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What’s an album that’s deeply personal to you?
Tell us about an album that means a lot to you, and, most importantly, why it means so much.
What makes it resonant? Why do you connect with it so strongly?
To be clear, it doesn’t have to be literally applicable to your life. It could be, for example, an album that you listened to at a certain point in your life and thus connect it with that. I’m asking this question more to get at the stories than the music itself. Tell me yours!
Pink Floyd always hit the nail on the head for me. Specifically The Wall, and Animals.
When I was younger in the 80s, The Wall felt like they were speaking directly to me because I I spent a lot of time in group homes, behavior modification programs, and mental hospitals. "Another Brick In The Wall (Part III)" was particularly apt with these lyrics:
I could feel that what was being done to me by the state -- the drugging, the physical restraining, punishments that did not fit the crime, the dismissiveness of my experiences and who I was, the literal walls I was behind -- were effectively bricking me away, one brick at a time.
At times the I would become so overwhelmed by my powerlessness that I would break into violent rages against myself or towards staff which made the song "One of My Turns" completely relatable even if Pinks reasons for having a break were different than mine, it seemed to be born from the same sorts of frustrations and the musical transitions fit the way it felt to go from numb, to rage, to confusion. The thing is, when I was able to listen to music (often music was prohibited) and I started finding myself slipping, I would listen to this album and scream out the lyrics which would calm me down, make me feel heard, and make me feel understood. It had the ability to halt my slide into violence. Anyway, the entire album spoke to me on a deeply personal level.
As I've gotten older, I don't listen to the The Wall as much mostly because it doesn't resonate as deeply but also because when I hear it, I remember those feelings, and I often prefer not to. Instead I've turned to Animals. It's an album I turn to when I'm feeling particularly hopeless about humanity - when I hate all of you/us. When I hate that we allow the worst animals to rule over us, whether it's politically, big business, or in our personal lives. I'll put the album on and dance to the music while screaming the lyrics, or I'll angrily fuck my husband to it. But then the album ends as it began, with a glimpse of hope, and I feel a bit better.
Morrissey was also my way of getting through a very difficult, very abusive home life. As a teenager, I famously had a Smiths or Moz shirt for every day of the week. Now I'm down to just one or two. Later, as an adult, I met my best friend working a bookstore. We hit it off eerily well, more so than either of us had with anyone before, and when we found out that the other spent their teenage years as a massive Morrissey fan -- she as a Chicana in California, me as a skinny white kid on a farm -- it just seemed to make sense. Hearing his music or playing it on guitar takes me back to those days; the good and bad feelings come rushing back. Memories of hearing this or that song for the first time; of riding the bus to school listening to his music; of getting beaten up in junior high for wearing a shirt with a shirtless man on it. My high school experience was characterized by everyone around me being on one drug or another, and me having Moz as either my own addiction or my only method of escape. And nothing he himself nor that anyone else does can take away what that meant to me, growing up as a deeply sad gay kid in a town of 80, in the middle of nowhere. I hardly ever listen to him now, but the thought of losing it is like cutting off a limb. He's one of those people whose death I can feel hurting me from the future, even before it has happened. When he goes I know I'll be inconsolable. I was a teenage superfan, but I don't recommend getting into him if you're not already. His behavior is too problematic, and it could never be the same as it is when you're a kid and find him by chance. I've spent a lot of time thinking of artists who could feasibly play the same role for people. Having discussed this with other adjunct professors of Morrissey studies, Mitski seems the only one who could take on the same role. I hope she comes back from hiding soon.
