Your link isn’t working, but I hope Carole King’s ‘Tapestry’ is high on the list.

Thanks maddie, it should work now. And yes, 'Tapestry' is #25.

"Rumors" should be #1. :) My all-time favorite and the keeper of so many

of my sweet memories and "Dreams" ;) But, hard to pick just one, isn't it? Thanks for posting this.

The Beatles Abbey Road is my favorite, and at least it made #5.

This list means nothing to me - I cannot stand listening to Joni Mitchell, even though I think she is a wonderful person - and my ex-boss was her interior designer and named a semanier (chest of seven drawers) after her that she designed for her. Something about her voice makes my skin crawl, but Laura Nyro is worse, as is Joan Baez, even though I love her as a person as well. I pretty much despise folk music in general, although I can appreciate that other people love it. I cannot help my reaction to it. I wish I liked it. I can like the singers without liking their music. I love Barbra Streisand as an actress but cannot stand her as a singer. I'm sort of the same way with Cher.

The closest thing to folk music I like is The Mamas & The Papas, and I noticed that If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears (which used to be 112 on their list) is now not on the top 500. This is as close to folk music as I like. In general, I prefer European bands and music to American.

I think their previous lists are better than the current one. Note that the order of their lists changes quite a bit from year to year.

In my opinion, such a list should recognize and highlight works that for their time and place were bold and brave, unique and revolutionary, original, deep (no weak cuts), and most importantly, influential and emulated by other artists afterwards. Any such list is by its nature subjective but this particular version seems weak. Seemingly a case of "here's a performer I like, let's choose an album for the list". For Marvin Gaye's interesting but not remarkable "What's Going On" to be #1 sends the whole list to a dustbin as far as I'm concerned.

(PS - It's great to love albums and associate them with good memories. Rumours -spelled the English way- is a good album but that's not the measure. To me, it's perhaps not even a top 100. It has a number of weak tracks that the more praiseworthy albums don't.)

Edit to add - I agree with lars about Joni Mitchell. She wrote some good songs - fewer than 10 for me - stretched over a long career and many albums. Her albums, again for me, each may have two or sometimes three good cuts and the rest forgettable filler, one after the other.

For me, it's the Beatles white album.

For me , it's just about everything the Beatles did. (but probably Rubber Soul and Sgt Pepper). I have never appreciated Fleetwood Mac. I will show myself out.

Yes, I haven't run across too many men who are whole-hearted 'Blue' fans. If you were in high school or college when this came out, a woman, and had gone through a bad breakup, this was *the* album, played over and over again.

For so many of us, songs are wrapped up in where and who we were when we listened to them (I think I said something similar on a thread about books). I spent my childhood listening to the Beatles and know every song inside and out. Are all of them great? Certainly not, but I love them all. (And for my money, Help!, the English version, is their best album. I'm most fond of their middle period music, even though I recognize and appreciate the great innovations they - and George Martin - began with Sgt. Pepper.)

ETA: salonva, if you love the Beatles you can stay. :-)

"For so many of us, songs are wrapped up in where and who we were when we listened to them"

Of course. But for me, a Top 500 list by an iconic (though no longer influential) publication like Rolling Stone shouldn't be affected by anyone's feelings about when, where or who they were or weren't when any particular album was released. I suspect many of the albums on the list were released when many of the contributing writers weren't around or old enough to write the word "album".

A list of "Best 500" isn't the same as someone responding to "which are your favorite 500". There are plenty of albums and groups that I think belong in the Top 50 that I don't particularly care for but such works are noteworthy all the same and should be recognized as such. Miles Davis' Kinda Blue and Birth of the Cool are like that in that I don't care for jazz but these recordings achieved milestones and created new styles others didn't.

From what I've heard over the years, Joni Mitchell has been a lifelong psycho. Unable to maintain relationships with anyone. So she has a lot of melancholy feelings to express in her songs. There's such a sameness to her songs, which is why I question a high rating for any of her albums. Same-old, same-old, for most of them. Did you hear about the incident when Mitchell got upset that Judy Collins had a MUCH bigger hit than she did with her version of Mitchell's Both Sides Now? Even though it made her a lot of money, Mitchell cut off communications with her. Collins thought it was ridiculous but had no reason to push the point.

Oh my gosh I'm going to have to scroll through 500 paragraphs? I'd rather see a simple list of artist, album, album release date. But okay.

Done. Not very compelling, to be honest. After the first ten (agree with them or not) it seemed like a random ordering of miscellaneous works.

The list is broken down, 50 albums per page. You can just click on '50-1' to see the top ones.