February is here and you know what that means: time for part two of our project, where we present the albums that define us, one entry per month.
To those who haven’t heard of the project before:
Let’s quickly remind us of the rules:
I’m really looking forward to what you’ll come up with next, I absolutely loved to read every single entry for January!
As a kid, I felt more and more a thirst for culture. My parents had done all they could to feed me, they even drove me to the bigger city 20mn from our place so I could get CDs from a public multimedia library.
But the real treat was going to my father’s younger siblings, that had good taste in music and knew exactly what I was looking for.
I have a vivid memory of my uncle putting this record out of a crate, the original edition with stickers and posters, and putting the needle on the vinyl… I entered another world, and was amazed at ever sound in this.
We listened to the entire record, my uncle and I. A very important transmission moment, to both of us.
I listened to this record with friends, we would listen to every detail, even the slight bump in the pitch of the very end of Great Gig In The Sky…
When I met my wife, this was our favorite record, we would listen to this, music as loud as possible, usually sining along.
My son was, ahem, conceived with GGITS playing LOUD in repeat.
Nice! Now the moment has arrived where I have to think hard about whether I will swap this album with another one. The connection to my father / his generation would definitely also be part of my text. No conceiving of babies though, so I might be outclassed 
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As a kid I listened 100% to music made by dudes. Dudes who looked like ladies; Kiss, Ratt, Mötley Crüe, Twister Sister etc. but still without any doubt or exceptions, dudes.
As I grew out of that phase and started listening to predominantly indie and alternative rock I mostly forgot about metal and hard rock. I completely missed out on most of death metal and all of black metal due to being more interested in Soundgarden and Faith No More in those formative years.
Around those same times 1991-1992 we started receiving satellite tv and I felt like the luckiest guy alive watching MTV on my own 14 inch telly for hours every day after school. When I wasn’t playing on my SNES, I was watching MTV.
One of my favourite shows was MTV’s Most Wanted hosted by Ray Cokes. It was engaging tv with people calling and sending postcards from all around the continent and it made me feel like I was living in Europe instead of living here in the cold dark north right next door to Russia.
Ray Cokes had occasional live music guests and I have a particularly embarrassing memory of seeing Suede play there around their first album and watching in horror and excitement as the vocalists shirt fell of revealing her upper body and breasts and at that exact moment realizing that Brett Anderson is actually a man despite of his androgynous look and voice. My mind blew up right there and then.
Even more mind expanding however was seeing a red haired lady play the piano and perform a couple of tracks off her debut album. I fell head over heels for her instantly. Maybe not romantically , but musically. (Although you have to remember that I was 16-17 years old at that time and filled with weird hormones. So I guess I kinda fancied her.)
Tori blew the doors open for a whole cavalcade of woman artists. I who had never before opened my ears to feminine voices, started buying every album made by women in hope of finding more stuff like Little Earthquakes. There were the obvious hits like Björk, PJ Harvey, Aimee Mann, Suzanne Vega, Kate Bush etc. which I love and worship to this day, but obviously there were misses too as I ended up trying and buying the boring blues rock of Sass Jordan or the lightweight mainstream pop of Joan Osbourne and Tasmin Archer. It appears being a woman didn’t instantly make you a musical genius but still I had a whole new world of artists to dive into after Tori had been the pioneer and opened the flood gates for others to come through.
Nowadays I listen to music from all genders without any prejudices but hearing These Precious Things for the first time on Ray Cokes’ show was an eye and ear opener. A boy raised on the harsh sexual stereotypes of hard rock finally realized that gender does not matter or hinder your talent in any way. You can be delicate, vulnerable and kinda hard core and bad ass at the same time.
I have every single Tori Amos album - yes even the Y Kant Tori Read one - in my collection but I’ve never been fortunate enough to see her live. Seeing her perform has been a bucket list thing for me for a long time. This coming may she’s coming to Finland and I have a ticket for the gig. I deliberately bought a ticket from the end of a row. That way I don’t have to embarrass myself by crying like a baby next to two strangers, but only one.
@Wolf-Rami: I will always be looking forward to your texts, you’re great at taking us to a place in time and making us feel like we were there. That’s exactly what I was hoping for with this project!
I’ve realized the embarrassing amount of dudes on my list. Wish someone like Tori had entered my musical socialization earlier!
This is an interesting but very important one to me. And another compilation. The Synthesizer Greatest series was I think a purely European affair and consisted of ‘remakes’ of lots of classic synth tracks done by Dutch composer Ed Starink. (Star Inc)
Allegedly the record label chose to remake/cover all the tracks because Jarre and Vangelis didn’t want to be on the same record together but I’m not sure if that ever has officially been confirmed. Although it would make sense because the bulk of this first one is made up of tracks by both 
They ended up making about 7 of these I believe and sold quite a few of them.
