"RETURN to Lockdown” already sounds like someone’s idea of a classic album title. Seeing as we seem to be heading to that place again, sanity-inducing measures are certainly required.

So you could do a lot worse than spend your confinement exploring both Rolling Stone’s new list of the top 500 albums, and the Scottish Album of the Year award’s shortlist.

I’ve been doing this over the last few days, and I’ve emerged with my own fizzing set of prejudices (what exactly is the compelling attraction of Tom Petty?), as well as some discoveries and reminders of greatness. But also, I have a renewed reverence towards the very format of the album itself.

In these streamable, customisable, attention-splintered days, you’d think the album would be done for. Why not send out clumps of three songs, once a month, over a year? Why not just let fans set up their own radio-like stream of your music on some platform? The more ways they can consume you, the more nickels and dimes (meaning: tiny digital micropayments) you pick up. Times are too tight to stick with old boundaries.

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Turns out that it’s exactly because the times are tight that we hold on to the old boundaries – and that goes for both artist and audience. In a demanding moment, we want artists to make confident statements about themselves and the world. Albums make those statements happen.

The length and song count of an “album” was originally limited by how much a vinyl record could take on each side – five to six tracks. That turns out to be as elegant and expressive a structure as the short story collection, the chapters of a novel, the set-pieces of an opera, the story arc of a movie.

The album, like any of these, can contain, express and capture a whole imaginary world, or a rich slice of their era – and sometimes, they can do both at the same time.

That’s what overwhelms me most about the Rolling Stone 500: the extraordinary ambition, and historical force, that can sometimes be poured into a single album.

That’s most striking when you look at the top 100, and particularly the new best album of all time: Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, taking over from the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (which topped the last 500 in 2003).

Look back over the 2020 list, and it’s as if several strains of black American pop music (and a few out-and-out geniuses) can be traced back to the thunderclap of Gaye’s record. Both the sensual infinity of melismas and yearnings in soul and R&B – and the specific anxieties and angers contained in rap and hip hop.

As the anonymous Rolling Stone writer reminds us, What’s Going on was instigated by a response to police violence. The Four Tops’ Renaldo Benson watched police clubbing civil rights’ protestors at Berkeley in 1969. The song he wrote in response finally landed with Gaye. The singer made What’s Going On a hit, and then wrote an album around it. In a month!

“The world’s never been as depressing as it is right now,” said Gaye in an interview at the time. “We’re killing the planet, killing our young men in the streets, and going to war around the world. Human rights ... that’s the theme.” And, bitterly, ours still. The Beatles’ psychedelic escapism maybe doesn’t quite match these times.

The other great tendency that marks the Rolling Stone list (and maybe the clue is in the title) is in the tradition of what you could call “poetry and strum”. These are the guitar heroes (mostly male and white, fleetingly women) who placed their feet on the ground and told their story as they saw and felt it.

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The bottom reaches of the RS 500 at least feature some albums from the black bluesmen who inspired so many of these rockers – Muddy Waters at 483, Howlin’ Wolf at 477.

There is certainly a nexus around Neil Young, both his own works and the other bands and collaborators he joined with. There’s a lot of reverence in this selectorate for his fragile, romantic accounting of American complexities. It’s certainly the polar opposite of the current top-down bluster and braggadocio.

But the guitar epicists of 60s and 70s – pre-punk and post-counter-culture – still thrum (or even strum) their influence through the artists and albums of subsequent decades, on this list at least.

Bob Dylan is heavily featured through the 500 and makes the top 10 with Blood on the Tracks (9). But he is behind Prince’s Purple Rain (8), Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours (7), Nirvana’s Nevermind (6) and Joni Mitchell’s Blue (3). Each of them are guitar-led, each with the greatest ambition for the lyrical testimony they deliver over the strings. (Maybe that explains a tolerance for Tom Petty. Something has to.)

I’m thrilled to see Stevie Wonder’s Songs In The Key of Life at number 4. Like Gaye’s What’s Going On, Songs is a Grand Central Station of an album – many lines stretch out from it, even just as a statement of possibilities. (It’s hard to imagine Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (19), D’Angelo’s Voodoo (28) or Beyonce’s Lemonade (32) without Wonder’s precedent).

We must be honest about the RS 500 – some of what’s made its way in, and their rankings, smacks a tad of promotional chicanery. Harry Styles’s latest is number 491 – higher than Bonnie Raitt, Rufus (with Chaka Khan) and Arcade Fire? And as for Bad Bunny or Tame Impala being on a list of anything... I also have to be honest about my total aesthetic bypass with anything related to the Beach Boys. With Pet Sounds in at number two, I’ll just have to chew on it.

But I digress. A decent 300-strong selection of artists, songwriters and producers suggested their own top 50 each: bad taste and preference can’t be screened out entirely. I am sure that sampling the massive bulk of what is there will shoot new energy into your music collection.

It might seem like a bathetic move, but I’ve also enjoyed diving into the Scottish Album of the Year awards longlist. Some of the contenders fall into the categories I’ve hazarded above. Lewis Capaldi’s Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent, Karine Polwart’s Scottish Songbook, and SHHE (self-titled) are undoubtedly poetry-and-strum.

But there are some interesting differences. The RS 500, other than celebrating soul, funk and disco historically, doesn’t really go anyway near electronic dance music (Kraftwerk gets an honorary mention). Yet it’s notable that EDM seems to be a great basis for an album adventure in Scotland. Free Love’s Extreme Dance Anthems, and particularly Anna Meredith’s FIBS, use their arpeggiators and Ableton software to rousing effect.

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And it’s good to see the packs of stellar young jazz musicians in Scotland solidifying into album projects, in Fat-Suit’s Waifs And Strays, and Mezcla’s Shoot The Moon. This chimes with the RS 500’s decent acknowledgement of the jazz tradition, as an album-making force – John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday all make it there.

As the Renaissance poet John Donne put it: in one little roome, an everywhere. And certainly, as we trudge around our home-working spaces again, we would do well to explore – and perhaps be revived and sustained by – these powerful and ringing curations of musical greatness.

Though as one track from the best album of all time, “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)”, puts it: “Radiation underground and in the sky/Animals and land, how much more abuse from man can she stand?”

You may argue with the judgements of Rolling Stone magazine. But there’s no arguing with Mr Gaye.

Visit the following links to see the Rolling Stone 500 Best Albums of All Time and the SAY Awards longlist: www.rollingstone.com and www.sayaward.com