10 albums a day #42

Poi Dog Pondering - Wishing Like a Mountain and Thinking Like the Sea (1989, CD)
The Pretenders - Get Close (1986, CD)
Propaganda - A Secret Wish (1985, LP)
The Psychedelic Furs
- The Psychedelic Furs (1980, cassette)
- Talk Talk Talk (1981, cassette)
- Mirror Moves (1984, cassette)
- Midnight to Midnight (1987, LP)
- World Outside (1991, CD)
Public Bulletin - Broke from the Sound (1987, EP)
Pure Prairie League - Best of (CD)

I discovered Poi Dog Pondering from a label sampler CD with the song "Bury Me Deep." I still think that's a great song, but I never really wanted to go any further. They're too hippy. And some of their lyrics are just dippy.

I've never been a real Pretenders fan. I also have the LP of Learning to Crawl, which I think has above-average integrity for an album of 1984, but I think I got it more or less by accident from a record club. They were another of those groups that I liked hearing on the radio, but that was all. Except for "Brass in Pocket" which I thought was such an excruciatingly annoying song that it always made me change the station. The only reason I bought this CD was because of the song "Hymn to Her." They kept playing it on the radio and it had a nice melody but I never paid a whole lot of attention to it until one day suddenly I realized: holy cr*p, that's a song about the triple goddess. I had to have it just because it was the only rock song I'd ever heard about about that particular archetype. Chrissie Hynde didn't write it; it was actually written by some old hippy friend of hers, who, according to an interview I read in Musician magazine with Hynde, "lives in a commune making hammocks and nut bars."

I sometimes wonder what effect it would have had on me if I had discovered the Psychedelic Furs in 1980, when their first album came out and I was a more impressionable youth. Anyway, I didn't get into them until Midnight came out in 1987, and I think I bought it after reading about it and them in Musician. It immediately became a favorite album. I bought the three cassettes all about the same time; they were all on the tape rack at Hastings. I could see buying the ones I don't have just to fill in all the blanks.

Pure Prairie League I liked enough to buy their "best of." I also have one old tape of theirs that I haven't ripped yet, and may in fact be too worn out, but we'll see. This is another one that I put in my "great road albums" category.

Album count: 425.