Most Influential Albums

[Fe Maiden]

I'll list a few that come to mind first though many will be left out!

Iron Maiden - Killers
Iron Maiden - Piece Of Mind
Iron Maiden - Number Of The Beast
UFO - Lights Out
Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath
Black Sabbath - Heaven & Hell
RUSH - 2112
RUSH - Moving Pictures
RUSH - Hemispheres
Queensryche - The Warning
Queensryche - Operation Mindcrime
Led Zeppelin - IV
Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti
Pink Floyd - The Wall
Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
Pink Floyd - Dark Side Of The Moon
Metallica - Ride the Lightning
Metallica - Master Of Puppets
Megadeth - Rust In Peace


That's all for now though I may add to it later. I won't go into the reasons why I chose these particular albums because I would never get to get up from the computer. I could go on forever about some of these albums and my connection to them.

Cool Idea ADD!!!!

[ChildrenofSodom]

I cant find my Number of the Beast ..I really wanted to listen to it, since this thread resparked some nostalgia.....

damn it.

[zgodt]

Here's the long version of my list, with commentary.


The Beatles - Hey Jude
It's hard to single one thing out of all my parents' old records that mattered to me as a kid -- stuff like The Beach Boys' "I Get Around" and Elvis's "Hound Dog" on 45, Brownsville Station's "Smokin' in the Boys' Room" on some compilation record, not to mention John Denver. But I distinctly remember listening to "Can't Buy Me Love" one day as a kid and having this thing click in my head, and I understood how much I loved the effect of a melody line being repeated over chord changes, although obviously I never could have articulated it that way. I also loved that song because it was fast. And perhaps because I could relate to the message; maybe that was an early factor in my anti-materialist streak.

Iron Maiden - The Number of the Beast
One morning I was taping Phil Collins and Michael Jackson off Casey Kasem's top 40 countdown. That afternoon a family friend played me "The Prisoner." And in a way I count that moment as the beginning of everything else that has happened in my life. Falling in love with that song instantly turned me into a kind of an outcast -- I was choosing against the norm, choosing to prefer the abnormal. This opened the way for me gravitating toward the people I came to know, getting into every subsequent kind of music I've gotten into, making certain choices and non-choices about what to study and what kind of work to do, and I can even trace the chain of events to meeting my wife, even though it had nothing to do with music, and she can't stand anything about Iron Maiden, and when I met her she even told me that she hated guitar.

Soundtrack for the film Terminal City Ricochet on Alternative Tentacles
My best friend from high school (and to this day) played me lots of punk stuff that I didn't really get or like (and meanwhile I was plying him with stuff like Testament and Prong that he didn't really get or like). Only when I heard NoMeansNo's couple of songs on this soundtrack (including their original collaboration with Jello Biafra, "Falling Space Junk (Hold the Anchovies)") did it really start to sink in. Here was a punk band that had the musical imagination and badass riffs that I prized and sought so much in metal. It opened the door for me to come around to appreciating a whole variety of great punk bands, from Soul Asylum to the Ramones, Dead Kennedys to Husker Du, Channel 3 to Fear.... And meanwhile NoMeansNo has become my favorite band of all time.

Public Enemy - Fear of a Black Planet
Another thing my friend Kevin played me. It didn't really sink in at first, either, but it opened me up so that when my housemates in college started playing shit like Das EFX and Da Lenchmob, not to mention more Public Enemy, I was ready to hear it and appreciate it. And this receptivity to hip hop has come back around years later to have a huge (albeit indirect and probably invisible to the outside observer) influence on my current activities as a teacher and performer.

The Grunge Years (an anthology from SubPop records)
Again, I'd been hearing Nirvana and Mudhoney for a while and sort of getting it, but this album really cemented that whole scene for me. And bands of the so-called "Seattle sound" formed pretty much the core of my listening habits for a while there. Meanwhile this album was my first exposure to some bands that because quite important to me (at least temporarily), and who I in fact got to interview for the college newspaper: L7, The Walkabouts, and especially Afghan Whigs.