I've found that people who came to his music as adults have a different relationship to him, one which is much healthier, and where they're more easily able to distance themselves from his persona. It's hard to describe to them exactly what having Moz as your only friend felt like. Sometimes he'd be speaking to you directly ("People see no worth in you. I do."), but most of the time it would be a commiseratory presence that mirrored your feelings of being unwanted. "Sixteen, clumsy, and shy: the story of my life" hits much differently when you're listening to it at sixteen, and also when you're listening to it at twenty-seven remembering when you used to listen to it at sixteen. I've talked about this with my "Morrissey friend" many times before, but as kids we both had this sense that he bore the world's pain like a biblical scapegoat. As a teenager, it seemed clear to me that he did, because he bore the pain of animals. Perhaps it's easy to see where his messianic complex comes from when people look to you like that. But it wasn't just his words. We saw it in the way that he moved. Every Morrissey fan worth their salt knows that there's two moments that occur like clockwork in every one of his shows: during a particularly sad song almost engineered for this purpose, he'll curl up into a little ball beside an amplifier, even now in his sixties. It's at those moments that his persona is the most believable. This man really is that sad, and really in pain, which is to say, he feels just like you do. His other gambit is the polar opposite. Usually after singing the line "But you open your eyes, and you see someone you physically despise," he'll take his shirt off and throw it into the crowd. The narcissistic exhibitionism of that gesture coupled with the lyric's cutting jab at himself sums him up better than I ever could.
I saw him for the first time on his 2007 tour of the US. I was sixteen years old. I got a ride from the only other queer person I knew at that time. She had just dropped out of high school, and I would soon follow. She brought him flowers. My heart pounded the whole way there, and nothing felt real to me. I don't think "hero worship" accurately describes what being a teenage superfan was like. I might have thought he was perfect, but I didn't want to be him. He already was me. He was the me where it was okay to be gay and have so many feelings. It was like meeting your best friend, long-distance lover, absent father, and therapist at the same time, because he was the only part of your life that was worth anything, and the only person who knew what it was like to be you. It's a feeling of super fandom he himself understands (or understood) well: "I touched you at the soundcheck. You had no real way of knowing. In my heart, I cried: 'Take me with you. I don't care where you're going.'"
We arrived a few hours early, but there was already a line outside the venue. I was wearing my favorite Morrissey shirt. One thing I've observed on several occasions is that a Morrissey concert is one of the only places you'll see people wearing the merch of the band you're seeing rather than a similarly cool band to gain yourself social capital. It was unseasonably cold and I weighed 115 pounds, so I was shaking by the time I got inside. But I didn't even feel aware of the cold. I was just so nervous.
Like he always does, he had a giant screen set up in front of the stage that plays a pre-show of old footage of the New York Dolls, Sacha Distel, Cilla Black, and all of the other obscure stars he likes. At a certain moment the screen drops, and a few things happen. The stage backdrop for the night is revealed, which like his album and singles sleeves, are usually sourced from a British kitchen sink film or rare shot of a classic male actor. That night, it was James Dean on the set of East of Eden. The band comes out one by one, usually in a coordinated outfit, and then out comes Morrissey. What struck me then and on other shows afterwards was how deliberately he seemed to move. You can learn a lot about an artist from the way they take the stage.
My friend and I were pressed against the railing. Either because the venue was short-staffed or it was early in the tour, there wasn't much in the way of security. Something else Morrissey fans and others are familiar with is the tradition of crashing the stage to hug him. That alone could be the material for a sociological study, as I've never seen that happen with such extreme frequency with any other artist. I was so young and passionate then that I knew that I was going to do it. There were a lot of older people around me, and I think they might have empathized with the scrawny, starry-eyed baby gay that I used to be. I don't remember saying anything to them, but there was something unspoken between us. When "You're Gonna Need Someone On Your Side" started, I began scrambling over the bar.
