2026-10-25
One year of 1001 Albums
Around one year ago, I was browsing Wikipedia as I usually do, and in some article related to David Bowie, I discovered a mention of a book: 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Curious, I followed the wiki page link to the book itself to find out what it was about. Turns out that it’s a musical reference book, and it was probably no wonder I’d stumbled upon it on a David Bowie page, as he holds the record for the amount of albums in the book. And once I’d gotten to the end of the page, there was another link: 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die Generator.
I’d been on the lookout for new music to listen to anyway (I think it was the original reason why I was browsing Bowie articles), and here I had a website that would help me listen to the 1001 albums included in the book, an album a day. There is an option to only get a new album on weekdays, but leaving out the weekends felt half-baked, so I went for the full album-a-day option. I signed up and received my first album on October 25th, 2025: Black Monk Time by The Monks.
I don’t really remember that much about my first album. I gave it a 3/5 on the site, which (usually) means “not particularly good, not really bad either” on my 1–5 rating scale. But despite getting a humdrum opener, I’ve stuck with it. And now today I have listened to, and rated, a full year’s worth of picks at 365 albums. Can’t say that my 365th album, Cheap Trick at Budokan was particularly good either. I think there are generally way too many live albums in the book (and yet Alive 2007 is not one of them).
This also means that I am just under one third done, as the generator incorporates albums from all of the editions of the book, meaning it actually generates from 1102 albums. The newest edition of the book that bumped it past 1100 actually came out just this month. Back when I originally signed up for the generator, the total still stood at 1089, so I’d have passed the one-third line already by now.
With one third of the albums behind me, I have to agree with one criticism of the original Robert Dimery book: it’s extremely Anglocentric. I’ve gotten four David Bowie albums in my first year and I think exactly one album from the entire Asian continent: Call of the Valley. Thankfully the one album I’ve gotten from there during my first year was pretty good, and definitely not something I would’ve looked for on my own. I don’t think it would even be particularly hard to mix it up a bit either. The book for example has three Kraftwerk albums, and nothing from Yellow Magic Orchestra. I’d trade Kraftwerk’s Autobahn for YMO’s Solid State Survivor in a heartbeat.
1001 Albums Generator lists albums to originate from the US, the UK, or from “other”, and “other” makes up for 11% of my first year albums. And I think even that is overestimated. Like, why is Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters considered “other”? As far as I can tell, it should be under US. And I guess Pretenders is “other” because it’s British-American, so it doesn’t land squarely in either of the big buckets? Rust Never Sleeps by Neil Young & Crazy Horse is also “other”, presumably because Neil Young didn’t get an American citizenship until 2020. Even though Young had already been living in the US for over a decade before the album came out and Crazy Horse is definitely American too. If I correct the ones I think are clearly mistaken and exclude the British Commonwealth from my “others”, I think I go down to just 7% “other”.
You can probably debate what should and shouldn’t be in the book until the end of times. I know I’ve written in several reviews that I could have died happy without ever having listened to what particular album I had that day. Still, it’s a very interesting experiment and I intend to keep up with it. It’s already become a routine to open up my project page each morning and add the given album to my playlist. I’m also now trying to write at least one sentence on each album I’ve listened to in the public reviews, since it’s really interesting to read about what people wrote about your favourite album, or an album that you absolutely hated. Except maybe for the reviews that are mainly about the artist themselves and not about the album. People really seem to hate Morrissey and are very vocal about it.
I’m also looking forwards to the user submissions. After you’ve completed all of the ~1100 albums from the books, you get to nominate an album that’s not in the book for other users, and then you get a random daily pick from other users’ picks. I’m gonna presume that there’s gonna be a lot more variety when I eventually get there in 2028. Not really sure what I’ll nominate though. Maybe something outside the anglosphere since Dimery has already picked that pretty clean.
Here’s a collage of the 32 albums that I gave a full 5/5 rating, in the order that I got them from the generator. It includes the album that I will most likely nominate as my number one favourite album in the entire book in two years’ time.