Tom Waits - Bone Machine
Hearing Tom Waits just changes everything. Period. I don't even know what to tell you. Except that the night I heard "Goin' Out West" from this album is also the night I heard "The Piano Has Been Drinking" from an album he'd made 15 years earlier, in an entirely different vein, and they both fucked my head up about equally.

Iron Maiden - No Prayer for the Dying
This album almost but not quite single-handedly killed metal for me for, oh, about 12 years.

The Chess Box - 4-disc box set of blues musicians on Chess records
Taught me a lot about blues, and exposed me to some artists I've come to love without reservation, especially Howlin' Wolf and Koko Taylor. And probably opened the door for me to appreciate some far older blues artists whom I've also come to love without reservation: particularly Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson. Also some particular lyrical characteristics -- most prominent in the songs of Willie Dixon -- gave me new ways to think about the world, and to construct poems, which as you may know is sort of a thing I do.

Uncle Tupelo - March 16-20, 1992
The genius of this album is it's blending of new songs written by Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy with covers of old Americana songs. The music is often sublime, but the project transcends music to become a work of historical synthesis about working class life. To get what I mean: track number 2 is called "Coal Miners" and it's a cover of an old rabble rousing agitprop song about how shittily the mining company treats the miner, and how the workers need to organize and "send this capitalist system to the darkest pits of hell." Track number 5 is a Farrar original called "Shaky Ground" that laments the wasted life of a miner with no real options; the chorus goes "we follow each other around on shaky ground". This kind of connection-making between present and past makes for many amazing moments of clarity about how people are now and were then and have always been.

Ani Difranco - mix tape my friend Margaret made for me, which drew heavily from Not a Pretty Girl and Out of Range
This tape made Ani Difranco both my guitar hero and my songwriting hero.

The Story of Great Music from Time Life Records, 5 box sets from a series of ?, each box containing four vinyl records and a book outlining background/program notes.
Hell yeah. I'd always been curious about classical music, but never really knew much about it, and didn't really know how to find out. Then one year we went to a big neighborhood garage sale in Ypsilanti, MI, because it was sort of the thing to do in town, and the first house we hit had this box of vinyl records for sale including 7 or 8 volumes of this Time Life Story of Great Music set. They were $1 each. So I bought 5 of them. Unfortunately, another shopper found the box around the same time I did and snatched the rest before I could come back with more money for the ones I missed. This was one of the best purchases I ever made. For the next few weeks, I would spend an hour or so in my basement having a drink and listening to the next installment of the history of classical music, and reading through the enclosed guidebooks to put it in context. I learned so much, and fell in love with some pieces and some composers that have become huge in the soundtrack of my life.

Braid - Movie Music, Vol. 1
A small but important discovery -- after a period of despairing about the state of music, and realizing I hadn't bought anything by a good new band in years, I found this on amazon by clicking through a chain of "customers who bought that also bought this" lists, and then listening to some crummy 30-second samples. I also bought something by Samiam the same way, which turned out to be mediocre as hell. But this album was great, and restored my faith that somewhere out there unbeknownst to me there had still been great bands making great music, and I just had to find them.

Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968, 4-disc box set
My friend Jim turned me onto this priceless discovery. A 4-disc set of forgotten garage bands from the late 60s -- much of it crappy and dull, but much of it sharp and fresh and literally amazing. I discovered bands like The Sonics and The Music Machine and The Monks from whom I've since sought out complete discographies -- not to mention mind-boggling songs like "Spazz" by the Elastik Band who seem to have never released anything else but simply vanished. Here was great punk, years before punk was supposed to exist.

Dismemberment Plan - Change
This is on the list mostly for aesthetic reasons. It's simply a very unusual album with very unusual approaches to making songs - in terms of theme, point-of-view, imagery - that has had the quality of expanding my mind (not to mention breaking my heart).

Charles Mingus - Mingus Ah-Um
One of the best albums of all time, and the first jazz album that ever sunk in enough for me to be able to say something like that about it.

