In the end, I decided it would make me happier to keep a handful of cds rather than getting rid of absolutely all of them (Cf), and when I realised that the number that gave me a real twinge to think about was in the vicinity of 50, I couldn't resist the round figure.
They're arranged chronologically by when they came into my life - as nearly as I can remember or reconstruct - and that winds up telling a pretty accurate story of how my tastes have developed over time.
The 50 tilt heavily towards my formative music-listening years, for any number of predictable (and good) reasons; it's pretty close to being my actual 50 favourite albums/cds, but there are a few from the early years whose 'personal historical' significance is what has made them keepers now.
School years
Music wasn't an insignificant part of my life before then, but this story really begins in about 1997 - year 10 - which I started aged 14, and continues into '98.
I can't remember which came first, the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack or Garbage, but I do remember a period of feeling like everything on commercial radio seemed just slightly too fast, off-tempo, and then one day hearing "#1 Crush", probably on Fox FM, maybe triple j, and it being so exactly right; that was one beginning.
Probably I'd heard "Only Happy When It Rains" and "Stupid Girl", and I'd got the idea that the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack was meant to be good, so out came my pocket money for both, at the local Target I think; Garbage's whole aesthetic was spot-on for me just then (and, of course, Garbage's), while R+J turned out to be a pocketful of all kinds of interesting alternative acts and genres, some of which would loom large for me down the track.
I got to Pearl Jam and Nirvana quickly after that, chasing music that reflected how I saw myself, at a time when grunge still hung heavily over the landscape. Pearl Jam were always closer to my heart, starting from those huge Ten anthems ("Alive" especially had already been just hazily present enough in background radio that when I actually focused on the song and realised how great it was, it already felt like a classic that had always been there), but Nevermind looms so large, and already did then, in that period of personal taste-formation, that it seems right to hang on to it too.
I'm hazy on the chronology, but several other really big ones had come into my life by the end of '98:
Year 12, 1999, was also when I really started discovering how much 'old' music had to offer. I began dipping into that great trio of the Cure, the Smiths and Joy Division (though it was during the first bit of uni that I went deep into them). For the first two, it was those best-ofs that were my introduction, and which I listened to over and over before discovering the riches of their back catalogues (but, also, they were both such great singles bands!), while with Joy Division, it was the sonorous Closer that first really sunk in.
Uni
Uni, the era of all kinds of discoveries, not least secondhand cd stores and more disposable income to spend on music! Again, the exact chronology escapes me a bit but I reckon first year, 2000, took in most if not all of these:
(Somewhere in there I got to The Velvet Underground & Nico, but I can't remember when, which seems of a piece with the outsized effect it seemed to exert in general, all the way from 1967...)
Blacklisted was released in 2002 and that's probably when I got it. I could tell at the time it was something out of the ordinary; I wouldn't know how much it would ripple through my own musical history until much later. And it was also in 2002 that I became wrapped up in Belle and Sebastian; I'd heard Fold Your Hands... but it was "Lazy Line Painter Jane" on the radio that made me fall in love, and then the pinpoint joys of Tigermilk, Sinister and Arab Strap from there.
And oh Aimee Mann. Who knows if I've remembered this right, but my recollection, anyway, is seeing the cd in the library, never having heard of the artist, liking the cover, and the rest is history; that was summer 2002/03. I'm not sure I have a single favourite album these days, but last time I did, Bachelor No 2 was it.
2003, fourth year at uni, and things were finding a different shape by then. That was the year Hail to the Thief came out, and was that the one for which we queued up at HMV Bourke Street at midnight? I was still deep in the Cocteau Twins and Belle and Sebastian, and of the many others who seemed to radiate out around them, Belly (all three of Star, King and Sweet Ride, really) and the Sundays (Reading, Writing and Arithmetic) hit me the hardest and have most lingered. And when I swooned for Summerteeth at the end of that year and into the next, it was seemingly out of nowhere, as fondly as I'd remembered "Can't Stand It".
The other huge album that came into my life somewhere around here, but it might have been much earlier, I don't know, was Moon Pix - another that seems completely out of time. Maybe it was 2004, because I'm sure I was still as immersed in musical discovery as at any time before, yet the only other that seems to have remained from then - and it's a big one - is Soul Journey, yet another into which I fell one summer (2004/05).
Then that extended coda, honours in 2005, and the memories are sharper here. Funeral at the start of the year, whose greatness I didn't realise at the time but which has stayed with me and sunk in deep. Alt-country, folk and americana opening up before me, Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams (especially Car Wheels) and Laura Cantrell a bit later (Humming By The Flowered Vine has lost none of its charm), and so many more. The Forgotten Arm (*) over the year's second half, which totally soaked me from the start.