It's always hard to tell how Morrissey feels about stagedivers. Often they're aggressive, and he's been known to cut shows short because of them. Seeing them in recent shows, I usually cringe and worry about his frailty. But that night wasn't like that. The chorus to that song is a little funny. It goes: "Give yourself a break before you break down. You're gonna need someone on your side. And here I am!" Those last words are sung with a melodramatic, but joking kind of emphasis. Moz had reached the chorus by the time I was struggling with the bar. I was having trouble actually getting up onto the stage, and was thinking I might have to give up and drop into a small, empty orchestra pit. In retrospect, it wasn't the smartest idea, as I'm not tall and the pit was too wide to be easily bridged. He must have seen me struggling, as he came across the stage, and flawlessly holding character, sung "And here I am!" as he swooped an arm down for me to latch onto and finish clambering up there. I remember being surprised at how strong his arm was, and also that he smelled distinctly like a church. It's an upbeat song, but the night and the experience had sent my emotional state into another dimension. I hugged him and just said "Thank you. Thank you," into his shoulder. He gave me a "there there" kind of pat to the back of my neck. I rushed off stage just as a security guy emerged from the back. Some gracious people helped me down, and worrying I was going to be kicked out, I stayed in the back and met up with my friend only after it was all over.
I'm a person with almost no pleasant memories. There are few things that I remember that I don't immediately try to repress. But that night was really special to me. The pain of my adolescence coalesced and took on a new meaning in that moment, because even though it was in a quintessentially teenage and desperate way, I communicated something to him that I had felt so deep down inside for so long. And that's my deeply personal music story.
Grabbing this from an older post, as it's exactly what I'd share now:
My musical development was suppressed on account of my family considering modern music evil. Funny that we had a copy of this song growing up that I played on my kid's record player. Music piracy (at least according to the record companies) was the only way I really got a chance to listen to music I identified with for a long time. So that was likely a huge influence on how I see piracy to this day, but that's a bit of a sidebar.
Here's the 'musical foundation' that I recognize and persists to this day, 20+ years later:
Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral
I first discovered Nine Inch Nails during a dark period of my life, being horrendously bullied in middle school, losing my elementary school friends, and barely having met a social circle I could fit into. Closer would play on the radio occasionally, and edgy/depressed/horny/immature teenage Vord only really saw it at shallowest surface level and liked it for that. But what hooked me was finding the CD case in my older cousin's basement (CD not found), and I analyzed every square inch of it. I experienced that whole album as pictures and words before ever hearing a song other than Closer. I basically kept this a secret for several months until I told said cousin and he let me listen to some songs. I was obsessed with Mr. Self Destruct and Closer. Turns out, he had a lot of the various other CDs as well, and made me a mix tape he titled 'Closer to Self Destruction', which was basically an algamation of the various Closer and Mr. Self Destruct versions from The Downward Spiral, Closer, and Further Down the Spiral. Over time, my tastes expanded, but NIN has been a bedrock, and especially when feeling down and out will make me feel better in that catharti, nostalgic manner.
Weird Al - Running With Scissors
Was always a fan of Weird Al, especially since that one time JoJo of WLAN locked himself in the booth and played 'Amish Paradise' on loop for 24 hours (in the middle of Amish country), refusing to stop until the police escorted him out. Hard to find on the net, but I am not alone in remembering this. Weird Al is the master of musical parody, and the number of other terrible musical parodies on Youtube is proof of that. Running with Scissors was the first album I purchased (on cassette). While he's not on regular listening rotation, I will see that man in concert every chance I get.
Catch 22 - Keasbey Nights
Catch 22 was my first live concert, mostly playing from this album. A ska concert was transcendent for someone who had relatively little exposure to music at all. Moshing with all the kicks and bruises...but once someone was on the floor people stopped to help them up.
William Shatner - Has Been
Was walking through a record store (remember those?), saw the last copy of this standing out awkwardly in the rap section. Said 'damn, I have to see what this is about,' bought it, and have been listening to it ever since. Was my first exposure to Ben Folds, and this album shows just how great of a musician Ben Folds is, because hew was able to play into Shatner's strengths and complement it fantastically. This album, more than any other, is one I would advise everyone to give at least one listen to.
Thin Lizard Dawn - Thin Lizard Dawn
Found this in a used record store in Ocean City circa 2003. It's weird and catchy. My wife and I consider Happy-Loonies one of our most important couple songs.
Daft Punk - Discovery
Discovery was introduced to me via Interstella 5555. Get stoned an watch it if you haven't yet. Something About Us def another couples song for wife and myself.
Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon
Vinyl, CD/FLAC, or GTFO. I've listened to this album hundreds, if not thousands of times in virtually every medium. It's a definitive stereo/headphone tester for a reason, and one of the only ones I can easily pick out whether it's compressed or lossless on a decent setup.
They're not even necessarily my favorite albums anymore from those artists, but those are the ones that make my brain tick. My wife liking most of them was one strong contributing factor to why she is my wife.
It's kinda funny to me how you have The Downward Spiral and Discovery on the same list.
Kinda like asking someone what their favorite kinds of movies are and replying with "well, I'm kinda into sci-fi adventure musicals, but Cannibal Holocaust is a fun time too."
Watch "Cannibal the Musical", get both.
But yea, different music for diferent times of life. Each one is deeply personal in a way I couldn't jist choose one.
I have to pick two of them, because they're equally important for different reasons.
Jethro Tull - Thick as a Brick I talk about this one a lot because it's a favorite of mine, but I've also got a lot attached to it. I have a memory of not being able to sleep, my dad gave me his CD player to use to listen to this album to help me go to sleep. I always liked the song anyway, but there was nothing significant about it at the time, but it's burned into my memory now. It's also just, musically, one of my favorite albums ever, but I always feel extremely happy when I listen to it.
Optimus Rhyme - School the Indie Rockers I was 19 taking care of my great aunt for a couple months when I heard this album the first time. Unlike a lot of nerdcore hip hop at its peak, Optimus Rhyme is really good at breaking past their dense gimmick and actually offer some significant depth to relate to that went beyond just trying to pander to the audience. This was a particularly rough time for me, the being alone with my great aunt was getting to me, but this album helped me keep it together, even if it was a connection to a sorrow I hadn't personally dealt with. I still play some of the grooves on my guitar.
My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade was the album that made me a music fan. I heard the iconic Welcome to the Black Parade somewhere in public as a kid and was mesmerized by it, so I went home and looked up the lyrics to find the song. This album got me into MCR, which was followed by Fall Out Boy, Panic, and All Time Low; I was developing my own music taste for the first time ever. I don't listen to a ton of this music at this point in my life, but this album will always hold a special place in my heart.
It's one of those perfect albums. I saw them on that tour and I'm forever grateful. I'm not a fan per se but that album is so amazing from start to fininsh.
The Book of Longing by Philip Glass, based on poetry by Leonard Cohen.
I was two years into an engineering project that I wasn't sure actually had a solution. Testing was taking me away from my wife and two young children for months at a time. I had tried everything I could think of and every possible approach to solving the problem, and there wasn't anyone I could go to for help.
I was in the Middle East, alone, with no hope for success. It's the most homesick I've ever been in my life, even more than when I left home and started out on my own as an adult.
For me, the lyrics are as powerful as anything else by Leonard Cohen. I've always loved Philip Glass, and I thought the merging of the two was beautiful.
I'm on my phone and I've had the text box here get reset a couple times swapping apps, so I won't go over it track by track, but the themes of being lost, love and despair, uncertainty, etc. all spoke to my soul, it was all exactly how I was feeling at the time.
I'm torn between two albums but for nearly identical reasons, which are the same reason as @CrunchyTabasco.
Ocean Avenue by Yellow Card: This was the "get me into music" album. I had just gotten introduced to the band right around the same time I got a shitty gen1 ipod handed down to me from my cousin. I now had the ability to take Yellow Card's music with me everywhere and I did. It introduced me to a guy who would become one of my best friends, and he'd introduce me to Anberlin, MCR, FOB, the whole scene music gambit. Despite the band being uhhhhhhhhhh fucking trash fires of human beings, it is impossible for me to not list this as one of the most important albums to me.
Never Take Friendship Personal by Anberlin: The first album I listened to that wasn't yellowcard. They were suggested to me by my best friend at the time and it would really define who I would be for basically the rest of my life, or at least through current times. It was my first album where I was obsessed with the band. It started my scene phase, which introduced me to my high school friends that I am still close with. It was my first concert. It was a mutual interest that introduced me to some of my closest friends in college. Anberlin the band was such an all-encompassing and influental part of my high school and early college years. The only reason any album comes close to the importance to me that Never Take Friendship Personal does is because Ocean Avenue is such a clear link to how I was introduced to Never Take Friendship Personal that it feels weird not to mention it.
