What record had the most influence on developing your musical tastes?

James Brown - Funky Drummer

That song made me a B-Boy and crate digger. The long version of this track still takes me away.

Eric B. & Rakim - Paid In Full

Hip Hop can make you dance and think. This album got me into Hip Hop. A bit of a standard.

Kyuss - Apothecaries' Weight

This song really got me into Metal and Hard Rock. How? A Metal head told me there was a bass solo in this song, good one indeed.

King Crimson - In The Court Of The Crimson King

This album changes everything. It redefines everything you think you know about music.

J.S. Bach - Orgelwerke Toccaten & Fugen by Ton Koopman

The beauty of layered complexity finds its peak here, simply epic.

David Bowie - Several compilations and albums

His music opened my mind for different music (Kate Bush, Lykke Li, Prince, Daft Punk etcetera...)

Beethoven - Symphony no. 5 by Klemperer

Recently I discovered the nine Symphonies. The 5th pulls you in and when it lets you go, you feel your heart beating...

Tool - Lateralus Fibonacci Order (see "the gift")

A slow burner at first but when you get into it, yeah it changes how you think about music, especially the title track.

 

The Beatles - Anthology 1, 2, 3

I wasn't into music much until I was 11 years old. The Beatles Anthology was premiering on TV and my dad was a huge Beatles fan as a kid, so he had me sit down and watch it with him. I was astonished by how good the music was. I hadn't heard much music that resonated with me before, and this was striking a real chord with me. My dad bought the Anthology albums and also the original studio albums on CD. I devoured them all. I listened to nothing but The Beatles and some of their solo records for about a year. I was obsessed. From there my dad turned me on to The Stones and The Who and a few other of the staple classic rock bands, Zeppelin and Hendrix and such. But for me The Beatles were king, until...

David Bowie - Best of Bowie 1969-1974 (and additionally Low, Heroes, Lodger, Scary Monsters)

I picked up this new at the time Bowie compilation because I recognized a few of the song titles ("Ziggy Stardust" seemed like a name I had seen somewhere, "Space Oddity" and "Changes" I had heard on the radio, and the comp also had his cover of "Let's Spend the Night Together" and the original version of "The Man Who Sold The World", which I knew from the Nirvana Unplugged album). I got home and put it on the little stereo I had in my room, sat down by my bed and began looking through the booklet. I was entranced. The booklet was full of images from Bowie's glam period, and he truly did feel alien and exotic. Being a teenager, I also responded to the ambiguous sexuality of his persona. The music was even better, full of drama, mystery, and really fantastic melodies/hooks/performances. My jaw dropped when "Life On Mars" started. I had never heard a song that achingly beautiful before. (Side note, years later I saw Bowie perform on a package tour with Moby, Busta Rhymes, and the Blue Man Group. When Bowie's set started, the sun was just setting, and Mike Garson came onto the stage and played the opening notes of "Life On Mars". Bowie walked out onto the stage wearing a long white scarf that trailed behind him, catching in the wind. He sang the song accompanied only by the piano, and other than some initial applause for his entrance, there was no other sound. I started crying out of happiness, flashing back to that night as a teenager hearing that song coming out of my stereo for the first time.)

I of course immediately sought out all of Bowie's albums. This was when the Ryko releases were the most recent, and they had a wealth of bonus tracks. I remember being really blown away by the fearless experimentation of Low, "Heroes", Lodger, and Scary Monsters. Those records opened me up to bands and artists that weren't just mainstream classic rock. To me Bowie is the lynchpin that my musical world revolves around. Going through his influences opened new musical vistas for me, allowing me to discover The Stooges, T. Rex, The Velvet Underground (and solo Reed, Cale, Nico), and Scott Walker, while learning about the artists he collaborated with or influenced turned me on to Siouxsie and the Banshees, Wire, NIN, Roxy Music, Brian Eno, Pulp, Blur, and so much more. His willingness to experiment made me excited to hear more experimental music, eventually leading me to The Residents, early Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Kraftwerk, Faust, Can, John Zorn, Yoko Ono, and among others...

Steve Reich - Music For 18 Musicians

I've written about this piece before. It's an hour long minimalist composition that to me is one of the essential recordings of the 20th century. It feels so organic, like it was birthed instead of written. It's not clinical or analytical like many minimalist compositions. It breathes and ebbs and flows. It's a masterpiece of musical expression. This piece got me into contemporary symphonic music, which I was able to then trace back through the history of symphonic music, from Stockhausen to Beethoven, Mozart to Bach, also leading me to opera. In a satisfying full circle, I turned my dad on to a lot of classical that he hadn't paid close attention to before, and he got hooked, stopped listening to anything but classical, and ended up buying hundreds of classical CDs from cheap lots on ebay. He even bought an ADC so he could rip classical vinyl to digital. I don't even bother with vinyl rips but he got into it for his own listening. Before he went headlong into classical though, he did express a love for jazz, leading me to do my own explorations into that genre and discovering...