And then, post-uni but pre-workforce, very early 2006, Neko Case's triumphant Fox Confessor. It's chance that it wound up in that position, but I can't think of many albums that could have better served - as it did in retrospect - as both last hurrah and a kind of bridge to what came next.
And beyond
Unsurprisingly, the pace slowed after that, but there have been a few that feel like stayers:
The most totemic acts that didn't get a guernsey: Mazzy Star, Manic Street Preachers, Neil Young, Saint Etienne, Jolie Holland. Maybe Powderfinger, Goldfrapp, Throwing Muses, Galaxie 500. Or any Sofia Coppola soundtrack!
And the other recentish albums that I came closest to hanging on to: Raising Sand, xx, both Bloom and Teen Dream, Lydia Loveless's Somewhere Else. I wonder about The Weight of These Wings too, if it might turn out in retrospect to encapsulate a moment in time.
They're arranged chronologically by when they came into my life - as nearly as I can remember or reconstruct - and that winds up telling a pretty accurate story of how my tastes have developed over time.
The 50 tilt heavily towards my formative music-listening years, for any number of predictable (and good) reasons; it's pretty close to being my actual 50 favourite albums/cds, but there are a few from the early years whose 'personal historical' significance is what has made them keepers now.
School years
Music wasn't an insignificant part of my life before then, but this story really begins in about 1997 - year 10 - which I started aged 14, and continues into '98.
I can't remember which came first, the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack or Garbage, but I do remember a period of feeling like everything on commercial radio seemed just slightly too fast, off-tempo, and then one day hearing "#1 Crush", probably on Fox FM, maybe triple j, and it being so exactly right; that was one beginning.
Probably I'd heard "Only Happy When It Rains" and "Stupid Girl", and I'd got the idea that the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack was meant to be good, so out came my pocket money for both, at the local Target I think; Garbage's whole aesthetic was spot-on for me just then (and, of course, Garbage's), while R+J turned out to be a pocketful of all kinds of interesting alternative acts and genres, some of which would loom large for me down the track.
I got to Pearl Jam and Nirvana quickly after that, chasing music that reflected how I saw myself, at a time when grunge still hung heavily over the landscape. Pearl Jam were always closer to my heart, starting from those huge Ten anthems ("Alive" especially had already been just hazily present enough in background radio that when I actually focused on the song and realised how great it was, it already felt like a classic that had always been there), but Nevermind looms so large, and already did then, in that period of personal taste-formation, that it seems right to hang on to it too.
I'm hazy on the chronology, but several other really big ones had come into my life by the end of '98:
- Automatic for the People, which I remember walking around listening to at school during lunchtime, and also during many long night-time walks
- Throwing Copper, whose anthemic and slightly mystical rock drama just hit the spot
- from the choirgirl hotel, which I found my way to via the glorious "Spark", which hit me like liquid magic, and which precipitated what, in retrospect, seems both a very unlikely and very fortuitous love affair with Tori Amos's music
- Post, which still sounds stunningly modern whenever I listen to it, and of course I'm still not really over "Hyper-ballad", which is where it all started
- U2's 1980-1990 best of, a Christmas present from my parents, which I think feels like it belongs in this company through equal parts sheer quality of the songs, expansiveness, and sense of having always been there and being likely to always be
- and, of course, OK Computer, the biggest landmark of them all when it comes to personal worldview-forming and distilling, zeitgeist-capturing and everything else.
Year 12, 1999, was also when I really started discovering how much 'old' music had to offer. I began dipping into that great trio of the Cure, the Smiths and Joy Division (though it was during the first bit of uni that I went deep into them). For the first two, it was those best-ofs that were my introduction, and which I listened to over and over before discovering the riches of their back catalogues (but, also, they were both such great singles bands!), while with Joy Division, it was the sonorous Closer that first really sunk in.
