Dave's Side One

Dave uses If You Want Blood You've Got It to explore the audience as part of a live musical event. Choose one track and listen once for the band. Then replay it listening only for the audience: where it anticipates, answers, swells, waits or changes the energy. Finally hear both together and ask whether the performance would mean the same thing without that room.

Dave uses Diary of a Madman to explore tension, dissonance and instability. Find three moments that make your ear feel unsettled. Do not name the theory first. Describe the feeling. Then replay each moment and ask what would disappear if the music were made smoother, safer or more resolved.

Dave uses Damn the Torpedoes to explore anticipation and setup. Choose a payoff you love - a chorus, riff, entrance or release. Rewind 20 to 30 seconds. Ignore the payoff on the first pass and listen only to how the record prepares you for it. Then play through the payoff and ask which setup choices made it land.

Dave uses The Original Soundtrack as a listening laboratory. The question is not whether the album deserves a higher ranking; it is whether changing where we place our attention changes what we hear. Today's test: Listen to 'I'm Not in Love' and identify three moments that exist because somebody made a recording rather than simply captured a performance. Then ask whether removing those studio-crea...

Dave uses Bridge of Sighs as a listening laboratory. The question is not whether the album deserves a higher ranking; it is whether changing where we place our attention changes what we hear. Today's test: Play the title track once without trying to identify notes or riffs. Listen only for attack, sustain, vibrato, distortion, decay and silence. On a second pass, ask which of those sound choices c...

Dave closes this week with Led Zeppelin's *In Through the Out Door* and a distinction that rankings cannot capture. Wendy, a dear friend, gave Dave the album for Christmas in 1979; after her death in 2021, the record remains inseparable from her and their friendship. A couple of months after receiving it, Dave wandered into his high-school auditorium, found friends Dave and Scott riffing on “In th...

Dave turns the Art of Listening test around and asks the audience for help. The Boomtown Rats, Todd Rundgren, and Lou Reed are artists he has repeatedly tried to understand without making the connection. Instead of dismissing them, he asks listeners for one album, three tracks and a listening path that might finally make the music click. This episode ends with a practical Art of Listening Test des...

Court and Spark gives Dave a lesson in musical restraint. With players such as Larry Carlton, Joe Sample and Tom Scott supporting Joni Mitchell, the record demonstrates that great musicianship can be heard not only in the notes played, but in placement, space and the decision not to call attention to the player. This episode ends with a practical Art of Listening Test designed to send the listener...

America's Holiday begins the band's six-album run with George Martin. Dave listens past the famous producer's reputation to ask a more useful question: what changed in America's sound, and what did Martin understand well enough to leave unmistakably intact? This episode ends with a practical Art of Listening Test designed to send the listener back to the record with a different question in mind.

Using his favorite Jethro Tull album, Thick as a Brick, Dave separates vocal technique from artistic fit. Ian Anderson's idiosyncratic delivery becomes part narrator, part character and part instrument — raising the question of whether the right singer can matter more than the technically best singer. This episode ends with a practical Side One Test designed to send the listener back to the record...

A sixth-grade listening station, a very loud kid wearing headphones, and Rare Earth's “Get Ready” lead Dave from a funny 1973–74 classroom memory to a serious listening question: what does the 21-minute LP performance reveal that the hit single edit cannot? This episode ends with a practical Art of Listening Test designed to send the listener back to the record with a different question in mind.

Dave uses It's a Beautiful Day's 1969 debut to test a simple idea: knowing “White Bird” isn't the same as knowing the album. By listening around the famous song first, the record reveals a broader, stranger band — and changes the way the hit itself sounds. This episode ends with a practical Art of Listening Test designed to send the listener back to the record with a different question in mind.

By the end of the 1970s, Alan Parsons wasn’t simply one of Dave’s favorite artists. It had become an obsession. In today's episode of Dave’s Side One, Dave closes out the week — The Records That Take Me Back — with The Alan Parsons Project’s Eve. The story begins with Dave’s best friend, who introduced him to Tales of Mystery and Imagination, I Robot and Pyramid. Something clicked. Dave estimates...

