Apparently I won't blog regularly. Oh well, I'm gonna give it one more shot, starting the cheap way with one of those make-a-list memes.
20 Albums That Changed Your Life
Think of 20 albums that had such a profound effect on you that they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that, no matter what they were thought of musically, shaped your world. When you finish, tag 20 others, including me. Make sure you copy and paste this part so they know the drill. Get the idea now? Good. Tag, you're it!
In the order that I thought of them:
1. Billy Joel,
Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 & 2
-- this was my first CD (double CD, actually)
2. Gin Blossoms,
New Miserable Experience
-- listened to it incessantly, particularly got into the song "Found Out About You," which was just the right kind of melodramatic to punctuate a first breakup
3. Rush,
Roll the Bones
-- though hard-core Rush fans would be aghast, this is album is what Rush is to me
4. Pulp,
Different Class
-- sarcasm and bitterness perfectly expressed and set to very, very good music
5. Morphine,
Cure for Pain
-- the first time I understood the importance of choice of instruments
6. Bad Religion,
Stranger Than Fiction
-- the first punk album I got into
7. Pink Floyd,
Dark Side of the Moon
-- the first (and, honestly, only) album for which I bought a fuzzy poster of the cover
8. Original Cast (1998 Broadway Revival),
Cabaret
-- Kander & Ebb at their best and Alan Cumming audibly chewing the scenery
9. David Bowie
Sound and Vision
(boxed set) -- sort of a bridge between the greatest hits package and actual albums, has several of my all-time favorite songs on it.
10. Billy Bragg & Wilco,
Mermaid Ave., Vol. 1
-- the first folky album I got into
11. Dwight Yoakam,
dwightyoakamacoustic.net
-- I became a country music fan when I heard this album playing in the Singing Dog record store across the street from OSU.
12. Johnny Cash,
American III: Solitary Man
-- the first contemporary Johnny Cash album I ever bought (might have been the first non-compilation Cash album I bought, too
13. Luxx,
Luxx
-- the first studio album by a band that will always basically be a live act to me. They never really hit it big, and the album doesn't quite capture how good the live show was, but it's still a good album, so if you run across a copy somehow, pick it up.
14. The Sounds,
Dying to Say This to You
-- Perhaps the strongest single piece of evidence for my theory that the Swedes know how to rock.
15. James,
Laid
-- my first Britpop album
16. Tom Russell,
Hotwalker
-- perfect blend of music and spoken word
17. The Knitters,
Poor Little Critter on the Road
-- the X side-project that I like better than I like X
18. The Killers,
Hot Fuss
-- I bought this album because I knew I wanted several songs on it and while listening to it the first time I kept finding myself saying "Wait, that song's the Killers, too?"
19. Treat Her Right,
The Anthology: 1985-1990
-- the album on which Mark Sandman introduced me to Dave Champagne
20. The Raconteurs,
Broken Boy Soldiers
-- is it really a short album when it's half an hour of awesome?
that I would have preferred a greater focus on Z Channel and a lesser focus on the personal story of Jerry Harvey. That's mostly my own fascination with process and milieu. I could easily imagine watching a "cable channel procedural." The glimpses the film offers into the world of cable television in the 1970s and 1980s utterly drew me in. 