Let's do a list of my most important albums.


Music, as I've said, is very important to me.  Hearing songs will often trigger certain memories for me, some good and some bad.  As such, I've already put together a list of the most important songs to me here.  I intentionally didn't flesh out that list with explanations, as specific songs are far too personal to me.  Albums, however, tend to bring to mind spans of time, rather than specific moments.  That being the case, I'm (for the most part) much more comfortable talking about them.  Again, these are important albums to me, not necessarily my favorites (Poets of the Fall is my favorite band, but none of their music is shackled to enough of my emotional baggage).  Chances are very high that I've forgotten something, but hey, that happens.  This is also a case where there are a dozen things that would be number 11 on this list.  And, as I'm focusing only on music albums to the exclusion of comedy, a special shoutout to Mitch Hedberg's Strategic Grill Locations.  You were so funny, man.

Counting Crows - August and Everything After

I don't want to go too far into this one.  All I have to say is that I can't hear this album without remembering the first of my friends to die.

(slightly broken, but better than nothing)

Lifehouse - No Name Face

There will be a running, but not constant, theme in this list, and that theme is this: This album helped me cope with some very difficult times.  I know every word of this album, and I've sung every one of them.  Though, bizarrely, what I'm thinking about right now is the fact that I was introduced to Lifehouse by Howard Stern, because he was impressed enough by them to tell his audience.  In my head, Lifehouse and the Stern audience are a pretty strange mismatch, but hell, it worked for me.

Korn - Follow the Leader

This is the album I was listening to the most during the most-of-a-year I was in college.  It was what I was listening to the moment I finally accepted that I had to quit.

Duncan Sheik - Self-titled album

Another simple one: When I feel like singing something, this is my go-to album.

Tool - Aenima

Again, an album I used to cope, but in a much different way.  As a piece, much of it deals with being a poisoned, furious person, and trying to move past that and heal, but also to keep the rage and direct it toward the things that deserve it.  When I couldn't take the world, I used to go walking late at night/early morning, through the neighborhoods and past the graveyard, listening to this on my first primitive mp3 player (and, oddly, in a suburb of the city where the lead singer went to college).  It was also my first exposure to Bill Hicks, and far from the last.

Hootie and the Blowfish - Cracked Rear View

This is the first music I bought with my own money.  The cassette, no less.  I bought it when we moved to Michigan the first time, back before the depression had fully set in.  I remember laying in the sofa-bed in the loft of my grandparents' condo (before the farmhouse was ready, and only my Dad and I were there) and, as my aunt put it the next morning, "shuckin' and jivin' with headphones and the Gameboy."

Better Than Ezra - Friction, Baby

Fairly simple: This is the first CD I ever owned.  I got it, along with my first CD player, for Christmas of '96.

The Cure - Bloodflowers

Guess what?  This album helped me cope with a lot of things; life as a college dropout, deaths, disillusionment with religion...some of the darkest times I've had.  As I get older, 39 hits me a little harder each time.

Stevie Ray Vaughan - Live From Austin, Texas

This one is a bit of a cheat.  One night at the video store, business was dead, so my boss popped out the standard promo video that played on the store televisions and instead put this tape in, and cranked the volume.  I'd never seen anything like it, and I ended up renting the video and bringing it home that night.  Stevie Ray played guitar like he was in a trance, like it wasn't something he was doing, but something he was feeling.  That was the catalyst that finally caused me to start viewing music as a skill rather than a product.  Oh, and it's on this list because I recorded the audio and played it very, very often.

Blink-182 - Self-titled album

Nope.  If you need to know why, you know.