India, Dec. 27 -- Music was already a big part of my life in 1975. 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 arrived as personal revelations. As this year ends and these masterpieces turn 50, I find myself returning to them with something more than nostalgia. With gratitude: for discovering them, albeit late, and for the fact that they'd been waiting all along.

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 ele...