12 Albums That Stuck With Me (with Bonus New Year’s Resolutions!)

It’s time for another text-based Facebook meme. This one reads something like this:

In your status list 10 (-ish) albums that have stuck with you in some way. Don’t take more than five minutes and don’t dig too deep.

My list uses the “(-ish)” loophole and definitely ignores the five minute and not digging deep rules.

The Who: Tommy
George Michael: Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1
Tom Cochrane: Mad Mad World
Charlie Sexton Sextet: Under the Wishing Tree
Counting Crows: Recovering the Satellites
Gideon Freudmann: Adobe Dog House
Fiona Apple: When the Pawn
Victoria Arico: Everybody Come to Dinner
Michelle Branch: Hotel Paper
World Leader Pretend: Punches
We Are Scientists: With Love and Squalor
Muse: Black Holes and Revelations

That’s in chronological order by release date, and it evolved from from a simple “What kind of music do you like?” email this past summer. So yeah, I’ve been agonizing over it for several months.

The somewhat vague phrasing of “albums that have stuck with you” really helped define the list. It doesn’t necessarily include current favorite bands, albums, or favorite albums by favorite bands. Influential music played by my family in my formative years isn’t really in there because no single albums from those bands stood out; Yes, Genesis, Tears for Fears, and Boston all had substantial catalogs by the time I was a teenager.

Rather than overexplain every choice in a single blog entry, I figured I’d lay them all out here and overexplain them one at a time over the course of 2014. And since even that wouldn’t be enough, I decided to share a simple video cover version of a song on each album as well.

So then, my 2014 resolutions:

1. Record one video cover song each month and post it with an album analysis every second Monday of the month.
2. Post something every Monday and Thursday so we get some consistency up in this here blog.
3. Read and listen more.

Feel free to share your own list of albums below, with or without explanations, using as much or as little time to think as you like. There’s a lot of good music out there, from mainstream to obscure.