Miles Davis - Sketches of Spain

Jazz is such a broad form of music that it took me a while to find something that really hooked me. To this day I don't really love big band jazz for example. But I heard Sketches of Spain and I knew I had found my entry point into jazz. There was a serene beauty to the music that drew me in and I was even more impressed when I heard Kind of Blue (of course). I'm still a huge Davis fan and have many of his records. I watched the Ken Burns jazz documentary, which isn't perfect but gave me a good overview of the different era and major artists in jazz.

 

Oh and the album that turned me on to hip hop was Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet, with a dose of help from Paul's Boutique.

 

bright eyes - fevers and mirrors

pretty sure it was recorded in a basement bathroom and is still one of the most raw and honest albums ive ever heard

 

Ween's Pure Guava and The Pod are my favorite albums, the pod album cover is Mean Ween using a Scotch guard powered bong put over Leonard Cohen's greatest hits album cover. The Orb: The Orb's Adventure Beyond the Ultraworld got me full into electronic music.

 

Think I'm a little bit of the opposite here - I don't have any particular albums that shaped my tastes but the song has to match my internal tastes. I don't know a better way to say it, but the track or album either has the "it factor" for me or it doesn't. "it factor" not being characterized by any one thing, genre, pattern, aspect of musical theory, commonly discussed subjective audiophile quality, or whatever else that I am aware of until now. Some artists will have this in abundance for me, where as others may literally have one half of a song in their entire discography that does it for me.

The closest thing I think I've had would be a few tracks that open me up to new types of music that I didn't listen to before and a lot of initial listening was somewhat compared to the figurative first track I liked in a genre. Goes away after I find a few songs I like though. After that, it would be tracks that I guess pushed the boundaries of a particular genre.

 

I have three all at different time periods of my life:

1. The Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream. I heard it on the radio on a family trip through Dallas. I was probably twelve and this was the first CD I ever bought and the reason I scrounged all summer to save up for a CD player. The only thing they played around here on the radio is country and some top 40 if you got lucky with reception….this has not changed much. Never cared for it so had little interest in music. My Dad did play a lot of Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, etc, which I did and do enjoy but when I was growing up I still saw that type of music as his music.

2. Albert King - Born Under a Bad Sign. I was probably about thirty or so when I got into vinyl. Was scrounging through an unorganized record store and I thought the cover art looked so cool that, if nothing else I could hang it on the wall as art. Would have been a giant waste. There is just something about the blues. Raw, proto rock and roll. I still don’t navigate this space all that well because it is so different from the grunge and alt rock I grew up on but very cool and very different than anything I collected before.

3. Joy Division - Substance. Outside of bands like Metallica and Guns n Roses, which stayed popular when grunge took over, I completely dismissed most of the music from late 70’s and the 80’s. Stupid. I have been on a punk, post punk and new wave kick for a while now. I bet most of the albums that I have picked up over the last five years are from this period.

 

A bit of a necro quote from 2017 but couldn’t agree more. In my teens and, embarrassingly, even part of my twenties I liked the music I listened to but was also probably trying to fit in a little too much with my peers. As an adult I care nothing at all what anyone else thinks and just enjoy what I enjoy.

 

Kai Winding - Mondo Cane#2 from November 1963 - wonderfully crafted album and he was a family friend. Also Switched-on-Bach - 1968 by Wendy Carlos, who many say is the smartest person on Earth. To think this album, with all its technical techniques and pure musicality to come out almost 60 years ago is just simply astounding.

 

Not a single record, but more genre exposure at specific times. The Beatles and K.C. and the Sunshine Band when I was in elementary school. Classic rock like Van Halen, Zappa, AC/DC, the 'Nuge, Led Zeppelin etc at military school in 6th grade (6th - 12th grade boarding school, pretty much everyone was older than me). Prog in high school (Yes, King Crimson, Rush etc - also when I started getting into hi-fi). New wave, punk, industrial, et.al. at the end of high school and in college (Bauhaus, Dead Kennedys, Coil, Depeche Mode, Sisters of Mercy, etc). I'm early Gen X.

 

Kind of similar to you. I had mostly classic rock records and then picked up Bauhaus' In the Flat Field when it came out. Boom. Everything thereafter I bought was punk and post-punk like Joy Division, GBH, Fear, Meatmen (We're the Meatmen...and You Suck!!).

(Aside, I remember picking up U2 "War" and Wall of Voodoo "Call of the West" at the mall when they came out and thinking U2 was sort of catchy but Wall of Voodoo was the shit and would have way more staying power.)

 

As a young boy in the eighties, I listened to my dad's record collection.
1. Dune by Klaus Schulze
2. WYWH - Pink Floyd
3. Santana - Abraxas

 

For me, I’d say it’s these five albums:

Dream Theater - Images and Words
Opeth - Blackwater Park
Porcupine Tree - In Absentia
Queenryche - Operation Mindcrime
Metallica - Black album