Today, in my lucid moments, I authored a list of the ten albums that have most left a lasting impact on me as a person. Not my top ten favorite, mind you. That's a much more difficult list, with all sorts of potential hang-ups and a guaranteed addendum of some fifty-odd runners up, all all different depending on the mood that's struck me.
Nor are they albums that have "changed my life". Nor are they albums I think you might enjoy, even. Nor are they even albums I listen to all that often. They're simply albums that have left a trace of themselves on my soul for one reason or another.
So, without further ado, the first two, in no particular order:
The Understanding by RöyksoppAs a young'n, I was never much into techno (as we called it) or electronica, or any of it's various subgenres. Not consciously, anyway. At dances, I'd kind of shake along to Sandstorm, sway self-consciously to Castles in the Sky, knowing that on some guilty level that I enjoyed the heavy beats and angelic voices of the faintly accented European variety, electric twinge and all. And so it was with some trepidation that I tried out Moby... and liked it. Matt gave me a sampler that had (among other things) a track entitled (in his uneven handwriting) ASIAN RAVE that ended abruptly at two minutes and one second. At fourteen, I was enthralled.
Some two years later, my aural sights had moved on to other things, a lot of it piecemeal from various friends. I maybe owned ten complete albums, and some 500 unsorted songs drifted around on my parent's PC, playing on a loop through Winamp. Even as fledgling as my growing musical diversity remained, I was still painfully aware of how little I actually had to listen to. So I began borrowing money from my parents, saving quarters, spending hours searching sites that promised 'FREE MP3S' (almost certainly giving my computer a couple dozen viruses in the process), attempting to discover what sort of musical taste I could scrabble together.
Cut forward two years.
Jenny and I started talking when I was 19, fresh out of a chain of uncertain relationships and raring to get into another one. She had amazing taste in music.
One of the first songs she made me listen to was a track off of The Understanding, and I went the next afternoon and bought the album for $22 (it was an import) . It was love at first listen.
Steady beats, catchy lyrics, totally danceable and utterly Norwegian. It defined me for the next year or so, playing out along with the drama around Jenny and I. We eventually parted ways, but I never fell out of love with Royksopp.
Tracks to listen to:
Only This Moment
What Else is There?
Come on Feel the Illinoise by Sufjan StevensSufjan Stevens is one of those people who I love unconditionally, despite not actually knowing them, knowing what they look like, knowing how to pronounce their name. It doesn't matter. I hear his voice, and I can't help but love him. It could be argued that this a great way to love someone, but I would then point out that it's a little bit creepy. It's the same sort of cloth stalking and fan-obsession is cut from, and while it contains a great deal of shallow regard, it leaves no room for the person whose voice it really is.
That said, my really super love for Sufjan began when I heard this album. I'd seen his name plenty of times before that fateful day, bouncing to and fro throughout the blogosphere, but the inpenetrable shine of indie smarm pretty much turned me off to wanting to give it a *go.
But lo!, the library happened to have a copy of Illinois hidden among the software and DVDs, and one moderately warm fall day I took it home with me. It didn't get any attention all that week, nor the week after... it wasn't until I got an e-mail from the good people from DPLD collections that it was a week overdue that I decided I ought to pop it into the 'ol player and give her a spin.
Oh, my ears. I listened to nothing but Sufjan for days, finally burning the album onto my computer after the physical disc began to skip. I listened to him croon about Chicago, Zombies, and Predatory Wasps through the winter (long ago returning the CD itself, along with $3 in charges), letting it alter me in subtle ways. It made me calmer, more poetic, more aware of the beauty of suffering.
Since then, I've collected everything I could find by Sufjan Stevens (including the five-disc holiday collection), and still listen to him an awful lot. But Come On Feel The Illinoise! is something set apart. Srsly.
Tracks to listen to:
Casimir Pulaski Day
Chicago
They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!
The next two will come tomorrow, with the two after that on the next day, etc., with Friday featuring the final two albums and some assorted other.
I love you all, two people who read my blog, and wish you a happy Monday evening.
-James
*I have since learned from my mistakes. Thank you.
3 comments:
oh jp. you have the best timing in the most awful of ways. I have five million things to say to you, only half in response to this, but in the interest of not creating a comment longer than your post, I'll be brief. brief for me at least.
note: we are no longer facebook friends. do not be alarmed. I need to not be there, is all. I'm going on a full week of crazy at this point, but I'm not sure I want to go back to before. And amidst my indecision, I'm doing everything I can not to destroy everything I've precariously built up in the last year or so. I guess I want to see if I can do it by myself. maybe I can't. probably not, not yet at least, but I'm not going to drag you back into that crap, not again. It's not fair.
That being said, I guess a lot of what I want to say is related to this post, though perhaps indirectly. Reading this made me think of my few conversations with Arthur, his insistent inflexible view of music as some perfection that very few attained. his disdain for anything that didn't even try in his mind. I tried to explain, that music is more than hippies carefully strumming out chords on the wild lawn of a small, midwestern liberal arts college, more than the tortured geniuses furiously scribbling lyrics in the dark shade of their bedrooms. Music is memories, I tried to tell him. The stupidest most stereotypical mechanized songs can mean the world to me, if only because of how they found their way into my heart. And sometimes, something beautiful comes in all on its own, but even then I have to have a hole in my heart at the moment I hear it for it to enter. I hope that makes sense to you, but I'm sure it will.
Perhaps loving a song for its merits and not its association is the wiser path. I think of the countless songs that james gave me, that I will never be able to love on their own or with someone else- when you say nothing at all, the last dance of our first dance as a couple. soundtrack for our movie, on a burned cd he made for me, my first introduction to mae. others from other places too- the dance was our high school graduating class's song. my old stupid roommate cassie once told me about how her boss (who, from her description, sounded like a pedophile) and her shared the song don't stop believin' (I never again played it when she was in the room.) and I will always remember the day this kid brought the evanescence song to our seminary class for an activity and played the song tourniquet, something in his eyes I'd never seen before, something I wanted to feel (and now, looking back, I wonder how it is that when he fell from the boy everyone thought could do no wrong to the broken man he is now, I was surprised. I saw his future in his eyes that day four years ago).
And then there is you. you and the countless songs you have given me, some that I wanted to love because you loved them, some I wanted to forget because you loved them, and some that I readily and hastily adopted as my own, taking away any claim I thought you might have to them....sufjan and franz ferdinand and frou frou and harry and the potters and the shins. I will never be able to listen to 23 or dice and not think of you. and so many others too, if only because they were my soundtrack to our conversations once upon a time and forever ago. They take me back, like the smell of your old home, an old friend, a loved bookstore.
I've completely lost my train of thought now, which is probably a good thing.
I took you off my friends list, not even thinking that I would no longer have your address. And yet, I still think of songs I'm going to put on the mix I will send you one day.
did you know your narrative voice changes when you are talking about things you love? it does. a lot. it reminds me of why we're friends.
the end.
hi! am i one of the two? if not, then be informed that there are three readers of your blog.
p.s. i feel like i ruined a beautiful internet conversation between you and ^person with this silly interuption. sorry.
ruin? nothing to ruin. this is everyday yapping. privacy the internet affords, and all that good stuff.
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