many Fans' favorite Rush album. This is definitely a Strap In Song. If you wash your hands the length of this song instead of "Happy Birthday", they'll be pruney and will smell like soap for Hours. I think it's four minutes before the vocals even kick in. You'll need a candy cigarette after this one.

6. To balance it out, we have the short and somewhat sweet The Trees, which is a very folklorey song about different types of trees that accelerates as it goes on. I say it's short, but that's really just compared to the other songs on this album. It's still over four minutes. 

7. The Most 80s Radio Friendly Song, in my opinion, is Subdivisions. This could almost be Journey  or Foreigner with Geddy Lee on vocals. The synths are much catchier here than on most tracks. It's also the apex of their Conformity Is Bad, Fight The Power songs. It doesn't sound rebellious musically, but the lyrics are very Of That Genre And Era.

8. The second Hey I Know All The Words To This Song  is the first Rush song I ever heard, Closer To The Heart. It was on a friend's mix called "Windowsills", which contained songs they liked to listen to while sitting on their ... windowsills ... contemplating the universe. It's a light, bass-centric ballad with bells. You can see it as a bit of a template for the more eccentric but mainstream grunge  bands like Screaming Trees and Alice In Chains. It 100% sounds like a Mother Love Bone song.

9. Where's My Thing is the fourth part of a trilogy of songs. How Douglas Adamesque, right? It's completely instrumental, and funky as Hell. I wish there were more Rush songs like this, but with lyrics. It's a blend of 80s arena metal and funk that I just don't remember hearing from anyone else.

10. As I was collecting the Rush albums, Test For Echo came out, and I loved the title track. I falsely remembered how it went for years, though, and listening to it this time through I still love it, but it sounded completely different from the version that occasionally rattled around my head for the last twenty years.

11. Tears is another ballad, this one almost acoustic, that I don't see on any of their retrospective hit albums. It just sounds like a familiar singer/songwriter with a guitar from the early late twentieth century. It's a great break from the relentlessness of most of Rush's work while still definitely being Geddy Lee. Also, flutes and violins? Ok.

12. Another early Rush hit was Fly By Night. I didn't remember this one at all when I was doing my listen-throughs. Each time it came up I thought "I like this Very 70s radio friendly classic rock song. Why don't I remember listening to it before?" It's chorus is just slightly different from the way they usually approached songwriting in the 1970s that it catches me pleasantly by surprise.

13. Red Sector A is very early 80s U2ish with its jangly and echoey guitars, so of course I gravitate towards it. It has an almost "Eye Of The Tiger" bassline in the background, and it definitely gets Rushier as it goes on, but that beginning is straight up all the early 1980s bands that I started to like in the early 90s.

14. I have never understood how Neurotica wasn't one of Rush's greatest hits. They didn't even release it as a single, but it's one of those Four Songs I mentioned earlier that I remember most of the lyrics to. I suppose that's one of the benefits of rarely hearing a band on the radio but owning their albums is that you really do end up knowing that you like a song because it affects you, and not just because you're bombarded by it in public.

15. The Body Electric is another jangly early 80s track. I liked it when I thought it was just a catchy song with a binary chorus. But it's based on a Twilight Zone episode by Ray Bradbury which, in turn, is based on a line by Walt Whitman. So it was pretty much designed for my enjoyment.

16. The fourth song that has stuck with me during the vast years when I don't listen to Rush is Animate. This one was a single, and I get it. It's got the riffs, the easy to remember lyrics that sound like a bunch of platitudes in a love song lacking a narrative. And the breakdown, where they namedrop the album name (Counterparts) comes out of nowhere and then tosses you back to the original melody.

​17. Territories flows out of the end of "Animate", with its almost Paul Simon rhythm guitar licks. Because of Gddy Lee's unique voice, it's instantly recognizable as Rush. Otherwise, this would be a real outlier song.