Iron Maiden - Brave New World
Picked this up on a whim after seeing it for $5 in the used bin. It's not on the list for being a great album, but for being decent enough that I started to wander back into Maiden and then into metal. Among other things, it led directly to my becoming part of the IMBB community, which among other things has led me here...

Opeth - Lamentations DVD
Maybe this is too recent to merit the list, but it feels important because it made me see more possibilities for the development of metal than I had foreseen. And the dichotomy between the clean set and the heavy set helped clarify for me the extent to which death metal vocals could be a valid aesthetic choice, rather than a product of limited talent and/or a trite and cartoonish attempt to be "scary." Meanwhile, the particular kinds of dissonance and disharmony that Opeth uses are something I'd been seeking for a long time in rock music.

The Coup - Steal This Album[/quote]
Again, probably too recent to merit the list, but I just got this in November or so and it's one of the best albums I've ever heard. And like the Dismemberment Plan album, it's approach is so fresh and unexpected that it opens up many new possibilities for how one can see and represent the world.


Peace, ya'll.

[zgodt]

Originally Posted by Fe Maiden

I won't go into the reasons why I chose these particular albums because I would never get to get up from the computer. I could go on forever about some of these albums and my connection to them.

Pick the 5 most important then.

[JRA]

Ozzy Osbourne- The Ultimate Sin: The first "real" album I ever bought after hearing it from my Uncle's collection.

Ozzy Osbourne- Blizzard Of Ozz: The album that kickstarted my thirst for metal/ hard rock after hearing Crazy Train on the radio.

Metallica- Metallica: Even though I don't like it that much now, it was the first Metallica album I ever bought, back when I was young, naive, and thought that these guys were the final say in metal.

Metallica- Ride The Lightning: + Jet Force Gemini = HolycuntingfuckshitwhatinLucifersfeceswasthat?!

Black Sabbath- Sabotoge: Why not?


I'll come up with more when I feel like it.

[ADD]

Originally Posted by zgodt

When I first considered the thread, I imagined it wouldn't be much different from a "favorite albums" list. But when I started thinking it through, I came up with some surprisingly different things. In approximate chronological order of intersection with my life:

Yeah I really don't want it to be like that at all, really more of a way to see how people's tastes in music are reflected through the albums they hold most dear, and hopefully this can lead to some conversation about their importance and influence in each person's life more specifically.

[overkiller]

Originally Posted by neilpeartjr.

Metallica- Ride The Lightning: + Jet Force Jemini = HolycuntingfuckshitwhatinthestenchofLucifersfecesw asthat?!

Jet Force Gemini? Like, the N64 game? Or am I just totally confused and nerded out.

[JRA]

Originally Posted by overkiller

Jet Force Gemini? Like, the N64 game? Or am I just totally confused and nerded out.

You're goddamn right the N64 game, and yes I miss spelled Gemini. See what happens when you sonsabitches keep me up?

[ADD]

Originally Posted by zgodt

Here's the long version of my list, with commentary.


The Beatles - Hey Jude
It's hard to single one thing out of all my parents' old records that mattered to me as a kid -- stuff like The Beach Boys' "I Get Around" and Elvis's "Hound Dog" on 45, Brownsville Station's "Smokin' in the Boys' Room" on some compilation record, not to mention John Denver. But I distinctly remember listening to "Can't Buy Me Love" one day as a kid and having this thing click in my head, and I understood how much I loved the effect of a melody line being repeated over chord changes, although obviously I never could have articulated it that way. I also loved that song because it was fast. And perhaps because I could relate to the message; maybe that was an early factor in my anti-materialist streak.

Iron Maiden - The Number of the Beast
One morning I was taping Phil Collins and Michael Jackson off Casey Kasem's top 40 countdown. That afternoon a family friend played me "The Prisoner." And in a way I count that moment as the beginning of everything else that has happened in my life. Falling in love with that song instantly turned me into a kind of an outcast -- I was choosing against the norm, choosing to prefer the abnormal. This opened the way for me gravitating toward the people I came to know, getting into every subsequent kind of music I've gotten into, making certain choices and non-choices about what to study and what kind of work to do, and I can even trace the chain of events to meeting my wife, even though it had nothing to do with music, and she can't stand anything about Iron Maiden, and when I met her she even told me that she hated guitar.

