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Albums that changed your life - Article on CNN.com


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http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/01/1...irpt/index.html

 

No albums reallychanged my life, but maybe I shoudl have let them. Among the albums to have an influence on me are:

 

Born to Run - the images that pop out of this album are still vivid thrity years and four copies later.

The sound track to the movie "Times Square" It opened up a whole new palette of sounds and styles to me at the time. Still have it on vinyl.

Replacements - Tim Introduced me to my favorite band and songwriter.

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For me:

Uncle Tupelo - No Depression

Really introduced me to country music (via punk, of course). Also inspired me to finally start writing my own songs.

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Uncle Tupelo Anodyne

 

This changed my life in many ways if I think about it. It also continues to be my favorite album of all time. Neil Young's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere trys to compete, but since it came out before I was born I give the nod to something of my generation.

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Uncle Tupelo - No Depression

Really introduced me to country music (via punk, of course).

same here, except I didn't come around to "country music" until I finally picked up the UT 89-93 Anthology CD a few yrs ago.

 

same for me, except 'pleased to meet me' instead of 'tim'.

ditto.

 

also,

Minutemen - Double Nickles on the Dime... blew my mind the first time I heard it, still surprises me every time I listen to it now.

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Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

 

Lamb Lies Down On Broadway- Genesis

 

Skittish/Rockity Roll- Mike Doughty (technically two albums but when I bought them they were packaged together so I treat them as such)

 

Neil Young Massey Hall 1971

 

Radiohead- Kid A

 

Smashing Pumpkins- Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

 

Soul Coughing- Irresistible Bliss

 

I've changed a lot. Or maybe not at all

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I find that the music that changed my life is generally music from my formative years. These records set the template for what I expect music to mean to me. There have been a lot of records that I love(d), but these touched me

 

Born to Run --- It is has been said (and not ironically) that Bruce saved rock and roll in 1975. Hyperbolic to be sure, but the effect that this record had cannot be overstated. From the opening harmonica glissanod and piano of Thunder Road to the operatic epic of Jungleland, this record was a primal, visceral rock statement. Desperate characters looking for redemption and finding betrayal. It hit my 15 year old ears like a sledge hammer. I still keep the faith and it's been 34 years burning down the road.

 

Abbey Road--- The Beatles were seeming always there. I was born in 1960, and by the time I became aware of music, The Beatles were the once and future kings. This one is a magical and if considered in the light of the circumstances in which it was recorded, it is amazing. Funky Rock, Childern's songs, proto-prog/heavy metal, insane vocal harmonies, ballads for the ages...it was/is a wonderful

 

This Years Model --- Elvis Costello's second record is simply the most viscerallcy exciting record I have ever heard. He was decidedly miscast as a punk rocker. Elvis is a tunesmith, a songwriter, a savant. The angry young man stuff didn't ring true, but the songs are absolutley killer.

 

London Calling --- It took me a couple of listens to get it...but once it clicked...DAMN. Revolution Rock unfiltered for the masses. Joe and Mick seemed to be ready for a long run.

 

When Nevermind and 10 came out, I was married with a family. While these milestone records caught my ear, they didn't move me...didn't change my world.

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Here are mine

 

Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream

It was just really cool hearing that album at 14. It opened up a world of music to me.

 

Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane over the Sea

This album continues to blow me away. No album has ever affected me so much. When I first heard in college, I wasn't a fan. I picked this up finally in 2003 and have continued to listen since.

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R.E.M. "Life's Rich Pageant" --I don't want toadmit to you what i had listenex to before that.

 

Velvet Underground and Nico- I heard this and the world seemed to be a bigger place full of possibilities.

 

And then there's this from an old blog of mine:

 

 

About 20 years ago, just after my older brother got his drivers license, we got permission to take the 78 Brown Caprice Classic my father had bought from his father out for a ride on condition that we had it back by three oclock on the dot, no exceptions, ifs ands or buts. And while we wanted to make the most out of this new, strange freedom, we didnt want to endanger our chances of letting it happen again. So we were cutting it close, taking it down to the wire and planning to pull into the driveway at the stroke of three.

 

About a block and half left to go and a man with a strange rhaspy voice came on the radio singing a simple 3 chord acoustic song which seemed to have a direct line to somewhere inside, expressing an emotion that, as a thirteen year old, I wouldnt have experienced personally yet, but which was familiar to me nonetheless.

 

The dashboard clock said we could still drive around the block and make it in time. We came to our driveway and rolled past it, so riveted by the wonderful new sounds that we didnt think whether or not mom was peeking out the window in anticipation of us.

 

And though it was not a road song, we learned what a joy it could be to simply drive and listen, because we drive we had to, five or six more times around that block, in order to make it to the end of that record which ran for more than five minutes.

 

We pulled into the driveway intuitively sensing that the harmonica solo was leading us to the end. There we put that old chevy in park and waited to hear the WXRT d.j. deliver the information we were hoping he would: Bob Dylan, Shelter from the Storm.

 

And somehow the storm with mom was also avoided, or at least forgotten next to the importance of the musical epiphany just experienced.

 

 

 

10 ALBUMS FOR 1 CENT is just too good an offer for a penniless-but-one teenager to pass up. The crafty folks at Columbia Records and Tapes were banking on the fact that the fine print saying regular club price would be lost on the would-be club member. And they were right.

 

Choosing ten records for a someone who knows little about music can be a daunting task. You have to rely on recommendations from friends who know equally little about music, judge a record by its cover, and employ similar dubious methods. Which lead you many bad choices.

 

Mercifully time has not left intact in my memory the titles of all ten vynil l.p.s that my brother and I chose. I do remember some: ABBA Greatest Hits, Grease Broadway Soundtrack (we were misled to believing it was the film soundtrack. Imagine the disappointment at not seeing Olivia Newton Johns face plastered across the cover and not hearing the word tit in Greased Lightning. The bastards tricked us) Billy Joel Glass Houses. And then there was Bob Dylan Blood on the Tracks, the only one of the ten that I still listen to all these years later.

 

The record still impresses me every time I sit down and give it a good honest listen. With my adult ear I can hear nuances that were lost on me when I first listened to it: the likelihood that tracks 2, 5, 9 and 10 were likely from different sessions than the others, the open tuning on Shelter from the Storm, the organ on Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts which works despite being slightly out of tune. With every serious listen there are more of these subtleties.

 

Lastly, there is the lyrical artistry which on this record alone justifies Dylans nomination for the Nobel Prize in literature.

 

Mr. Robert Alan Zimmerman has never liked talking much about himself. Shunning interviews and writing an autobiography which, though it does paint fascinating pictures of various eras, doesnt bring you all that much closer to the man himself.

 

On Blood on the Tracks he often tells his stories in the third person, or assumes a personality as he sings in the first person, but we are not fooled: the record is about the painful breakup with his wife. It is the cagey master poet at his most personal, most eloquent, and most painfully beautiful.

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The Beatles "White Album" or "Let it Be" or "Abbey Road" (whichever one I listened to first as a 3 or 4 year old.

 

Wilco "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot"

 

John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme"

 

Steve Reich's "Music For 18 Musicians"

 

 

I'm sure there are other great albums out there for me to find, but these all changed my musical life if not my life in general.

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