Tuesday Playlist: All-Time Lowes

There are days when you line things up and expect them to go according to plan and they do, and then there are days that are the opposite of those days, and today was decidedly the latter type of day. I had every intention of publishing this post hours ago — and I came so close — but now it's coming up on 9 o'clock and I am old and tired and only doing the best I can, which is not that great.

You know who is great? Mr. Nick Lowe, who has been one of my favorite songwriters for as long as I can remember. We love weird musical gateways here at Jefitoblog, so I'm compelled to share that my introduction to Lowe's greatness came courtesy of the cassette copy of The Rose of England that bobbed around in my dad's 1984 Toyota Camry for years on end — and that I'm pretty sure he only bought said cassette because Huey Lewis handled production on one song. That song? The classic Lowe original "I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock & Roll)," which I performed at my mother's next wedding, but that's a story for another day.

Anyway, I'd be willing to bet that when I bought Lowe's 1990 album Party of One, I did it with The Rose of England in mind — and I'm awfully glad I did, because not only is it a pretty solid LP, it also introduced me to most of the band responsible for John Hiatt's Bring the Family album, which I would only hear and fall in love with after the fine-but-disappointing release of 1992's Little Village, which reunited every member of that band to diminishing returns.

I'm doing an extraordinarily poor job of outlining/identifying the actual chronology and personnel involved in these projects, but that's probably fine; if you're already a Lowe fan, you know exactly what I'm talking about, and if you aren't, I'd have to spend way too many words getting into the weeds of it all. What really matters here is the music, which has been outstanding for pretty much all of Lowe's career. The generally accepted low point is 1988's Pinker and Prouder Than Previous, which found Lowe near the nadir of his alcoholism as well as the dissolution of his marriage to Carlene Carter, but even at his worst, Lowe is better than the best most songwriters have to give.

In anticipation of his upcoming album Indoor Safari, which ranks high among my most eagerly awaited releases of 2024, here's a playlist of more than 70 personal favorites plucked from the Lowe discography. Given that I became a fan during the days when he was at least nominally considered a power pop artist, I still prefer the more uptempo stuff — but you'd have to have a heart of stone (and a soul to boot) in order to keep from hearing the brilliance brought to bear on the more contemplative stuff he's been releasing for the last 30 years.

If you're already a fan, I hope you appreciate these picks; if you aren't, I hope they serve as the Lowe gateway your ears have been waiting for. He's one of the all-time greats.