Shoot out the lights: the best of music made for night

There are some records that take on a magic quality when the lights go out, an alchemy that creates something special.

Some things can be better with the lights off. Music is one of them.

Nocturnal listening is one of music’s great pleasures. Whether in solitude and in silence or shared with others, there are some records that are made to shine in the dark.

Many of us had our very first transformative experience with music tucked into our childhood beds, ear trained on an AM radio or headphones plugged into an old stereo or, more recently, scanning a Spotify playlist, disappearing into the sonic embrace of a song.

Those moments of discovery leave their mark on you.

You feel like a pioneer out on the frontier, searching for another song that will fire your imagination and lift you out of yourself, creating a world of possibility and discovery.

To this day, I’m still a pilgrim on that quest.

There are some records that take on a magic quality when the lights go out. It’s as if the artist knows that in the dark, an alchemy takes place that creates something special, something we can only see when really, we can’t see at all.

If you are yet to take that voyage into night listening, here’s a list of my favourite late night listens that bring the night to life.

MARVIN GAYE – “WHAT’S GOING ON” (1971)

Marvin is more renowned for wanting to turn you on rather than turning out the lights, but his 1971 opus “What’s Going On” is a late-night prayer cycle for a better world.

A symphonic soul tour-de-force recorded amidst the mayhem of the Vietnam War, Marvin had to fight tooth and nail with Motown founder Berry Gordy to share his masterpiece with the world.

This wasn’t dancing in the streets. This was taking a knee and asking: “What’s going on?”

Starting with the aching title track and closing with the desolation of “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)”, “What’s Going On” will lead you to the light.

NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS – “GHOSTEEN” (2019)

This album took incredible courage to make and no small amount to listen to.

“Ghosteen” is Cave’s 17th album with The Bad Seeds, a band that have made the dark their domain.

This, however, takes the listener beyond previous boundaries. Cave has been on an extraordinary journey since the tragic death of his son Arthur in 2015.

“Ghosteen” is his latest destination. With little more than piano, synth and voices, there is a stillness and tranquility here, a sadness and redemption that are at peace with each other. Extraordinary.

TALK TALK – “SPIRIT OF EDEN” (1988)

Beginning life as a mid-table synth pop proposition in the early ‘80s, no one could have guessed what was to come. “Spirit of Eden” is arguably the finest musical achievement of the 1980’s.

It’s devotees (and full disclosure, I’m a card-carrying member) are almost evangelical about its transformative properties.

From the epic nine-minute opener “The Rainbow”, through to the affirmation and redemption of “I Believe In You” vocalist, the late Mark Hollis, and producer and multi-instrumentalist Tim Friese-Greene create soundscapes and textures that burst into technicolour and leave you exhilarated.

It’s a record that dares to search for the vanishing point and almost gets there.

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JONI MITCHELL – “HEJIRA” (1976)

A diary of a restless soul, tumbling around America’s forgotten back roads, “Hejira” is poetic, fierce, reckless and fractured.

In the opener “Coyote”, Joni sings: “No regrets coyote, you just picked up a hitcher, a prisoner of the white lines of the freeway”.

Joni had to fight her corner amidst the feckless machismo of ‘70s west coast rock, and the scars are evident here, as is her fierce independence and strength.

In “Amelia”, her tribute to America’s legendary flyer Amelia Earhart, Larry Carlton’s guitar and Joni’s voice take flight and you are there, in a 747 over geometric farms.

The road is endless with Joni on “Hejira”. You wouldn’t be anywhere else.

MILES DAVIS – “BITCHES BREW” (1970)

By the late 1960s, Miles had read the wind – there was something goin’ on.

Having won the heavyweight title as the king of bop, he took the off ramp to dive into psychedelia and fusion with “Bitches Brew”.

The album marked the start of Miles “electric period”, as guitar maestro John McLaughlin, drummer Tony Williams and fellow jazz genius Herbie Hancock helped Davis stretch out his canvas and embrace the abstract.

“Bitches Brew” sees Miles meet the Woodstock generation down on the street to take a trip. Pack your bags, you could be gone a while.

BON IVER – “BON IVER” (2011)

Indie prodigy Justin Vernon was already the darling of the proto-hipsters before he dropped this gem in 2011.

Marrying sweeping synths with folk tones, electric guitars, sonic edges and heraldic horns, “Bon Iver” is endlessly beguiling, an album that reveals itself with each listen.

It’s more than the sum of its parts, though. Vernon above all is a brilliant, empathetic songwriter. On “Bon Iver”, it all comes together magnificently.

JULEE CRUISE – “FLOATING IN THE NIGHT” (1989)

It’s all in the title. Julee Cruise’s 1989 debut album is a dreamscape of sugar-coated nightmares.

Produced by legendary film maker David Lynch and orchestrated by composer Angelo Badalamenti, the album pivots around “Falling”, a song that became the calling card for Lynch’s genre-busting TV classic, “Twin Peaks”.

Seducitve and dangerous. Just as it should be at that time of night.

DIRE STRAITS – “MAKING MOVIES” (1980)

Dire Straits are still a calling card for the uncool, but to hell with all of that.

The band’s third album opens with an arrangement of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel Waltz”, and from there Mark Knopfler and friends whisk us off on a tumble through an abandoned boulevard of broken dreams and aimless heroes with “Tunnel of Love”.

The album’s signature tune is the heartbreaker “Romeo and Juliet”, a song that encapsulates the late-night heartache and regret all of us have visited at some time.

All the while Knopfler’s guitar is sweeping, bittersweet and soothing in all the right places.