The A.V. Club‘s website has started a new series of columns in which writers talk about their favorite year of music. The first one came out this week, with a very RTH-friendly choice.

There are a lot of years, I could choose as my favorite, but my first response is always 1974. That’s because of four albums: Randy Newman‘s Good Old Boys, Richard and Linda Thompson‘s I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, Big Star‘s Radio City and Steely Dan‘s Pretzel Logic. These albums all form a bedrock for a certain kind of music I really value. All those albums are weird pop of a sort: The musicianship is often understated (on the Dan album, it’s understated for them), but not boring; the lyrics are literate and intelligent, but they require a bit of work to penetrate. These albums don’t exactly set out to dazzle, but they create perfect senses of place and character. Each record slowly reveals something, the way a book or film might. As the cliche goes, they show, they don’t tell. You could call these albums “Rubber Soul for English majors.”

So, gut check time, and don’t think to much about it: What’s your favorite year in music and why?