A great first album can make the second one feel almost automatic. In today's episode of Dave’s Side One, Dave remembers buying Toto’s Hydra because the band’s debut had already earned his trust. Radio offered obvious entry points in “99” and “White Sister,” but Dave’s relationship with the album wandered elsewhere. He loved the groove of “Mama,” the introspection of “Lorraine,” and the orchestrat...

The world chooses the hits. Sometimes one listener quietly chooses a different song. In today's episode of Dave’s Side One, Dave returns to Supertramp’s Breakfast in America. He loved the singles, and in 1979 they were everywhere: “The Logical Song,” “Goodbye Stranger,” “Breakfast in America,” “Take the Long Way Home.” But the song that moved Dave most was “Lord Is It Mine?” Instead of simply lett...

Teenagers don’t merely listen to records. Sometimes they assign those records jobs. In today's episode of Dave’s Side One, Dave remembers discovering The Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed with his friend group around 1976. The album was already nearly a decade old, but it felt like a discovery. And somewhere along the way, Dave and his friends became convinced that “Nights in White Satin” might b...

Do you remember when an artist could seem to appear on the radio almost overnight? In this episode of Dave’s Side One, Dave goes back to Eddie Money’s 1977 debut. At first, nobody in Dave’s circle really knew who Eddie Money was. Then the songs were suddenly on the radio—and “Two Tickets to Paradise” became more than something Dave heard. The band Dave was playing in learned to cover it. That chan...

Sometimes the format through which we discover an album becomes part of the album itself. In this episode of Dave’s Side One, Dave returns to The Doobie Brothers’ Takin’ It to the Streets—but the record on the turntable is not the copy that owns the memory. Dave had the album on cassette first, and Side One, Cut One—“Wheels of Fortune”—became an obsession. He loved the riffs, rewound the tape and...

Sometimes the person who changes the way you hear a record becomes part of the record forever. In this episode of Dave’s Side One, Dave begins a week of "Dave's Memory Lane" — The Records That Take Me Back — with Aerosmith’s Rocks. Dave already liked Aerosmith when he first heard Rocks at a friend’s house. His friend was different: he was obsessed. He knew every nuance of the record and kept point...

If someone could see only five records from your collection, would they learn anything about you? In today's episode of Dave’s Side One, Dave closes Week 10 — The Art of Listening by turning the experiment away from price, condition, sequencing and discovery and toward the person standing in front of the shelf. Using Chicago VI as a personal anchor, Dave asks what makes a collection more than an i...

What happens when the masterpiece becomes a doorway instead of the entire catalog? In Episode this episode of Dave’s Side One, Dave uses Blue Öyster Cult’s Spectres to introduce a simple catalog-discovery exercise: move one album over. The famous album is often the right place to begin. The problem comes when consensus turns one record into the complete answer for an artist. Dave introduces The Ca...

What happens when you buy curiosity instead of something from a want list? In this episode of Dave’s Side One, Dave uses Beck, Bogert & Appice for an Art of Listening experiment built around record-store discovery. Want lists are useful. Reviews, ratings and streaming previews are useful too. But knowing almost everything before buying a record can remove one of the great pleasures of browsing: th...

Can an imperfect copy still be a great listening copy? In this episode of Dave’s Side One, Dave uses Dave Mason’s It’s Like You Never Left to separate grading a record from listening to one. Collectors naturally see condition first: ring wear, split seams, writing, scuffs and surface marks. Those details matter when a record is being bought, sold or graded. But once the needle drops, the question...

Your next favorite record may already be hiding in the credits of one you own. In this episode of Dave’s Side One, Dave uses Steely Dan’s Aja for the next Art of Listening experiment: read the back cover before you drop the needle. Before recommendation algorithms, listeners could follow musicians, producers, engineers, studios and arrangers from one record to another. Aja is an ideal example beca...

When does a song stop being a fixed recording and become a performance? In today's episode of Dave’s Side One, Dave continues The Art of Listening with The Allman Brothers Band’s At Fillmore East. A familiar studio recording can become the version of a song we carry in our heads: the guitar enters here, the solo lasts this long, the ending happens there. But a great live performance reminds us tha...