Why is Huey Lewis & The News’ Sports on my best 1,000 albums ever list?
The heart of rock and roll is still beating.
Some stats & info about Huey Lewis & The News – Sports
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? SF Bay Area Bands, Rock Music, Album Rock
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – not ranked!
- All Music’s rating – 4.5 out of 5 stars
- When was Sports released? 1983
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #677 out of 1,000
Huey Lewis & The News’ Sports on Spotify
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.
What does Huey Lewis & The News’ Sports mean to me? What does it make me feel? Why is it exciting or compelling?
Sports is one of those albums where you look back, now some four decades later, and you say, “I can’t believe this album of nine songs is absolutely jam-packed with smash hits.” Literally over the half the album was all over the place (I’ll age myself here and say that I was a little kid and listened to a lot of radio and watched a lot of MTV’s early era in those long dim gone days): “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” “Heart and Soul,” “I Want A New Drug,” “Walking on a Thin Line”, and “If This Is It” helped form the soundtrack of 1983 for the mainstream rocking U.S. of A.
And there’s a good reason: this is mid-tempo rock that’s exceptionally well crafted, with great hooks and approachable, “I wish I could see these guys play at my local bar” energy put out by the band, fronted of course by Huey Lewis at the peak of his powers.
I was a little surprised that “I Want A New Drug” was the song that popped out most to me as best representing the band’s energy.
What’s perhaps even more surprising is that Sports’ “other” four songs contain some really good stuff. “You Crack Me Up” is a great “maximum 1980s” deep cut, for example.
Pop culture stuff that’s somehow related to Huey Lewis & The News’ Sports
There is a small collection of songs that are not just iconic in their own right, but are at the same time tightly associated with a movie or television show. We’re talking “You Could Be Mine” by Guns ‘N Roses and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and for television this is likely more along the lines of opening theme music, where Alabama 3’s “Woke Up This Morning” immediately conjures and bolsters The Sopranos’ all-time great status.
If you’re nodding because you know where I’m going at this point, it’s because you know how big a deal Huey Lewis & The News’ “The Power of Love” was in the mid-‘80s because of its association with Back to the Future (and vice versa!).