Hi again,
Just can't stop listening to First Love by Avalon.
May I ask what your top 5 Avalon songs are? And, what in your opinion is their best album?
Have you listened to Can't live a day?
Top 5 songs..... oh boy I would have to spend hours listening to them as I have a lot of Christian songs in my collection that I cycle through randomly and I have 73 songs of Avalon in 7 albums including a Christmas album.
I will list a few of the songs I have that I rated 5 of 5 stars in Winamp I have 24 songs rated this and 17 rated 4 of 5 stars
Testify
Undeniably You
Love Won't Leave You
Wonder Why
Picture Perfect World
The Greatest Story
This Love
Adonai
Best Thing
Reason Enough
You Were There
Take You At Your Word
Make It Last Forever
The Glory
You Are The Reason
and more. I would really have to listen for hours to decide on top 5 as I find that the groups range of style of songs is very wide from ballad to worship to sort of Jazz and Pop. BTW these songs are in no particular order and I added about half of them to the list after I listened to them to remember what the song was as I don't have a memory for the titles of all my songs I like but do recognize them by listening to them.
What to me makes this group great is a lot of groups have a sort of default sound to them from their singing to the instrumentation but Avalon is all over the place and have very powerful instumentation in their songs with I think very good mixing of vocals such that you enjoy..... everything in their music not get all stuck on one instrument or one vocalist taking center stage every time. I think that likely they made a lot less money off their music than many other groups that were secular music and blew the talent those groups had... away.
I've listened to Can't Live a Day and it is also rated 5/5
First Love for some reason I didn't really get into I guess it sounds a bit like it doesn't really fit in with the style of most of their best songs (to me).
As for favorite album...... hmmm I currently have the following albums:
A Maze Of Grace
Avalon
The Creed
Joy - A Christmas Collection
Oxygen
Stand
In A Different Light
I would say that I like Oxygen and their Debut (Avalon) album perhaps the best but the other albums are not far behind as the all have great songs on them.
It is a shame they pretty quit making great albums I even just looked at wikipedia and seems I have pretty much all their albums I think as most of the rest I don't have are just greatest hits and compilations of songs previously done. I probably have 50/50 Christian/secular music I'm guessing as I haven't bought hardly any secular music of groups past the early 90s when I went to almost all Christian music. I still enjoy classic rock and hits of the 70s and 80s and have a variety of stuff all over the place from the 20s and WWII and jazz and the 50s and 60s mostly these are compilation albums not specific artists/groups.
I've tried to like the newer music but when they went to trance and rap and hip hop and whatever after that I lost interest but I'm not knocking those genres unlike Avalon however a lot of them (to me) sound like cookie cutter copies and low budget productions that don't have a good balance of high quality instrumentals and vocals with good mixing to them. I mostly now listen to my collection than turn on a radio. At one job I was unundated with country music hits for several weeks and it only took 2-3 days to tire of it even though some songs were not totally bad the style of music (to me) gets irritating and also as usual radio stations want to play the top hits to death on the stations. If you have 20 top songs of 4 minutes each that is only 80 minutes of content so even if you add 80 minutes of commercials that is 160 minutes or less than 3 hours to repeat a song I was hearing the same song 5-6 times in an 8 hour period for about a dozen days vs my phone has enough songs on it to not repeat one song I like for several weeks at over 8000 songs and my 4 to 5 star rated songs comprise over 190 hours at over 2700 songs. If I add in 3 star rated content it balloons to 5700 songs and close to 400 hours.
I have about 30 more CDs I have yet to rip and incorporate into my collection I picked up at thrift stores and garage sales and off Ebay in the last few years.
It is getting harder to find music CDs these days and at the places that sell (mostly junk or new stuff) you have to sift through an overloading amount of CDs to find maybe 1 or 2 that look interesting then I consult my music app on my phone and find out I already have that album or song. I picked up the Avalon CDs early in my Christian music buying as I got them used and cheap and had heard their songs on the radio in the mid to late 90s.
To those that like CCM Avalon is one of the best groups their music is IMO timeless.