Anyway, I only learned about all this much later. As a young kid I was absolutely mesmerised by the sounds on display. I think it was the Miami Vice theme that drew me to it… Not sure 
This series introduced me to Jarre, Vangelis, OMD, Ultravox, Moroder, Kraftwerk, Sakamoto, Kitaro, Mike Oldfield, Jeff Wayne, Jan Hammer, Harold Faltermeyer, Alan Parsons… Just not the real versions. 
It made me a lifelong fan of ‘the synthesizer’ and probably why I always feel a bit nostalgic when I hear a big overdone rompler sound…
And I’ve had quite a few times in my later life where I heard one of the originals and realised it actually had vocals…
Nonetheless, this series remains an absolute cornerstone of my musical appreciation/development. I have the first 5 of these in a playlist somewhere and listen to them fairly regularly… Instead of the originals.
I mostly listened to Tori Amos by proxy because she was a big thing in my social circle (mostly among the girls though) when I was a teen. I just realised my memory of her music is mostly an amalgamation of Little Earthquakes, Under the Pink & Boys For Pele with Cornflake Girl being the first thing that always comes to mind.
I should probably do a bit of a deep dive on her at some point.
The way TLDR: Another old dude investigates his relationship with Pink Floyd’s Darks Side of the Moon.
This one is indulgently long, hence the link. The remainder of my entries should be much much shorter.
Q: Are we not men? A: We are DEVO
I’m going way further back this month. This is actually the album i had originally planned to start with as it was so profoundly influential to me at such an early age, not just musically but artistically as a whole and in my way of looking at the world broadly.
I’m not only the oldest of my siblings but the oldest kid in my generation in my family (cousins, et al) so i didn’t have the cool older kid to influence my tastes at home. However, for about two years i had an older step sister (me 8-10, her 15-17). She was nice but even i at that age understood that she was a total square when it came to cultural stuff and so were most of her friends who were always in and out of our house. Though there was one guy, carl, who was charmingly weird and always had strange music playing in his car when he’d pull up. One day when i was 8 or 9 years old i stole a cassette tape off the passenger seat of his busted up volkswagon without having any idea what it was and it changed my life. It was beautiful and sad and funny and scary and strange all at the same time. It was somehow the most alien thing id ever heard but like i immediately got it intuitively. My little mind cracked wide open, the lyrics and the sounds, oh the sounds, all articulated the feelings i had about the world of the time (still in the 80s) in a way i wasn’t eloquent enough to. I didn’t really know what a synthesizer was apart from it being some sort of keyboard and id never heard one used so detuned like on jocko homo. The thin, ring modulated guitars were a rejection of all of the toxic positivity and baseless optimism of my parents music. The bizarre vocal deliveries let the messages cut through without relying on the crutch of pretty melodies or pretty voices. The music respected my intelligence for the first time in my life.
I got caught for stealing the tape and that was good. My dad was beyond pissed but when i went to give the tape back to carl he was more interested in hearing what i had to say about the music. We sat there in his car in our driveway in the dark and the rain for what felt like all night (probably an hour or two) and talked about music while he played snippets of different tapes and chain smoked. A week or so later he started leaving me tapes, usually mix tapes but occasionally full albums, some of which will probably end up on my list in future months. By the fifth or sixth tape i had decided i was going to be a musician, that i had to, that inside i already was.
I want to say that this band was clearly one of my biggest influences but Devo wasn’t really a band. They were an art project that had a band aspect to it. They were a visual art project until the kent state massacre when they switched to making music videos and invented a band to accompany that. In the sense that they were a band, they were one of the more substantive and most subversive of the 20th century, you’d just never know if you’ve only heard whip it.
This isn’t my go-to Devo album these days, different albums for different moods, but its the one that got the ball rolling for me.
Spud life!
Edit/ a couple if additional thoughts after posting.
The score from “The Fountain.”
I was already a fan of Kronos Quartet, Mogwai, and Clint Mansell. But what they achieved on this far exceeded my expectations. The range of emotions and dynamics here are fantastic.
I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to this, but easily over 100. And it still moves me.
My Bloody Valentine - Loveless
Kind of hard to get into this one in earnest with a paper trail.
It was a crummy time of my life. I felt stuck in a situation I couldn’t leave. I went to sleep with this album on repeat nearly every night for a while, trying to melt through the walls and be anywhere else. I was nearly one with the wallpaper by the time I’d get to “What you Want.”
My situation wasn’t dire but I still felt very little control over it. I’m happy that time is over and happy the album doesn’t carry any continued stigma for being the soundtrack of lesser days.
That’s the most negative backstory of the albums I have but it’s still a defining personal refuge that’s luckily more contemplative and introspective these days.
Fucking legend, that Carl! How cool of him to hang out with a little kid and show them music, taking them seriously. Thanks for sharing this wonderful story. Did your relationship with Carl end after these few tapes or did it continue? Your anecdote shows how pivotal a few people can be on your musical journey, like that one great teacher that saw something in you and encourages you to discover it yourself.
