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Brook Pridemore posted a note on Facebook with a list of 20-plus albums that changed his life, so I wrote a response note with 20-plus of my own. I liked what I wrote, so I'm posting it here too. 20-plus albums that changed my life: a list like Brook Pridemore did
(in vaguely alphabetical order)
*Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique: I was late to liking a lot of things, like Nirvana and Beastie Boys. I had License to Ill on vinyl when I was 6 or 7, but I was too scared of getting yelled at by my parents for listening to rap, to actually listen to it often or at a level above number 3 on the volume dial on my bedroom stereo. I liked "Sabotage" when it came out, but I only ever heard it on MTV or the radio. In '98, I picked up Hello Nasty on vinyl, because it was orange vinyl, and I inevitably worked my way back into the catalog, and yeah this album's a masterpiece.
* Beck - One Foot in the Grave; Nirvana - Bleach: I would listen to these 2 cassettes in my walkman nonstop on the bus rides to and from Start High School. They were both black cassettes with white writing, which was a switch from the norm (tapes were usually greyish with black writing), so these albums felt very Different and Modern. And the equal amounts of ache, rock, and weirdness made this my essential high school soundtrack.
*Bjork - Homogenic; Miles Davis - Kind of Blue: One of the biggest joys me and my best friend Zach had while working on the high school newspaper was listening to music on the newspaper's computers while typing. Initially we worked together during an early-bird hour before school had technically started, but the following year, Zach was gone, Newspaper was a regular mid-day class, and the staff was tripled in size. I would continue to listen to music I liked, and sometimes it would cause concern to other staff members. I remember the act of listening to Kind of Blue one day forced a fellow staff member to tell me "that noise has got to go!" I don't have a specific anecdote for the Bjork album, but I remember it caused the same type of reactions. And it put me in a weird spot; I felt the world at large had acclaimed the music I was listening to, how come the kids in the newspaper room didn't appreciate how smart I was being? I wonder now if I was just being a precocious nerd, or if this is just an early indicator of my ongoing marginalization in relation to pop culture.
* Elvis Costello - My Aim Is True: I bought a used vinyl copy of this in Ann Arbor, Michigan, while on a field trip in high school. I loved the shit out of it. From then on, I would go to Ann Arbor looking for culture, and I would slowly begin to build my Elvis Costello-on-vinyl collection.
*DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist - Brain Freeze: I love soul music, I love 45s, and I was slowly getting into hip-hop after decades of neglecting/ignorantly disdaining it. My best friend Zach burned me this, and since then, if I ever stick it in, I pretty much remember every second of it by heart.
*Lee Dorsey - Yes We Can: Just an amazing, funky, brilliant album, produced and mostly written by Allen Toussaint, with The Meters as the backing band. If I ever made a desert-island list, this would definitely be on it.
*Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits; Bob Dylan - Self-Portrait: For the longest time, I only knew Bob Dylan as the butt of standup comedians' jokes. I knew he was incoherent and that he mumbled. Then I heard the Greatest Hits album (vol. 1), and I was hooked forever. Much later, a few years ago, I was working the midnight shift for a friend, doing assistant-editing work on a TV show he was cutting, and I would explore his iTunes, and one of the albums he had was the much-maligned Self-Portrait by Bob Dylan. At 4 in the morning, sleep-deprived, with too much coffee and tea in your system, logging footage into Final Cut Pro, Self-Portrait becomes the most insane, best album ever. It's pretty good in the middle of the day too.
* Footloose soundtrack; Cyndi Lauper - She's So Unusual; Michael Jackson - Thriller: These are the first 3 pop albums I remember owning. On cassette. When I started listening religiously to my walkman in high school, I revisited these albums, and they continued to be some of the best pop-rock the '80s had to offer. (Okay, maybe not Footloose, that's just pure nostalgia.)
*Genesis - Invisible Touch: Another one of those formative pop albums; part of the reason I love the gated drum sound and prog-rock (which, despite popular belief that Phil Collins forced Genesis to abandon prog sensibilities, is still somewhat present on the longer cuts on this album) to this day.
*Jackie Brown soundtrack; Out of Sight soundtrack: I've always loved soundtracks, and the end of the last century felt like a high-water mark, where folks were creating really out-of-the-ordinary scores and songscapes for their flicks. Pulp Fiction's soundtrack might have made the greater cultural impact, but Tarantino's follow-up for Jackie Brown was much bigger for me (it's a much tighter mixtape too) and sent me off on countless musical and film expeditions just trying to find out about all the stuff on it. Oddly enough, the other Elmore Leonard adaptation from that time, Out of Sight, also had a kickass soundtrack, mostly of original DJ music that still sounds good, unlike those Fatboy Slim CDs I used to like then too.
*The Moldy Peaches - The Moldy Peaches: I felt like I knew these people when I first heard this, and I was astonished when I found out people I met from other cities really liked it too. I have little doubt that the homemade nature of this record opened me up to the possibility of trying to become a music performer.
*Willie Nelson - Phases & Stages: Like hip-hop, country was a genre I long ignored, because it seemed like everybody ignored it. When I finally started to play catch up, I realized that I love a lot of country music. Willie Nelson's '70s stuff is kind of visionary in a low-key way, and while Red Headed Stranger is more famous, this one does pretty much the same brilliant thing, but touches me a little deeper. Plus, I ripped this album off for My 3 Addictions.
*Neutral Milk Hotel - In The Aeroplane Over The Sea: Similar to my experience of The Moldy Peaches, once I had a rudimentary idea of how to play the guitar, I realized that this album -- which my best friend Zach had burned for me, calling it akin to Sgt. Pepper's-- was really easy to play on guitar, and that it was the emotion (and the arrangement of the other instruments) that mattered. This was a big boost to my fledgling songwriting career in that respect, although I haven't listened to it in years.
*Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense (reissue): Seeing Stop Making Sense during its '99 theatrical revival run was one of the best moviegoing experiences I've had. The reissued soundtrack album, which includes all the songs from the concert film, instead of the handful on the original LP, is one of the most joyous collections of performances put to disc.
*Velvet Underground - White Light/White Heat; Tom Waits - Small Change: Some time in high school, I went to a garage sale and bought a bunch of records for a twenty-five cents apiece. These two were included in that purchase. I had never heard music from either act before, and you can pretty much say that I've never been the same since.
*Brian Wilson Presents Smile: Having little history with the Beach Boys besides what played on oldies radio, I had no reason to be disappointed with Brian Wilson's release of Smile when it came out. I thought it was visionary and astonishing. I'm still not disappointed. It's one of the best fucking albums ever, gahdammit.
2:47 AM
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