Soundtrack for the film Terminal City Ricochet on Alternative Tentacles
My best friend from high school (and to this day) played me lots of punk stuff that I didn't really get or like (and meanwhile I was plying him with stuff like Testament and Prong that he didn't really get or like). Only when I heard NoMeansNo's couple of songs on this soundtrack (including their original collaboration with Jello Biafra, "Falling Space Junk (Hold the Anchovies)") did it really start to sink in. Here was a punk band that had the musical imagination and badass riffs that I prized and sought so much in metal. It opened the door for me to come around to appreciating a whole variety of great punk bands, from Soul Asylum to the Ramones, Dead Kennedys to Husker Du, Channel 3 to Fear.... And meanwhile NoMeansNo has become my favorite band of all time.

Public Enemy - Fear of a Black Planet
Another thing my friend Kevin played me. It didn't really sink in at first, either, but it opened me up so that when my housemates in college started playing shit like Das EFX and Da Lenchmob, not to mention more Public Enemy, I was ready to hear it and appreciate it. And this receptivity to hip hop has come back around years later to have a huge (albeit indirect and probably invisible to the outside observer) influence on my current activities as a teacher and performer.

The Grunge Years (an anthology from SubPop records)
Again, I'd been hearing Nirvana and Mudhoney for a while and sort of getting it, but this album really cemented that whole scene for me. And bands of the so-called "Seattle sound" formed pretty much the core of my listening habits for a while there. Meanwhile this album was my first exposure to some bands that because quite important to me (at least temporarily), and who I in fact got to interview for the college newspaper: L7, The Walkabouts, and especially Afghan Whigs.

Tom Waits - Bone Machine
Hearing Tom Waits just changes everything. Period. I don't even know what to tell you. Except that the night I heard "Goin' Out West" from this album is also the night I heard "The Piano Has Been Drinking" from an album he'd made 15 years earlier, in an entirely different vein, and they both fucked my head up about equally.

Iron Maiden - No Prayer for the Dying
This album almost but not quite single-handedly killed metal for me for, oh, about 12 years.

The Chess Box - 4-disc box set of blues musicians on Chess records
Taught me a lot about blues, and exposed me to some artists I've come to love without reservation, especially Howlin' Wolf and Koko Taylor. And probably opened the door for me to appreciate some far older blues artists whom I've also come to love without reservation: particularly Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson. Also some particular lyrical characteristics -- most prominent in the songs of Willie Dixon -- gave me new ways to think about the world, and to construct poems, which as you may know is sort of a thing I do.

Uncle Tupelo - March 16-20, 1992
The genius of this album is it's blending of new songs written by Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy with covers of old Americana songs. The music is often sublime, but the project transcends music to become a work of historical synthesis about working class life. To get what I mean: track number 2 is called "Coal Miners" and it's a cover of an old rabble rousing agitprop song about how shittily the mining company treats the miner, and how the workers need to organize and "send this capitalist system to the darkest pits of hell." Track number 5 is a Farrar original called "Shaky Ground" that laments the wasted life of a miner with no real options; the chorus goes "we follow each other around on shaky ground". This kind of connection-making between present and past makes for many amazing moments of clarity about how people are now and were then and have always been.

Ani Difranco - mix tape my friend Margaret made for me, which drew heavily from Not a Pretty Girl and Out of Range
This tape made Ani Difranco both my guitar hero and my songwriting hero.