Thanks. Our relationship did continue. He graduated a couple years after that and moved away from our tiny remote town and was in a couple punk bands in seattle in the early 90s but had some troubles with substances. He moved back and got clean the summer before i started high school. We reconnected and were friends. He continued to be that same awesome guy and he would always come see my shitty bands play. I moved away before finishing high school and we eventually lost touch. Nearly twenty years after i left, now living back in our home town, i ran into his brother at the skate park who said he’s doing well and has a family and stuff.
I can’t even begin to express how important that early influence was to me. I was not a very happy child and to be treated like a peer like that by someone nearly twice my age was life changing. Like you said, to be taken seriously. I’ve made it a point to pay that forward when the opportunity arises, to encourage that spark and treat kids like real people.
Here’s the background:
You grew up on the edge of a “pretty” rural coastal town, northern germany. Most radio stations mostly broadcast rubbish, and all you knew so far were the Beatles + Slime + some free jazz at night on NDR 4.
This album was my introduction to electronic music, even though it was recorded completely analog. (Then Yello came along and brought a few other colours with them.)
Ween — Quebec
I sometimes have a difficult time justifying my love of Ween, but at the end of the day, I fall firmly into the “Okay yes, THAT is awful, but listen to how good THIS is” camp. And more than anything else, I love how open they are with their process — they started Browntracker (RIP) to share demos and oddities in the earlier days of the internet, Mickey (Deaner)’s YouTube channels offer a lovely little collection of obscure early videos and oddball tv appearances, and you can find a plethora of live recordings/b-sides/demos/rarities on YouTube and the Internet Archive, with the full blessing of the band. It’s very cool, especially considering that they started sharing so openly when they were still on a major label.
Ween has a reputation for being musical chameleons, but I would argue that each studio album showed pretty specific growth: GodWeenSatan debuted a promising punk band who could broadly/irreverently pantomime other genres; they honed their pop melody skills in a big way for The Pod; Pure Guava saw them develop more convincing psychedelia and more listenable freakouts; Chocolate and Cheese integrated more complex chord voicings, and the songs worked incredibly well for their live shows, offering more room to improvise and experiment without falling into too many jam-band cliches; 12GCG obviously showed a lot of growth in their country songwriting, plus their touring with the Shit Creek Boys helped them become a world-class live act; on The Mollusk they finally had developed the chops to perform excellent prog rock and deliver on their weirdest impulses; and White Pepper saw them absolutely nail that Steely Dan soft-rock thing. Basically, they could PLAY plenty of genres from the very beginning, but it took them a while to get past a certain karaoke vibe. On Quebec, every song truly just sounds like Ween.
This is also the album that was the most chronologically-aligned with my fandom. Ween had been on my radar for years by the time Quebec came out — for whatever reason, The Mollusk was super popular among my church friends in the late nineties, and I knew at least a dozen of their other songs by the time I graduated high school — but Quebec really cemented my interest, and it’s still the album I revisit most often.
I’ll spare you a track-by-track run through, but here are my highlights: the abrupt, heavy-as-hell outro to “Happy Coloured Marbles” has become one of my most-borrowed songwriting tricks; I would argue that “The Argus” is one of the most perfectly-composed rock songs ever written, and the guitar multitracking still absolutely thrills me; “I Don’t Want It” and “If You Could Save Yourself” are genuinely heartbreaking; and the phone ringing at the end of “Zoloft” stresses me out so so much, which I’m sure is the intent. Very effective. Very Ween.
I also think their live shows peaked in this era. They had the maturity, experience, chops, and back-catalogue to absolutely slay on stage, but life hadn’t completely caught up to them yet. I saw them in 2007 or 2008 on the La Cucaracha tour, and they still put on a satisfying show, but the energy wasn’t quite there and Aaron (Gener) looked like he had aged about twenty years since the 2003 Live in Chicago DVD (which also could have made this list).
One final note: the demos and outtakes are worth a listen. There’s nothing earth-shattering, but as always, they offer an interesting glimpse into Ween’s songwriting process. Some of the versions are nearly identical to the album, down to the effects and ear candy; some of the versions are clearly in the early phases. Some of the outtakes made it onto Shinola, some deserve a much wider release than they got, and some should have probably never even been released for free on the internet:
https://archive.org/details/ceaser-demos/
Final final bonus — Josh Freese played drums on a few songs because Claude Coleman was recovering from a bad car crash, and he wrote a song about it:
I agree with all of my brown heart. Ween will show up for me on this thread as well.
Hail Boognish!
Thats two bands in a row, Ween and Einsturzende Neubauten, that will almost certainly be on my list, though different albums. Loving this.
White Pepper is one of my top 20 albums ever and I grew interested in Quebec after reading your post but then I went to Discogs and realized that even the cd is 45€ and upwards.
I don’t say this lightly - but thank god for streaming services. Otherwise I’d never be able to hear Mollusc or Quebec as the prices are through the roof.
Until now there are more bands than i expected. Interesting and a good read all that.
Don’t hesitate to reconnect 
