Matthew McConaughey names his five favourite albums of all time: “They were just spitting it”
The association between Matthew McConaughey and music will always be defined by the time he was arrested while high as a kite and playing the bongos in the buff, which is fair enough when it’s one of the most famous incidents of his career, either onscreen or off.
The easy-going Texan has always given off a laid-back and lackadaisical vibe, so his fondness for a certain herbal remedy and enjoyment of transcendental music was nothing out of the ordinary, given his persona. He’s far from a one-trick pony, though, even if he almost pigeonholed himself as such.
From the promise of his early years to the decade-long romantic comedy rut he found himself getting far too comfortable in, the onset of the McConnaisance reinvented and rejuvenated the star from a shirtless heartthrob into an Academy Award-winning maverick happy to dive into challenging roles it would have been impossible to see him doing before his self-instigated resurgence.
Ever since then, McConaughey has been on an eclectic run that’s spanned comedy, fantasy, drama, thrillers, animation, and period pieces, so it would make sense that the five albums he named to Rolling Stone as his all-time favourites would be cut from similarly eclectic cloth.
The first title to roll off his tongue was The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, the seminal bestselling concept album that’s been widely acclaimed as one of the greatest records ever made, regardless of genre. From influential soul and R&B to stadium-sized rock, McConaughey flew against the consensus to anoint Rattle and Hum the best thing U2 has ever done.
“A lot of that album was live,” he offered. “They were just spitting it, man. They were not asking for permission. They were honest. And man, they had fangs at that time.” John Mellencamp’s The Lonesome Jubilee also made the cut for the way it “shaped a lot of my sense of patriotism and even race relations and human relations” because the lyrical content cut straight to the heart of modern America with no frills.
McConaughey’s list wouldn’t be complete without a country album, but instead of opting for a classic, he instead pointed to Sturgill Simpson’s 2014 sophomore effort Metamodern Sounds in Country Music as being “another back-to-front great album” that doesn’t have a weak link in any of its ten tracks, even if it only runs for a brief 34 minutes from start to finish.
If McConaughey looks like the sort of guy who’d dig AC/DC – which he does – then there was no chance he was going to omit Highway to Hell from his top five, either, and listening to that quintet in succession would be nothing if not an interesting audio journey from beginning to end.
