Of the 30,000 photos I have uploaded to flickr in the last 9 years I’d guess more than a third were taken in my 1/3 acre yard or house. My guess might be totally off, but I have yet to find on a given day that I cannot locate something new, different. Being home this […]
cc licensed flickr photo shared by ·Music Moves My Feet·
I will definitely show my age era here.
Yes, you kids with your “digital buy a song for 99 cents mix it up on your pod” may have something special you will blog about in 20 years. But for me, in many ways, there was nothing like the music that defined the Album Rock period that ushered me through those teen years.
It’s one thing to have a good song, but an Album, for many musicians, was a concept, a whole, and there was not only the music, but the art on the cover, the liner notes, the stamp on the disc… it was a feast. What do you get in an iTunes download?
Just bits.
So I had a hankering to come up with a list of ten albums that were formative to me- not the ten best albums nor the most important, but actually, ten I could recall because of when they occurred in my life. Ten stories.
cc licensed flickr photo shared by Scoobay
But first, I was a little inspired by this book, 1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die. I had thumbed through it last April when I was on my sister’s boat, and it was a nice surprise when she sent me a copy as a gift.
It’s a book you can just pick up and thumb through anywhere, it is arranged alphabetically by artist/group, crossing classical to rock to show tunes to punk to opera to world music. You go from Héctor Lavoe to Leadbelly to Ernesto Leeuono to Led Zeppelin to Peggy Lee to Michael Legran. Author Tom Moon offers clear, non snooty critic like commentary, but it is opinion (how can it not be?).
There’s a neat little bit of linkage at the end of each section, almost like hypertext in an old style book. For each album, the author lists “key tracks” from the album; then “Catalog Choices”, like a “see also” meaning another album by the same artist; then “next stop” which is something similar by a different artist, and last is “After That” something less related, that might help you branch out in musical style. This is all accomplished in about an inch of print, and it leads to discovery.
So here are my Ten Formative Albums…