18. Closing out the album is a quiet Tolkienesque ballad, Different Strings. I imagine it as a love song from Frodo to Sam at the end of their journey. It's an appropriately ridiculous way to end a Rush album that doesn't contain a focused narrative.

During the early days of her career's shuttle-like rise (it took years to prepare for, but once she reached the digital platforms, she shot into the stratosphere), Billie Eilish was interviewed on a late night show. During the course of the interview, she was asked about Van Halen, and she didn't know who they were. She was massively ridiculed online for Not Knowing this seminal 80s rock band. But the thing is, you can't know Everything. And even if you, like Eilish, devour thousands of bands and albums, you're going to have a blind spot.

Sometimes a blind spot is sort of intentional. For me, that's The Rolling Stones. Apart from their massive hits, I've never really got into them. When Metric asked "Who would you rather be? The Beatles or The Rolling Stones?" I wanted to shout back. The Beatles, Of Course. My reimagined discography of The Beatles would be one of the lengthier discoveries I've done, even though they were only really around for a decade (though I would absolutely slot in their Anthology singles from the 90s). The Rolling Stones? You get two albums.

When I was in high school I bought their four Greatest Hits albums, which include their work from 1964 - 1981. And I thought "This is too much. Not all of these hits are very great. You could probably squish all the good songs on to one album."

So I've had my own Greatest Hits mix of The Rolling Stones for decades now. But since I was doing these discographies, I thought I should go through and listen to all their albums. Maybe a couple of times to really give them a chance. 

At the end of the third listen-through, my opinion hadn't changed very much. The band, minus Mick Jagger, are extraordinary. They're versatile. They've evolved over the years. They're incredibly talented. But they're rarely innovative. When they are innovative, like they are on "Gimme Shelter" and "You Can't Always Get What You Want", they're transcendent. But when they're playing American blues rock, they're just a very talented cover band with a nasally lead singer.

Mick Jagger is the problem. He's an excellent front man. Great energy, easy to impersonate, and when he's got a song in his range, you want to sing along with him. But, particularly in the 60s and 70s, he would try and be bluesy or morph his voice in interesting ways, and it just never worked for me.

One of my closest friends has an Exile On Main Street shirt, and has talked about the album at length to me. So I was excited to sit down and devour it. I imagined I would have a three or four album discography, and one of them would be a condensed Exile On Main Street. I listened to it twice in a row, trying to find anything that I would want to listen to again, and there was nothing for me. A group of tax dodging British millionaires trying to emulate Black American culture comes off exactly as disingenuous you might imagine from that description. Yea, the instruments sound great, but the nasally vocals clash with them, and the lyrics could be replaced with an air conditioner warranty manual, and they would have the same effect.

If I were going to be stuck on an island for a year, and given the choice between Exile On Main Street or a Right Said Fred album without even "I'm Too Sexy" on it, I'd choose Right Said Fred.

There is no Beatles album that I would even consider swapping out for Right Said Fred.

At the end of this last listen-through, I came out with a two album discography. And, I want to make it clear, I LOVE these two albums worth of songs. There was no struggle to fill up the two albums. I could listen to any of these songs on repeat (except "Let It Bleed") and be content.

1. Tig Notaro has a routine about being in school, and having a teacher that asked students to bring in their favorite song. The teacher would play the beginning of the song at the end of the class. And, one day, a kid who was not Tig's friend asked Tig, because Tig is cool, what would be a cool song to play. Tig answered, honestly, You Can't Always Get What You Want. It is a very cool song. BUT it starts with a boy's choir singing the lyrics acapella. And the teacher only played that part of the song, making the kid embarrassed that people would think that he was super into boys choirs. It's a great routine. The dichotomy between that boys choir that floats at the beginning and end of the track and the Mick Jagger, congos and maracas and background singers chunk of the song is perfect.

