Best Album For
by Dave Sandell & Caleb Gardner
Dave Sandell and Caleb Gardner choose the best album for highly relatable, real-life situations — like decompressing after a long day, elevating a backyard party, impressing the car next to you at a stop light, missing someone you love, or running from zombies.
Episodes
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Seeing Aliens
Dave and Caleb have a close encounter of the third kind as they choose the best album for seeing aliens. Is music a universal enough language to avoid world domination? Do aliens even exist? Is it better to give them the best music the world has to offer, or the music that most stirs your soul?...
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A High Speed Chase
What's the right soundtrack for barreling down a highway in pursuit -- or being pursued -- in your very own General Lee? Dave & Caleb lay out the criteria, buckle in, and gun it to 95 with The Prodigy's Fat of the Land and The Reverend Horton Heat's It's Martini Time! Two albums from a golden era...
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Not Selling Out (With Vince Brackett!)
Special guest co-host Vince Brackett joins the podcast this week to discuss what it means to “sell out” for a variety of musicians, and the template for popular and highly successful musicians to “reverse sell out” with an album cycle (or more) marked by attempts to be taken more seriously as an...
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Introducing Your Kids to Hip Hop
We go deep on a roadmap for getting your kids to rap music, from Sugarhill Gang to whatever is happening in the genre right now. How do you approach conversations about lyrical content, specific life experiences that aren’t our own, and answer questions you never thought you’d have to answer...
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A New Year
Dave and Caleb welcome in 2024 by naming the best albums for starting a new year. What albums best capture that fine line between eternal optimism and existential dread about what could come? Dave suggests Prince’s 1999, a party album preoccupied with nuclear proliferation in the early 80s, and...
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2023 (Our Top Tens Episode!)
Dave and Caleb are wrapping up 2023 with our inaugural top tens of the year, plus loads of honorable mentions and singles. We count it down 10-1 and hopefully introduce you to some of your new favorite music! Our favorite albums of 2023: Alex Lahey - The Answer is Always Yes Boygenius - the…
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Let's Make a Christmas Mixtape!
This week we're doing something different, a game we call Let's Make a Mixtape. Our friend Hana Kim joins us as we draft 18 Christmas songs that we're publishing as a playlist you can listen to on Spotify or Apple Music. But there's a twist -- when it's someone's turn, they get to not only draft…
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Christmastime
December is here and we’re ready to get in the Christmas spirit! Or Dave is at least. Dave brings Caleb on a magical journey through a season of lights and traditions and a spiritually moving season, while Caleb keeps us grounded in the stress and consumerism of the holiday. But, one thing they…
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Getting into Caleb & Dave's Favorite Band
Dave and Caleb celebrate their November birthdays by introducing you to one of their favorite bands, the Scottish indie rock legends Frightened Rabbit, and their seminal break-up album, The Midnight Organ Fight. Discussed today: Frightened Rabbit’s catalog Spiritual Cramp - Spiritual Cramp Jamie...
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Sweater Weather
The leaves are changing, the hot apple cider is brewing, the bonfires and bonfiring, and Dave and Caleb are ready to crown the best album for autumn. What are the albums that we pull out for just a few months each year that are elevated by the invigoratingly crisp air and the cozy trappings of...
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2:00 AM Becoming 1:00
Daylight Savings Time is upon us, and Dave and Caleb are celebrating by choosing albums that sound great at one in the morning. What makes an album sound best in the dark, wee hours of the morning? Dave gets into one of his all-time favorites, Portishead’s trip-hop classic Dummy, and Caleb goes…
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Spooky Season
Halloween is upon us, and after a quick stroll through all things traditions and family policies, Dave and Caleb unpack what makes a song spooky? Is it the song itself, or are the images we associate with it doing half the work? Along the way, they give picks for music that is genuinely…
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Becoming a Swiftie (with Sydney Bauer!)
Taylor Swift is a global sensation with legions of devoted fans who call themselves "Swifties." Surprisingly, your hosts Dave and Caleb -- a.k.a. two dads in their 40s -- aren't among them. But in the midst of the year of Taylor, we wanted to find our way in. So we enlisted our friend Sydney…
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Starting a Bar Fight
If movies like Roadhouse and Fight Club taught us anything, it’s that every bar fight is accompanied by a catalyzing track. Today, two pacifists take another trip into their imaginations to determine the album that could come on that would make you want to defend someone’s honor (or at least buy...
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Taking a Time Warp to 1966
Dave and Caleb hop in their DeLorean to travel back to the year 1966 and decide which album they most want to experience in the time of its release. They talk about the frenzy that surrounded every Beatles release and what it must have felt like to experience your favorite band going in new...
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Going Home Again
They say you can’t go home again, but this week Dave and Caleb make an attempt to as they think about hometowns. The good, the bad, the people, what it means to bring your full grown up self to a place where you are perpetually 17 years old, and importantly, the power of music to become…
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Starting High School
Dave and Caleb go deep on how they formed their imagination for high school (spoiler alert: Saved by the Bell shows up) and what types of feelings and memories shaped their mindset as they remember entering high school, with all its misplaced promise and unearned swagger and raging hormones. They...
