Tapping into a seam of gold: The best of '75

Music was already a big part of my life in 1975.

- Sanjoy Narayan

I had my father's Western classical music LPs, and Beatles, Rolling Stones and Doors records borrowed from luckier friends in Calcutta. But at 16, I didn't fully grasp what that year was giving the world.I came to the best 1975 albums only years later, in moments that often involved personal revelations. As this year ends and these masterpieces turn 50, I find myself returning to them with something more than nostalgia. With gratitude.

This was a phenomenally generous year. It gave us Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, a meditative introspection that blends acoustic back into the electric; a work so deeply personal that it seemed to anticipate the confessional era of songwriting that would follow. I first heard it soon after its release, but truly discovered it during a phase of my own reckoning, and it felt like Dylan was speaking directly to me across the decades.

Similarly, when I finally sat down with A Night at the Opera by Queen — the most expensive album of its time, it was said; made on a budget of $40,000 — I understood why Bohemian Rhapsody (right) had become a phenomenon. It was ambition made audible; the sound of artists refusing to be confined even by the rules of rock.