I spent the summer after my freshman year of college driving all around Michigan in a Chrysler Town & Country minivan with a busted CD player, leaving me nothing to listen to except a cassette tape of the Greatest Hits of James Taylor, who I considered the greatest singer-songwriter ever (an easy claim to make when everything you listen to has a -core suffix).

The track list of that cassette was culled largely from this album–Sweet Baby James, Country Road, Fire & Road (a mighty fine tune), and the live version of Steamroller, to be exact. This is no accident–this is the best James Taylor album by a huge margin, but I’ve since learned that it isn’t hard to top most of his other albums. And so while my opinion of Mr. Taylor’s standing among his peers has changed, there will forever be a special place in my heart for these songs.