The Metroschifter’s Favorite Albums

  Episode 41 If you’re one of those people who feel that one-minute episodes are “kinda short,” oh boy, are you in for a treat. With a playing time of 2 hours and 25 minutes, this week’s episode is 145 times longer than usual. In this special, extended episode, I sit down with my bandmates as we discuss our favorite albums. My best friends Pat “Pea” McClimans, Chris “The Hört” Reinstatler, and I have traveled the world and played music for thousands of people. Our band, the Metroschifter, has played over 200 shows in 15 countries. Though we haven’t played a show together in about ten years, it hasn’t stopped the three of us from continuing to travel together. It’s kind of like we’re still going on tour, but we just don’t play music for other people anymore. In just the past few years, we have traveled to the Oregon coast, the Netherlands, Joshua Tree National Park and, well, several undisclosed locations that I can’t talk about for security reasons. One afternoon in September 2018, we were hanging out in Hört’s apartment in Long Beach, California. He has a big, hardcover coffee table book there called The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, published by the editors of Rolling Stone magazine.  It’s a massive, heavy book of more than 200 pages, and the more we looked through it, the more ridiculous it became.  As you’ll hear in this episode, we had a lot of problems with this book. So after bitching about it for quite some time that afternoon, Pea, Hört and I eventually decided to make our own lists. To make it more manageable, we decided to go with Top 15 lists instead of submitting our Top 50 or Top 500 favorite albums. And rather than ranking what we thought were the greatest albums of all time – a term that we felt had a connotation of historical or cultural significance – we opted to make lists of our own Top 15 albums from a perspective of personal importance, relevance to our own lives, and basically, our favorites. We spent a few hours that afternoon compiling our lists and when the lists were ready, we sat down around a microphone to discuss our choices.  There is a page at kcomposite.com/albums where you can see our favorite albums and listen to them free if you are an Apple Music subscriber. Links mentioned in this episode: Adventures in Design episode #827 “A Man Out of Time” with guest Scott Ritcher link Adventures in Design episode #914 “Old Timey Radio Memes” with guest Scott Ritcher link Bedtime Bourbon, a very small batch straight bourbon whiskey available only in Kentucky: louisvillebourbon.com The Metroschifter’s favorite albums with links to iTunes and Apple Music: kcomposite.com/albums