4. The BeatlesAbbey Road

It’s so hard to choose a Beatles record. In fact, it’s often easy to forget them altogether given how much a part of the fabric of modern music they are, and how tempting it is to push something shiny and new ahead of them, but Abbey Road is ridiculous. All the songwriting ability, all the learning that came out of the experimentation that happened on previous albums… It’s like a best-of, but it’s so cohesive. I don’t know, if I was making this list in a month or two I would still put a Beatles album on it, but maybe not this one. It does contain ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ though, which is just about the slinkiest piece of music ever recorded, so perhaps it’d still be top of the list. I’m dying to cover it, but you just can’t, can you? It’s not allowed. And that last track, ‘The End’, there’s something so sad about that, coming to the album retrospectively, knowing their history and what they meant to music. But the very last hidden track, ‘Her Majesty’, pisses me off: "It was so perfect, what’s this?!" The magic around this album is probably something to do with the fact that it’s pretty much the last one they recorded. It’s a magical year, 1969.