1986 in music: Beauty and the Beast?

Knowing only the hits from the year's best-selling album True Blue, I was not expecting Papa Don't Preach to be the opening track. It just sounds like a mid-album song to me. It really does feature some silly lyrics ("I'm in trouble, deep") but, boy, I see how it fed into teenage angst and melodrama. 

For my money, Cherish and Open Your Heart are the best singles, but there sure are a lot of hits on here. The in-between songs like Jimmy Jimmy and Where's the Party are perfect album fillers, and although Like a Virgin always struck me as a more iconic album, this one is a quintessential follow-up, improving and expanding her sound.

Now, then: if Madonna was a perfectly packaged pop-star for the times, Kim Mitchell is the type of Canadian success story along the lines of Leonard Cohen winning a Male Vocalist award, a successor to Bryan Adams who's even more about the rock and hardly a music video star.

While my favourite song of his, I Am a Wild Party, doesn't actually appear on this album despite the title being a lyric from that song (it was a live track that he played on tour to support this album, and would later show up on concert and hits records), any album that can boast Patio Lanterns (and my second favourite Mitchell track Easy to Tame) is worth celebrating; and it was with a Juno for Album of the Year. The non-single track Alana Loves Me was a new stand-out track for me.