2.  The drums and "yeows!" from Sympathy For The Devil creep through the end of the previous track. I first heard parts of this song during a live version of "Bad" by U2, and decided I needed to hear the original. Its a song that's been liberally covered by bands that I loved. But as much as I loved Guns N Roses in the 90s, I could never imagine deliberately listening to their horrendous whispery growled cover of this song. It sounds like a karaoke version recorded just after Rocky Horror Picture Show let out. The Rolling Stones version is such a weird mix of bongos, piano, and hooo-hooos that it always makes me smile. The guitar sounds like some sort of alien mosquito, occasionally buzzing by the song. It also has some of The Stones best narrative and lyric writing.

3. So, uh, I also only sought out Ruby Tuesday because it's part of the same medley  from the end of that live versino of U2's "Bad". Like "Sympathy For The Devil", it's more piano based than guitar. It also has the best fluttery flute use in rock and roll. I feel like, having grown up in the 80s and not the 60s, I don't usually enjoy this Frolicking In The Flowers rock. It (the genre, not this song in particular) was a cliched object of ridicule when I grew up. But this had the kind of catchy energy that makes it a bit of an exception. I can imagine this in an Ernest Goes Somewhere movie.

4. The first really rock song on this imagined album, with it's fantastic drum intro, drum fills, and basic-ass riff is Get Off Of My Cloud. This was a song I'd hear on the oldies station pretty regularly. It's almost a Kinks song. It's nice and dirty with very 60s garage production. I can see it being a song where people at high school dances would shout the chorus at each other.

5. And it leads into the dirtiest riff they ever produced. Even if you've tried (and tried and tried) to avoid The Rolling Stones, there is no escaping (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction. What is there to say about this song? It's on every Best Rock Songs Of All Time List, even the one that's called Best Rock Songs Of All Time Not By The Rolling Stones. It's just that pervasive. I wonder if the lack of girly action is what led Jagger to Bowie.

6. There's a bit of a twangy guitar transition from "Satsifaction" to another piano rag song, Let It Bleed. I kind of hate Jagger's vocals here, the fake drawl that he uses only at the end of certain lines. It's definitely a Get Ready To Stumble Home Drunk song for the end of the night at a very shitty bar.

7. I think the only reason I enjoy Street Fighting Man is because I used to have a mashup of its music along with the vocals to The Temptations' "Ball Of Confusion", which is one of my favorite songs from that era. The music on "Street Fighting Man" is bright and flawless but the vocals have never really grabbed me. Too nasally and too cemented to the beat for a rock song about revolution. But that guitar riff is perfect.

8. Similarly, the piano riff for Let's Spend The Night Together demands my attention every time I hear it. I do prefer the Bowie version, which I heard first, even though it is Uber 70s space rock. But this version is okay, too. The bada-bop-bop-bop-ba-da-das and the Beatlesque background vocals really make the song.

9. Under My Thumb should really be a song about espionage rather than a song about taking control of a relationship from someone who used to be controlling. The lyrics on this song are kind of shitty. But that marimba and fuzz bass? *Chef's kiss" And the quality of Jagger's vocals are perfect for this song. I just hate the lyrics.

10. Tina Turner covered "Under My Thumb", and it's not one of my favorite songs when she sings it, either. But she should have covered Stray Cat Blues. How would it sound for an older woman to sing about how much she wanted to fuck a 15 year old groupie? Would it still be considered "a classic"? This is another song where I love the music but wish the lyrics were different.

11. On the flipside, I love the lyrics on Mother's Little Helper. Great narrative, great rhyme scheme, great chorus. Getting old totally is a drag.

12. Partially for the thematic dissonance with the previous track, and partly because I do love the organ intro and the fiftiesesque echoey production, the next track is Time Is On My Side.  This has to be their best throwback song. This could be a Big Bopper track.

13. The Rolling Stones have a lot of songs that are covers or blatant rip-offs of American blues. Most of them don't land for me. But Heart Of Stone sounds more like Cream or the other British bands doing blues-rock, and that hits differently. I like it. Jagger seems to be content to sound like Jagger, while the background vocals bounce between 50s croony background vocals, and the harsher 60s sound.