The Story of Great Music from Time Life Records, 5 box sets from a series of ?, each box containing four vinyl records and a book outlining background/program notes.
Hell yeah. I'd always been curious about classical music, but never really knew much about it, and didn't really know how to find out. Then one year we went to a big neighborhood garage sale in Ypsilanti, MI, because it was sort of the thing to do in town, and the first house we hit had this box of vinyl records for sale including 7 or 8 volumes of this Time Life Story of Great Music set. They were $1 each. So I bought 5 of them. Unfortunately, another shopper found the box around the same time I did and snatched the rest before I could come back with more money for the ones I missed. This was one of the best purchases I ever made. For the next few weeks, I would spend an hour or so in my basement having a drink and listening to the next installment of the history of classical music, and reading through the enclosed guidebooks to put it in context. I learned so much, and fell in love with some pieces and some composers that have become huge in the soundtrack of my life.

Braid - Movie Music, Vol. 1
A small but important discovery -- after a period of despairing about the state of music, and realizing I hadn't bought anything by a good new band in years, I found this on amazon by clicking through a chain of "customers who bought that also bought this" lists, and then listening to some crummy 30-second samples. I also bought something by Samiam the same way, which turned out to be mediocre as hell. But this album was great, and restored my faith that somewhere out there unbeknownst to me there had still been great bands making great music, and I just had to find them.

Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968, 4-disc box set
My friend Jim turned me onto this priceless discovery. A 4-disc set of forgotten garage bands from the late 60s -- much of it crappy and dull, but much of it sharp and fresh and literally amazing. I discovered bands like The Sonics and The Music Machine and The Monks from whom I've since sought out complete discographies -- not to mention mind-boggling songs like "Spazz" by the Elastik Band who seem to have never released anything else but simply vanished. Here was great punk, years before punk was supposed to exist.

Dismemberment Plan - Change
This is on the list mostly for aesthetic reasons. It's simply a very unusual album with very unusual approaches to making songs - in terms of theme, point-of-view, imagery - that has had the quality of expanding my mind (not to mention breaking my heart).

Charles Mingus - Mingus Ah-Um
One of the best albums of all time, and the first jazz album that ever sunk in enough for me to be able to say something like that about it.

Iron Maiden - Brave New World
Picked this up on a whim after seeing it for $5 in the used bin. It's not on the list for being a great album, but for being decent enough that I started to wander back into Maiden and then into metal. Among other things, it led directly to my becoming part of the IMBB community, which among other things has led me here...

Opeth - Lamentations DVD
Maybe this is too recent to merit the list, but it feels important because it made me see more possibilities for the development of metal than I had foreseen. And the dichotomy between the clean set and the heavy set helped clarify for me the extent to which death metal vocals could be a valid aesthetic choice, rather than a product of limited talent and/or a trite and cartoonish attempt to be "scary." Meanwhile, the particular kinds of dissonance and disharmony that Opeth uses are something I'd been seeking for a long time in rock music.

The Coup - Steal This Album

Again, probably too recent to merit the list, but I just got this in November or so and it's one of the best albums I've ever heard. And like the Dismemberment Plan album, it's approach is so fresh and unexpected that it opens up many new possibilities for how one can see and represent the world.


Peace, ya'll.[/quote]

THIS is what I'm talkin' about

I'll probably pick like 10 from my list and do the same thing. I encourage more people to do likewise

[SomewhereInTime72]

Argh. Sort of a list. I'll elaborate on some later. Also, I'll order it later.

System of A Down - System Of A Down
Korn - Korn
Metallica - Master Of Puppets
Disturbed - The Sickness
Dir en grey - Gauze
Bruce Dickinson - The Chemical Wedding
Tool - Aenema
Metallica - ...And Justice For All
Iron Maiden - Number Of The Beast
Judas Priest - British Steel
Queensryche - Operation: Mindcrime
Ozzy Osbourne - Blizzard Of Ozz
Helloween - Keeper Of The Seven Keys Pts1 + 2
Amorphis - The Karelian Isthmus
Megadeth - Rust In Peace
In Flames - Clayman
Judas Priest - Sad Wings Of Destiny
Foreigner - Foreigner
King Crimson - In The Court Of The Crimson King
Children Of Bodom - Hatebreeder
King Crimson - Discipline

Wow I should have been harsher... but there were a lot of albums I didn't wanna leave out.