Uni
Uni, the era of all kinds of discoveries, not least secondhand cd stores and more disposable income to spend on music! Again, the exact chronology escapes me a bit but I reckon first year, 2000, took in most if not all of these:
- Kid A, which was definitely 2000, and which I remember riding back up to uni along Elizabeth Street with on the day it was released, on a tram on which every second passenger seemed to be doing the same thing, then everyone's minds blowing more or less in unison from the music itself, which we'd been warned by the reviews was different and it sure was
- to venus and back, another jewel-like offering from Tori, the live disc as good as the studio one
- Homogenic, Bjork's best album in a back catalogue where that really means something
- Low, which I think I listened to early courtesy of one of the uni libraries (ERC or Rowden White), though I only properly discovered its greatness on a slow burn over many years, and maybe the ultimate 'pop music as art' record for me
- New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which has somehow always been one of several sentimental favourites across R.E.M.'s many genuinely great albums, maybe because it's just the right era of fm radio vibes for me
- Tabula Rasa, the most enduring of Kim's many dispatches from beyond the world of popular music, and wired straight to my spine right from the beginning
Amnesiac came out in 2001, still during the period of uncritical Radiohead adoration and intense listening to every second of every song, and that was also the year when I tumbled into the orbits of My Bloody Valentine (and especially Loveless, what an edifice) and, even more headlong, the Cocteau Twins and 4AD in general. MBV I can probably thank pitchfork for, but, aptly enough for such a mysterious band, I haven't the faintest idea how the Cocteaus came on to my radar. There was that marvellous best-of Stars and Topsoil, then the dive into their many records, many of which still stand out and glimmer, Treasure and Blue Bell Knoll the brightest. Of all my favourites over the years, theirs remains the music most beyond words.
(Somewhere in there I got to The Velvet Underground & Nico, but I can't remember when, which seems of a piece with the outsized effect it seemed to exert in general, all the way from 1967...)
Blacklisted was released in 2002 and that's probably when I got it. I could tell at the time it was something out of the ordinary; I wouldn't know how much it would ripple through my own musical history until much later. And it was also in 2002 that I became wrapped up in Belle and Sebastian; I'd heard Fold Your Hands... but it was "Lazy Line Painter Jane" on the radio that made me fall in love, and then the pinpoint joys of Tigermilk, Sinister and Arab Strap from there.
And oh Aimee Mann. Who knows if I've remembered this right, but my recollection, anyway, is seeing the cd in the library, never having heard of the artist, liking the cover, and the rest is history; that was summer 2002/03. I'm not sure I have a single favourite album these days, but last time I did, Bachelor No 2 was it.
2003, fourth year at uni, and things were finding a different shape by then. That was the year Hail to the Thief came out, and was that the one for which we queued up at HMV Bourke Street at midnight? I was still deep in the Cocteau Twins and Belle and Sebastian, and of the many others who seemed to radiate out around them, Belly (all three of Star, King and Sweet Ride, really) and the Sundays (Reading, Writing and Arithmetic) hit me the hardest and have most lingered. And when I swooned for Summerteeth at the end of that year and into the next, it was seemingly out of nowhere, as fondly as I'd remembered "Can't Stand It".
The other huge album that came into my life somewhere around here, but it might have been much earlier, I don't know, was Moon Pix - another that seems completely out of time. Maybe it was 2004, because I'm sure I was still as immersed in musical discovery as at any time before, yet the only other that seems to have remained from then - and it's a big one - is Soul Journey, yet another into which I fell one summer (2004/05).
Then that extended coda, honours in 2005, and the memories are sharper here. Funeral at the start of the year, whose greatness I didn't realise at the time but which has stayed with me and sunk in deep. Alt-country, folk and americana opening up before me, Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams (especially Car Wheels) and Laura Cantrell a bit later (Humming By The Flowered Vine has lost none of its charm), and so many more. The Forgotten Arm (*) over the year's second half, which totally soaked me from the start.
And then, post-uni but pre-workforce, very early 2006, Neko Case's triumphant Fox Confessor. It's chance that it wound up in that position, but I can't think of many albums that could have better served - as it did in retrospect - as both last hurrah and a kind of bridge to what came next.
And beyond
Unsurprisingly, the pace slowed after that, but there have been a few that feel like stayers:
- In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, further into 2006, which I came to late and with wild surmise
- Boxer, in 2008, which had an immediate air of greatness that wasn't at all misleading
- a whole heap of Patty Griffin, starting in 2008 with Children Running Through and continuing to now, amongst which Impossible Dream (listened to in 2013, the year I was particularly flattened by Griffin's greatness) also stands out although at least a couple of others are nearly as transcendent
- and most recently, Sharon Van Etten's Are We There, as recently as 2014, but it hit me hard then and shows no signs of going away...
The most totemic acts that didn't get a guernsey: Mazzy Star, Manic Street Preachers, Neil Young, Saint Etienne, Jolie Holland. Maybe Powderfinger, Goldfrapp, Throwing Muses, Galaxie 500. Or any Sofia Coppola soundtrack!
And the other recentish albums that I came closest to hanging on to: Raising Sand, xx, both Bloom and Teen Dream, Lydia Loveless's Somewhere Else. I wonder about The Weight of These Wings too, if it might turn out in retrospect to encapsulate a moment in time.