Whaaaat? Of all the artists I was expecting to see in this thread, Anberlin was not one of them! There's a decent chance we might have seen one another IRL at one of their concerts. :)
For me, Blueprints for the Black Market hit me the way Never Take Friendship Personal hit you. Blueprints is a hard album to return to from a modern perspective, as I can now hear all of its limitations and some of its songs have not aged well ("boys speak in rhythm / and girls in code"), but at the time it was fresh and powerful. I still identified as Christian at the time of its release but I disliked a lot of Christian music for being too on-the-nose. Anberlin felt like the one of the rare Christian bands that fell outside of praise and worship songs and managed to do it well.
I thought Never Take Friendship Personal was a full step up from Blueprints, and then I felt that Cities brought them to an incredibly high peak. I still come back to that album occasionally, though it was definitely a victim of the loudness war which also makes it hard to listen to today for different reasons than Blueprints.
I definitely didn't expect there to be other big Anberlin fans on here!! I completely agree with you on Blueprints. Even back when I was getting into them, I thought the lyrics of NTFP and Cities were just better. I owe the album a relisten, but that "boys speak in rhythm, girls in code" is the exact song I think of when I think of Blueprints which is super unfair because there were some really really good songs on the album! Naive Orleans, Glass to Arson, Autobahn; there were a ton of really fun songs on there. The acoustic of Naive Orleans and Unwinding Cable Car off of The Lost Songs still haunt me.
YUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUPP. That was exactly where I landed. The only other bands I can think of that kinda sorta walked that line were Switchfoot and Relient K, but even then both of them had songs on all of their albums where they got really on-the-nose.
Looking on Spotify it looks like they released a lot of music after I started listening to them less. I don't know that I ever actually listened to Lowborn, or that in 2020 they released live versions of Cities, Blueprints, and NTFP and I guess a new merch line and doing livestream music events? Guess its time to dive back in!
Interesting. I never really followed them after Cities, but it looks like they've done a lot more since! I'll join you in diving back in! I think I'm going to listen through their discography album by album over the next week or so and see how it hits me today.
Also, Switchfoot and Relient K were legit! I should revisit some of their stuff too. I know some early Relient K won't stand the test of time ("Mood Rings" is the "girls [speak] in code" of their output), but Matt Thiessen really matured as a songwriter over the course of their career and put out some impressive stuff.
Also, I don't know if you're familiar with them, but there's a lesser known band named Mae from that time that I still listen to on the regular. They're Christian but not preachy in the slightest, and they have great rock/alternative/emo-adjacent songwriting. The Everglow is an absolute masterpiece of an album.
It may be a bit cliche but Linkin Parks first two albums, Hybrid Theory and Meteora, were arguably the two most important albums I owned growing up.
I had a, relatively speaking, normal childhood. Divorced and remarried parents gave me a huge extended family. Outside of some minor bullying in elementary and middle school, my biggest issue growing up was feeling completely alone. I still can’t pinpoint why given how large of a family(5 brothers/sisters, 4 parents) I had but most of my childhood was spent nose deep into books or intently into my N64/GameCube or reenacting mock battles with my assortment of Star Wars toys.
Something about those first two albums carried me though. Whenever I had a bad day or was feeling more alone than usual, I throw one of those albums, usually Hybrid Theory, into my stereo/CD player, turn off the lights in my room, and just close my eyes and forget I existed for a bit.
Eiffel 65 - Europop, Aqua - Aquarium
Blue (Da Ba Dee) & Barbie Girl. Sooo bad, but so good! 90s dance music is the best!
They aren't even close to the best songs on the albums though lol
True, but they are the most recognizable, and I felt people might appreciate the links for a hit of nostalgia after you mentioned the albums. :)