I can’t believe we’re coming up on the 10 year anniversary of many of these albums! It feels like just yesterday I was finishing high school and bumping “Upgrade U” and “Sexyback” on the way to UT Tyler. I remember many a night in the car with my friend Josh listening to John Mayer’s ‘Continuum’, and me and Meg used to bump the hell out of Nelly Furtado’s “Wait For You” after school. It’s a classic Timbaland track.
I had a Creative Zen mp3 player and I made sure I had the bootleg version of Justin Timberlake’s “My Love”, y’all know the one I’m talking about. The one that had the “Atlantic records exclusive” all over the track. I’m sure I still have that mp3 on a hard drive somewhere. This was the same year we were introduced to Ne-Yo and the fact that he was so sick of love songs. I have to say that that song was pretty catchy and it was the perfect first single for the man who can pen an awesome R&B love song. Between Jay-Z’s ‘Kingdom Come’ and his future wife’s ‘B-Day’ we had 3 duets! It was a big year for them. Amy Winehouse dropped ‘Back to Black’ and blessed us with the title track as well as “Rehab” and “You Know I’m No Good”. I’m still saddened by her death.
One of my absolute favorite albums that dropped that year was John Legend’s ‘Once Again’. To this day, I can put on that album and listen to it start to finish without skipping a track…and that says a lot! He’s a musical genius and the live instrumentation on this album makes my inner band nerd smile, especially the flute solo on “Another Again”.
Please take a listen below and tell me some of your favorites from that year. Special shoutout to Buzzfeed for reminding me about this year in music!