14. Another song I first heard by U2 is Paint It Black. I love U2. They were my favorite band in high school, when I first heard their cover. I could not, with a straight face, say that their cover does the original justice. It's a paint-it-black-by-numbers version. I am glad that it turned me on to the original, though.

15. Yesterday's Papers was in weird rotation on the oldies station my parents listened to. They often highlighted the echoey, barely produced rock with the slightly off-key doot-do-do-dooods in the background that were pervasive in the 60s. The highlights of the song for me are the haunting marimbas dripping off the equally hautning vibraphones giving the track something that's both very creepy, and very elevator jazz. It just makes me think about period pieces in the 60s about the 1940s for some reason.

16. I almost think that the radio station previously mentioned used to medley "Yesterday's Papers" with Not Fade Away, since I hear them seeming to flow into each other, though they clearly do not. The vibraphones and marimbas are jettisoned for harmonica, tambourine, and hand claps. It's one of those covers that I am more familiar with than the original, even though it is not a better version.

17. For me, the best song on this album is the closer. There's a lot of history behind the song that I've heard via poets, and VH1, and articles about bands who wreaked havoc on other musicians who worked with them. It's not my place to talk about it, but you should really research the history of Gimme Shelter. It's pretty dense, and important to music history. It's also just a killer song. Jagger is always better with background singers. He's never once been the best singer on a Rolling Stones album. I can't think of a single song that should even attempt to follow this.

This season is heavy on the overarching conspiracy theory, so get ready to spend a lot of time with Skinner, X, Krycek, Byers, and the Syndicate (featuring SMoking Man and friends!)

Episode 1: Apocrypha
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Skinner, Krycek, The Lone Gunmen, John Fitzgerald Byers)

We open Season Four with The Syndicate (Smoking Man, Well-Manicured Man, and their associates), The Lone Gunmen, and Krycek. This is super continuity and conspiract heavy and has some very juicy?...oily developments.


Episode 2: Jose Chung's From Outer Space
(Mulder, Scully)

It's Monster Of The Week time! It's a relatively funny one, too, with alien abductions, a foul mouth sherrif whose profanity is amusingly handled for prime time network television, and The Best Cameo of the series, if not the best cameo in all of 90s TV.


Episode 3: Quagmire
(Mulder, Scully)

Frogs. You're already on board, right? The investigation into a decreasing frog population leads to one of the longest and best Mulder/Scully scenes for the entire series.


Episode 4: Wetwired
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Skinner, X, The Lone Gunmen, John Fitzgerald Byers)

Despite the cast involved in this, this episode isn't focused on the series' long-arc about alien abduction and everybody's past. Instead, we get an investigation into the relationship between television and violence with X, members of The Syndicate, Skinner, and The Lone Gunmen all helping piece together a relatively smaller scale conspiracy.


Episode 5: Talitha Cumi
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Skinner, X)

Here is the overarching conspiracy episode with some awesome character development between Mulder and Smoking Man.


Episode 6: Herrenvolk
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Skinner, X)

This is the beginning of the X-Files official season four. It's one of those great Build Your Longtime Story By Destroying Part Of It episodes. Also, there's a creepy new wrinkle to the mystery.


Episode 7: Home
(Mulder, Scully)

This is more Friday The 13th than X-Files, as the Monster Of The Week is humanity. Horrible, distorted humanity.


Episode 8: Musings Of A Cigarette Smoking Man
(Smoking Man, John Fitzgerald Byers)

There is a phenomenon in Doctor Who called Doctor Lite Episodes, wherein the Doctor is either barely used or not at all. This episode has barely any Mulder or Scully, as we see the career of Smoking Man through his own eyes.


Episode 9: Tunguska
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Skinner, Krycek)

Everyone is turning on everyone, as the US Government demands to know Where Is Fox Mulder? (No, there was no reason to think he was missing before this episode.)


Episode 10: Terma
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Skinner, Krycek)

Where is Fox Mulder? Russia? Why? We end the season trying to find that out.