Classics: (What's the Story) Morning Glory

This is an absolute top ten all time album for me.  Each song is good, and some of them are untouchable pop rock gold.  You've heard Champagne Supernova, Don't Look Back in Anger, and Wonderwall for the past 20 years through their still-incessant play on radio.  But the rest of the album has such a great similar swagger, with gigantic choruses and interesting slides between straight rock and indie weirdness.  I think people in the know would call this Britpop, but other than Blur or Teenage Fanclub, I don't really know what that means, so I say this is alternative rock that is just so solidly built and performed that it became pop.  And these dudes are British.  Whatever.

Favorite track is most definitely Wonderwall.  I've sung it enough now to my youngest daughter as a lullaby that she can sing along for portions of it.  But I love these two bits most of all "I don't believe that anybody, feels the way I do, about you now" and this bit of the chorus: 
"And all the roads lead us there are winding,
and all the lights that light the way are blinding,
there are many things that I would like to say to you but I don't know how."

On top of the great lyrics, its just a cool sounding song with that classic acoustic sound developing into drums and strings and piano.  Ryan Adams does a really cool cover of Wonderwall that is just straight acoustic with an echo-ed out voice.  Really beautiful, kind of sad sounding.

In addition to the album just being intrinsically good, I have a great memory of it as well.  My buddy Jason and I had a spur of the moment road trip to Louisiana late one night, with this album as our soundtrack.  We sang the whole thing in full voice all the way through the East Texas night on our way to a really gross bachelor party.

They end the album with this trippy ditty, that just slides along out of the waves and cruises up to a huge chorus that would be crazy fun to sing along with in a huge crowd.  This song makes zero sense to me at all.  I bet nerdy nerds at Oxford have done entire senior year dissertations on the meaning.

You can take just about any of the songs (except for the weird Swamp Song interludes) and it would be a great fat fun singalong with a load of mates.  "Some might say, we will find a brighter day!"  "You gotta roll wit' it, you gotta take your time!"  Etcetera.  

Hard to believe this thing is almost 20 years old.  I know people my age know this album, but for you young 'uns out there, you should go check it out.  If these two dummies hadn't ruined everything by fighting with each other at every possible moment, this album could have been the second step towards true world domination.  Instead, they made Be Here Now in 1997 (which was pretty good) and then a few other fair to middling discs and an AT&T commercial anthem before they threw in the towel and fought through the tabloids. But this one still holds up as excellent long after.