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Retreating to the Woods (with Quentin Coaxum!)
Dave is joined this week by a special guest, Quentin Coaxum (https://quentincmusic.bandcamp.com). Quentin is a professional trumpeter, composer and teacher in the Chicago area, where he’s performed at the Chicago Jazz Festival and the Pitchfork Music Festival. Dave and Quentin go deep on two very...
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Jumping in a Lake With Your Friends
Dave and Caleb make one last splash before summer comes to a close by determining the best album for jumping in a lake with your friends, including a surprise album that neither of them like all that much. Can an album be a 'best album for' if it has 5 killer tracks and a ton of filler? They also...
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Driving by a Group of Youths
In today’s episode, Dave wants to bring you in on one of his most embarrassing behaviors that began with a brilliant attempt to be cool in high school, and Dave and Caleb attempt to determine what songs you can blast from your car that will, for a brief moment, make sure the high schoolers you…
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Burying a Body with a Friend
You get a call in the middle of the night from your best pal, panicked and determined. Something unthinkable has happened. Things will never be the same. And now you have to pick the best album for burying a body with a friend. It’s a listener suggestion this week on Best Album For! Dave and…
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Working Out When You Don't Want To
Dave and Caleb lament how easy it is to lose momentum on work outs and pick their best albums for getting out of bed or out the door to get a work out in when you're really unmotivated. Caleb takes us into 1980s hardcore punk and Dave presents one of his all-time favorite albums that rarely gets...
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Getting Work Done at a Coffee Shop
Dave and Caleb explore their ideal work settings and choose the album for the inevitable times you’re stuck in a coffee shop with bad reggae covers playing in the background. Along the way, they explore where jazz music sits for them in 2023, and Dave reveals the origin of his very confusing AOL...
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Solo Road Trip
Dave and Caleb hit the open road and pick the best album for a road trip by yourself. Along the way, they talk about guilty pleasures, whether one can dance while driving a car, the scourge of hidden tracks on CDs, saccharine songs that haven’t aged well, and two unassailable albums for solo road...
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Listening to Music in the First Half of 2023 (Best of 2023 so far...)
Dave and Caleb present a special episode entirely dedicated to new music from this year as they count down their individual top 5 lists of 2023 music so far, plus a peak at what they’re excited about for the rest of 2023. [SPOILER ALERT] Albums recommended in this episode (not in this order):...
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Decompressing After a Long Day
We discover that we have very different ideas about what it means to decompress, from when that process should begin to how it should end. Should decompression be energizing after a long day, or should it help us unwind? We debate what makes for a good decompression album and make it through...
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Becoming Musically Sentient, Part 2 (Dave)
It’s part two of our superhero origin stories as we unpack Dave’s arrival at becoming ‘musically sentient’ — the first album he remembers where music meant to him what it means now. We journey through the Bangles and ‘Do the Bartman’ to arrive at a seismic shift in music history that Dave caught…
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Becoming Musically Sentient (Part 1: Caleb)
This week we’re releasing two new episodes on the same theme: the first album you remember where music held the place that is means to you now — what we call ‘becoming musically sentient.’ Caleb takes us way back to fifth grade when music videos on MTV were the most influential thing in the pop...
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Elevating a Backyard BBQ
Summer is here and along with it comes numerous excuses to gather in someone’s backyard to grill out (or, barbecue / BBQ if you’re from the midwest. We see you, Texas.) What are the most important things to consider when creating your playlist for a backyard BBQ? From target audience to volume to...
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Doing Peyote in the Woods
Two guys who have never done any hard drugs choose the best album for a hallucinogenic drug experience. Why? Because they’ve seen every movie and television depiction of the experience, good and bad, from the last 30+ years and have a pretty clear idea of how to establish criteria for such an...
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Apologizing to Your Kids
In the last of the launch week episodes, Dave and Caleb figure out the Best Album For Apologizing to Your Kids. What music would work best in the background of modeling emotional health and doing the hard work of repairing with your kids? Along the way, they discover that many of the great…
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Cratering a Social Network
In the second of three launch week episodes, Dave and Caleb choose their Best Album For a nearly universal human experience — Cratering a Social Network. What kind of music would someone listen to if they were making the choices that a certain social media exec has been making over the last…
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Best Album for Starting a Podcast
It’s launch week, and in the first of three episodes, Dave and Caleb present their picks for the Best Album For Starting a Podcast. They find a not-so-deep cut from 1995 that captures all of their hopes and dreams for this new venture, and then discuss what to do with albums that once fit the…
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About this show
Dave Sandell and Caleb Gardner choose the best album for highly relatable, real-life situations — like decompressing after a long day, elevating a backyard party, impressing the car next to you at a stop light, missing someone you love, or running from zombies.
Hosted by
Dave Sandell & Caleb Gardner
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