Music Monday for January 20th, 2025

This week we have Music Monday: One Random Album, One Short Journey on time - it’s a small miracle. As it says in the overview, pick one album at random and listen to it front to back, then write a little blurb-y thing about it. Yeah - I’m cheesy. It’s OK.

This week’s album

Shuffle is insiting on being hipster cliche recently (or maybe that’s just the way my music library is weighted). Hootie and the Blowfish - Cracked Rear View is about as elevator music as you can get in 2025.

The debut studio album from Hootie & The Blowfish and their most commercially successful. It was the highest-selling album of 1995, with 10.5 million shipments that year alone, eventually shipping 16 million copies to retailers by March 31, 1999. RIAA sales of April 2010 19× platinum, for the fifteenth best selling album of all time in the United States.

“Cracked Rear View” reached Number 1 in the Billboard Top 200 five times in 1995 and produced four of their biggest hits:

• “Hold My Hand”
• “Let Her Cry”
• “Only Wanna Be with You”
• “Time”

• When did you first hear this album? - Almost certainly when it was released; there was no escaping the singles.
• What were you doing when it played the first time? - This is one of those albums that feels like it just was always there - it’s pervasive in a way that feels like it just coalesced out of the air and into people’s collective memory.
• What emotions or memories are attached to it? - The singles are all great sing-along songs, so playing them at an open mic or bar was always an easy way to get people singing back at you and pay the bar tab - but the album itself is full of songs that I seem to know all the words to, even though I’ve never actually owned a copy.
• What would you write on the card if you gifted this album to a friend? - All of the best things about cheesy mid-90’s pop wrapped up in a neat little bow.
• Overall take? - Actually a pretty progressive album from a lyric standpoint. Given other things on the radio at the time I’m not surprised, but I seem to have forgotten. It was a #1 album for so many weeks for a reason - well crafted songs that float along with some interesting (though not highlighted) instrumental parts mixed in and a conversational vocalist.

Join in

Here’s the cheesy marketing hook - do your own and then come talk about it somewhere. It’ll be fun, I promise.