The Albums that Made Me

While I don’t really get into it much, music is one of the great pleasures of my life. Movies are what I talk about, but maybe it’s because music connects with me in ways that aren’t as easy for me to explain. It connects me to emotions I have a hard time facing, and music serves as an outlet.

As a kid I grew up listening to my parents’ music, old crooners, and pre-rock music. Dad loved listening to the “Fiddler on the Roof” soundtrack, so that was a fave around the house. I didn’t really start listening to music seriously until I was in my teen years, and ironically, I HATED music from the 1980s, though I love the stuff now. My sister had a friend who was into classic rock and 1970s stuff like Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, Yes, and progressive rock. Through him, I started to hear music in a different way; I heard it not with my ears, but with my heart. It sounds corny, but we all know that feeling, the feeling when a song connects with you, and says what you can’t. A song that looks inside you and sees your secret heartbreak, and tells you it is OK. Or a song that hears your rage and screams it into the world for you. Or even a song that just reminds you that life isn’t always meaningless.

Movies touch me.

Music speaks to me.

As I have gotten older my tastes have changed. They have grown, they have deepened, but not as much as they should have. I remember buying my first record, a 7″ of Quiet Riot’s “Cum on Feel the Noize.” I had heard the song on the radio and loved it. I bought the record and only listened to the B-side once. I didn’t care about it. I liked “Cum on Feel the Noize.” I was so weird about liking the song, liking ANY song, that I wouldn’t listen to it when anyone in my family was around. I had to be alone.

It was for me.

I love what I love, and the path that led me to where I am today started here:

Megadeth: Rust in Peace

This was the first cassette I remember buying. I won’t swear it was the first (it feels like the first), but it’s the one I remember. I heard it through a friend, and it was the first heavy metal band I had really heard, deep down heard. The guitar work is beautiful and vicious; the lyrics opened my eyes to the crooked politics of the world, and together, it all opened a door I was happy to go through.

GWAR: Scumdogs of the Universe

Man, you either get GWAR, or you don’t. They seem like theater kids who grew up listening to glam rock and punk, and mixed the two and came up with interstellar heavy metal. They are brash, bold, ridiculous, and this album is brilliant.

Mr. Bungle: Self-Titled

Oh, boy. This album blew my mind wide open. Melodic, demonic, and astronomic, it was a mix of everything you could love and hate in music and sung through an insane asylum. Have you ever heard this record? Heavy metal beats, a brass section, keyboards, and one of modern rock’s greatest singers.

Phew.

Nirvana: Nevermind

I remember when I first bought this cassette. I was playing it over and over and over again, and it freaked my sister out. She couldn’t understand the music, and I get it, because it wasn’t for her. It was for me, and all the kids who felt like outsiders. Cobain captured our pain and our confusion and used it as a battle cry. A warning.

White Zombie: La Sexorcisto

White Zombie never got better than this album for me, nor has Rob Zombie. On this record, my love of horror and heavy metal combined, and this was the music of summer, of monster movies, and of everything that goes bump in the night.

Ani DiFranco: Dilate

Lord, does this album speak to me. Beautiful, painful, and raw, it was Ani at her best. On the verge of becoming a music icon, and a symbol of musicians doing it for themselves. God, what a record.

Failure: Fantastic Planet

The newest of the albums, and one that drags the bottom of the soul, and pulls up the pain, and my go,d it’s beautiful. All of it. An album with heavy themes of addiction and loneliness, it transcended genre and time and stands as a killer record for the ages.

And are there more albums?
God yes.

So many.

But these are a great cross-section of what I was listening to, and which influenced my taste. Music got me through so much.

I remember the day an ex broke up with me, and as I dropped her off, I just jammed to the Coal Chamber song “Unspoiled.” It spoke for me. Making mix tapes and then mix CDs were so intimate, and whether they were for you or someone else, they were stories told through songs. They told someone how you felt about them when you couldn’t, or they set a mood, like a good Halloween mix. Sure, you can make a playlist, and it’s something, but it doesn’t feel as personal, and in the case of the mix tape, as thoughtful.

In my heart, I hope a story of mine connects with someone the way a song can.

It’s a hope.

…c…