Strange Trails is hands down the best album of 2015.
Since adding it to my collection in April 2015, iTunes tells me I’ve listened to the whole album about 50 times – not including the extra plays from adding individual songs to my playlists. Five of the songs from the album made it into my Top 25 Most Played songs, and all of them made the Top 50 list.
The magic of Strange Trails is that it’s a collection of excellent songs which flow brilliantly into each other. You can get lost in the sound of the music, but if you listen you can also enjoy the story and adventure in each song. Since the songs flow into each other so smoothly, you often get lost in the middle of the album, only to shocked back to reality as the “The Night We Met” signifies the end of the adventure.
This album managed to revive (for me) the idea of the album as an art form. We live in a world obsessed by singles, and many laud the new models of purchasing music since they can buy only the songs we like. But when that happens, we also forget that many musicians craft an album as an author does a book – and it should be consumed in its entirety.