This post is taken from a current Facebook Meme, and the title is fairly self explanatory. Some people have done 25 albums. I’ll just write til I run out… 🙂 These won’t be in any particular order (just don’t categorise music like that) and will definitely be incomplete and open to change:
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 Hejira – Joni Mitchell: I think I’ve written about this before on here. When I first heard this I was playing in a really trad New Orleans jazz band (OK, Trad up to the point where they had me on electric bass sitting in for the double bassist when he couldn’t make it), and the band leader was pretty fascistic about the music he thought was acceptable. So the trombone player, Sandy, used to slip me dubbed cassettes of things he thought I needed to hear, and one such tape had his own ‘best of Weather Report with Jaco’ compilation on one side, and Hejira on the other. And it blew my mind, on every level. I loved the bass playing, but more than that I loved the freewheeling harmony, the naked story-telling, the narrative threads that were weaved. Music would never be the same again.
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 Beyond These Shores – Iona: I’d already been hugely influenced by the progressive epicness of their previous album, ‘Book Of Kells’, but Beyond These Shores was the Iona album that made me want to be in the band (I nearly auditioned for them in the mid 90s, but bottled out of pursuing my connection with the band to make it happen)… fast forward to last year, and I got to play with Dave Bainbridge on a tour, which was a lot of fun, and I got to hear close up just how many of Dave’s ideas – compositionally, sonically and guitaristically – I’d stolen over the years. |
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 Nothing But A Burning Light – Bruce Cockburn: I was already a Bruce fan, again, but this was the album that made him possibly the most important lyricist I’ve ever had the fortune to encounter.
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 Dusk – The The: The point at which I realised at had way more to learn from doubt than I did from certainty. A remarkable exploration of human searching, failure, hope and ultimately, grace.
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 Hypocrisy Is The Greatest Luxury – The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy: My introduction to the shamanic magicalness that is Michael Franti. Incredible that he was in his mid-20s when he made a record as astute and prophetic as this one. It still sounds prescient 17 years later…
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Thonk – Michael Manring: So that’s what the bass guitar is meant to sound like. OK, thanks Michael. |
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 Plumb – Jonatha Brooke: Just by sheer virtue of it’s magnificence. It also features one of my favourite political songs ever – War, featuring a cameo by Bruce Cockburn. I listened to this and nothing else for about 2 months in 96.
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Ghost Town – Bill Frisell: The first Frisell record that really got me (all the others caught up soon after) – the point at which jazz and americana and folk music and country music and sountracks all melded into one as interesting music. The death of the pigeon-hole.
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 Fragile – Yes: in my mid-teens I wanted to be Chris Squire. The incredible sound of the record still amazes me today.
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 High -The Blue Nile: I actually owned two Blue Nile records before I ‘got’ them. But when I did, they changed everything. My next album will hopefully make me feel the way this album makes me feel.
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 Spirit Of Eden – Talk Talk: Ambient music suddenly became about ‘ambience’ not just nothingness. Deep soul-searching, heart wrenching music. Another one that shaped the feel I want from my records.
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 Bright Sized Life – Pat Metheny: Back in the days when every record was a treasured piece of 12″ plastic. I remember buying this, I remember the journey back to my dad’s flat in Dagenham, I remember looking at it leant against the wall. And I remember putting it on and not believing what hit my ears. I didn’t understand it at all, but I fell in love with it immediately.
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 King’s X – Dogman: Important because it was the sound of a band growing up, getting darker, dealing with conflict, doubt, pain… I love every record they’ve ever done, but this is the life-changer…
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Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me – The Cure: Another band where about 8 of their albums soundtrack different parts of my life. Disintegration is my favourite of theirs, but Kiss Me.. is the one that dug deepest, made me want to be in the band. To this day they’re one of about 4 bands in the world I’d drop everthing to join… |
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 Doolittle – Pixies: ‘Sergeant Pepper’ for late 80s indie kids. Passion, anger, scariness, humour and some KILLER basslines.
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Prefab Sprout – Steve McQueen: I’m an 80s pop fan. Not the Stock/Aitken/Waterman nonsense, but the songs from a time when pop was a way to say something, and along with Talk Talk, Nik Kershaw, The The, The Blue Nile, David Sylvian, Prefab Sprout made me LOVE the ‘art of pop’. |
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 D’Angelo – Voodoo: Purely for the rhythm section, and the vibe. Unlike anything before or since.
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So there you go, that’s 17… I may add more later.. :
