Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums
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The stories behind some of the most essential albums of all time, told by the artists who made them and Rolling Stone’s writers and editors. Each episode focuses on one album from the brand-new, updated version of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums list, featuring fresh conversations with the people who made the music, classic interview audio and expert commentary. Episodes include the late Tom Petty on his solo classic Wildflowers, Taylor Swift talking about her career-changing 2012 album Red, and Public Enemy breaking down their political masterpiece It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.
Now we’re back with Season Two. Across 10 episodes, you’ll hear Dolly Parton tell the stories behind the songs on her 1971 solo breakthrough Coat of Many Colors; Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr delve into the making of the Beatles’ troubled final album, Let It Be; Britney Spears’ collaborators explain how she made 2007’s Blackout in the eye of a paparazzi hurricane; friends and relatives of Alice Coltrane look back at how she overcame tragedy to create her masterpiece Journey in Satchidananda; Rivers Cuomo and his bandmates reflect on the unlikely birth of Weezer’s Blue Album; and much more.
Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums is hosted by Senior Writer Brittany Spanos.
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Top 10 Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
Lauryn Hill's "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill"
Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums
11/10/21 • 45 min
After rocketing to worldwide fame in the early Nineties as an actress and a member of the Fugees, Lauryn Hill took a big risk with her solo debut, 1998's "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill". It made her an even bigger star at age 23, sold millions of copies, and won her five Grammy Awards, which is the most any woman before her had taken home in a single night. But in the years following Miseducation's blockbuster success, Hill all but exited public life. Though she has since returned to touring and has released one-off singles, she has yet to release a proper follow-up to her one solo album.
In the latest episode of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums, Hill's collaborators and confidants detail the ambitious, personal recording process along with the complicated decades that have followed, including legal disputes with some of those same collaborators. While Hill rarely grants interviews, she also responded to e-mail questions from Rolling Stone for this episode, providing detailed new insights on an album that has become so influential and beloved that it landed at Number 10 on our brand-new poll of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, making it the highest-ranking hip-hop album on the new list.
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Tom Petty's "Wildflowers"
Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums
11/03/21 • 42 min
In this episode of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest albums, we go inside the emotional story of Tom Petty’s "Wildflowers", a 1994 solo album that the singer, along with many fans, felt was the best work of his entire career. For a variety of reasons, Petty never could stop thinking about "Wildflowers"; in fact, it was on his mind right before he died. Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench, and Steve Ferrone of the Heartbreakers along with Petty’s daughter Adria, wife Dana, and "Wildflowers" Executive Producer George Drakoulias discuss how the album was born over a fraught two year period marked by the breakdown of Petty’s first marriage, and a time of depression and uncertainty that followed. This mental state produced songs like "It’s Good To Be King” and "You Don’t Know How It Feels” that seem light and cheerful on the surface, but are actually expressing deep pain. We also share unheard audio from the Rolling Stone archives of Petty speaking about "Wildflowers" and his hopes for a deluxe edition that didn’t want up coming out until three years after his death. Later in the episode, Rolling Stone staffers David Browne, Angie Martoccio and Andy Greene join Spanos to discuss the album’s legacy.
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Introducing: Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums
Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums
11/01/21 • 2 min
Get ready to explore Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums, a new podcast from Amazon Music. Originally released in 2003, the 500 Greatest Albums list is Rolling Stone’s most read and most argued-over article of all time. This year, the magazine completely remade it, with help from voters such as Beyonce, Taylor Swift, U2, and more. In each episode, we’ll dive into the making of one of the albums on the new list: Hear Tom Petty's family and bandmates explain how a deeply painful period in his life resulted in a classic solo album; Swift talk about how Red was a huge risk that changed everything for her; Chuck D on how Public Enemy tried to make the greatest rap album ever with It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and, quite possibly, succeeded.
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Dolly Parton's "Coat of Many Colors"
Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums
03/08/22 • 24 min
Dolly Parton takes us inside Coat of Many Colors, the 1971 album where she came into her own as a solo artist, as a songwriter, and as a storyteller. Over the album’s 10 tracks — seven of them written solely by Dolly — she explored topics like poverty, class, spirituality, nature, female empowerment, and sexuality. The album marked Dolly’s first significant steps out of the shadow of Porter Wagoner, the rhinestoned country star who gave Dolly her big break by hiring her as the “girl singer” on his TV variety show. Dolly tells us the stories behind the songs, including “Coat of Many Colors,” an account of a childhood that was poor in money but rich in love. Contemporary artists like Brandy Clark and Carly Pearce join to talk about the album’s legacy. It’s an intimate look at a deeply personal statement.
New episodes of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums release every Tuesday, only on Amazon Music.
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Weezer's "Self-Titled (The Blue Album)"
Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums
03/15/22 • 30 min
In 1989, a teenage Rivers Cuomo moved from suburban Connecticut to Los Angeles to become a superstar hair-metal guitarist – and instead ended up the frontman of Weezer, one of the key bands of the Nineties alt-rock revolution. Cuomo and his bandmates tell the story of the unlikely birth of Weezer, and the making of a classic debut album that's still winning over new generations of fans.
New episodes of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums release every Tuesday, only on Amazon Music.
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Shakira's "Dónde Están los Ladrones?"
Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums
03/22/22 • 36 min
With more than 80 million records sold worldwide, Shakira is the best-selling female Latin artist ever. But within her decades-long career, there’s one album that set her up for massive fame and in many ways, predicted it all: 1998’s Donde Estan Los Ladrones?. In this episode, producers and collaborators behind the album open up about working with the Colombian singer with the huge voice, on the cusp of her foray into global fame.
New episodes of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums release every Tuesday, only on Amazon Music.
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Liz Phair's "Exile in Guyville"
Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums
03/29/22 • 32 min
Back in 1993, a young songwriter named Liz Phair came out of nowhere to drop one of the Nineties’ defining albums: Exile in Guyville. Phair came from the Chicago indie rock scene, but she had a new story to tell: the secret life of an ordinary twentysomething woman, grappling with love and sex and insecurity. The album didn’t get any mainstream airplay, but it changed the stakes for indie rock, musically, culturally, and emotionally.
On this episode of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums, Contributing Editor Rob Sheffield tells the full story of the album, with help from Liz Phair herself, who breaks down how she channeled the "disillusionment and fury" of her twenties into an era-defining musical statement. Exile producer Brad Wood also weighs in with his memories of the time period, and Mannequin Pussy’s Marisa Dabice discusses how Phair’s “fearlessness” helped free up her own writing.
New episodes of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums release every Tuesday, only on Amazon Music.
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Kanye West's "Yeezus"
Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums
04/19/22 • 28 min
In 2013, Kanye West released Yeezus, his sixth studio album. It sounded like nothing the rapper had ever produced. Fans recoiled at the album’s experimental sound. Critics began to wonder if Ye, who seemed to be at the height of his career, might finally be losing his touch. But, then, something strange happened. Over time, the world Kanye constructed on Yeezus — full of guttural and chaotic emotion, combined with so much noise — started to feel and sound like the world around us. Kanye’s collaborators on the album, from indie electronic musicians like Arca and Hudson Mohawke to icons like Daft Punk and Rick Rubin, helped him construct a blueprint for where popular music was heading.
In this episode of our Amazon Original podcast Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums, collaborators on Yeezus (including producer Hudson Mohawke), and New York Times critic and Kanye expert Jon Caramanica join RS Senior Editor Jeff Ihaza to tell the story of how Kanye West took a sledgehammer to the norms of rap and pop culture to create one of the most fiercely innovative and prescient records of all time.
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Missy Elliott's "Supa Dupa Fly"
Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums
05/24/22 • 40 min
In the Nineties, much of the conversation about hip-hop was dominated by the feud between the East and West Coasts. The South was putting out tons of incredible rap records too, but almost nobody was paying any attention to Portsmouth, Virginia. With 1997's "Supa Dupa Fly", Missy Elliott and Tim "Timbaland" Mosley changed that, and gave the world a taste of the future.
Missy and Timbaland met as teenagers in Virginia and soon found they were musical soulmates. As they explain to Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield in the episode, that friendship translated into some of the most lasting and adventurous music to come out of the Nineties. Both were content working as behind-the-scenes players, but once Missy was coaxed into making a solo album, the pair created "Supa Dupa Fly" in an incredible two weeks. Missy’s voice and delivery were one of a kind, whether she was singing, rapping, or just yelling, “Beep beep!" In this week's episode of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums, both explain the stories behind the songs, including how Tim created the incredible Southern soul space-funk beat for "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)".
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The Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds"
Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums
11/17/21 • 54 min
In early 1966, the Beach Boys arrived at Los Angeles’ Western Studios to hear what Brian Wilson had been up to. The touring version of the band – Mike Love, Bruce Johnston, Al Jardine and Dennis Wilson – had been on the road in Japan, singing surf hits like “Fun, Fun Fun” and “I Get Around.” Wilson, after suffering a mental breakdown on a plane the year before, stayed home, opting to work on instrumental tracks with studio musicians.
What the band heard stunned them. Using instruments like harpsichord, harmonica, strings, and even sleigh bells, Wilson had written a spiritual album that captured heartbreak, insecurity, pain and sadness of entering adulthood. According to legend, the Beach Boys did not like "Pet Sounds", and its commercial failure led Brian Wilson to lose confidence in himself and descend further into mental illness. As the band explained to Rolling Stone in this week's episode of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time podcast, the truth is more a little more complicated.
While "Pet Sounds" didn’t sell, it inspired generations of musicians, beginning with the Beatles, who, according to George Martin, said ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ “never would have happened” without "Pet Sounds". The album was voted number two on Rolling Stone's rebooted 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list, the spot it held in 2003.
Rolling Stone’s Jason Fine narrates the episode, which includes archival interviews with Brian Wilson, members of Wrecking Crew and more, as well as new interviews with several Beach Boys, plus members of Brian Wilson’s touring band, who brought the music of Pet Sounds to life on stage for the first time in 2000.
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FAQ
How many episodes does Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums have?
Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums currently has 23 episodes available.
What topics does Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums cover?
The podcast is about Taylor Swift, Album, Music, Amazon Music, Podcasts, Music Interviews, Music Interview and Music Commentary.
What is the most popular episode on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums?
The episode title 'Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On"' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums?
The average episode length on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums is 35 minutes.
How often are episodes of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums released?
Episodes of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums are typically released every 7 days.
When was the first episode of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums?
The first episode of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums was released on Nov 1, 2021.
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