Hopping on the My9Albums trend
Usually my commute to YMAAA HQ involves walking from the living room to my office in our little house. Recording my conversation with author and podcaster Keith Jopling involved a significantly longer trip. Yesterday, I made the two-hour drive to Boston to chat with Keith at the Berklee College of Music, where he was giving a talk on his book Body of Work.
During our conversation, he made reference to the My9Albums trend on social media. I had noticed that some people I follow had posted a graphic featuring nine albums that were important to them, but I hadn't realized it was a full-blown trend. At his presentation to the Berklee students, Keith revealed his full list of nine albums. When I saw that his group included two albums that would almost certainly make my list, I knew that I would have to make my own post once I got home.
So a short while ago, I did just that. I published this "poster" on the @youmealbum Instagram account.
The task that the My9Albums site gives us is to come up with a list of the nine albums "that made us." That's a pretty broad directive, but I didn't think too much about what it means for an album to "make us." I just picked the nine albums that were the most essential to the growth of my music fandom.
I started with Supertramp's Crime of the Century, because buying that album represented my first foray into exploring discographies. I was obsessed with Breakfast in America when it came out—so much so that I needed to explore more Supertramp. I became equally obsessed with Crime of the Century, and I went on to buy Even in the Quietest Moments..., and when they were released, I bought ...Famous Last Words... and Brother Where You Bound.
Duke is the most obvious album to include on this list. I bought it soon after it came out and listened to it every day for about a year. I have never gotten as immersed in an album as I did with Duke, and it led to me eventually buy every Genesis album through We Can't Dance. (I didn't explore Calling All Stations until nearly 20 years after its 1997 release and did so via streaming.)
Zenyatta Mondatta isn't my favorite Police album; that would be Regatta de Blanc. But my first concert was seeing The Police on the Zenyatta Mondatta tour at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, NJ. Through the miracle of YouTube, I have been able to relive this formative moment.
My musical horizons didn't expand much beyond progressive rock and the mainstream rock bands I heard on the radio throughout high school and college. My boss at my first post-college job had much wider-ranging musical tastes. While I knew and liked the R.E.M. songs I'd heard on the radio, it had never occurred to me to buy an R.E.M. album...that is, until Jan played Lifes Rich Pageant for me. From the opening riff of "Begin the Begin" I was hooked. I went on to have a Genesis-level of obsession with R.E.M. for the next 25 years.
My R.E.M. devotion was strong during the '90s, and I could have easily included Out of Time, Automatic for the People or New Adventures in Hi-Fi on this list. But if I wasn't listening to R.E.M. (or U2), I was probably listening to Toad the Wet Sprocket, and specifically Dulcinea. That album, probably more than any other, takes me right back to the '90s.
As I have often mentioned on the podcast, I largely snoozed through the music of the 2000s and 2010s. I paid virtually no attention to rock, and if I listened to radio, it was the Miami hip hop station Power 96. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that when I started to get interested in rock again, it was through my explorations of a '90s band. During the early months of COVID, I had lots of time on my hands, and I spent much of it exploring the Sleater-Kinney discography. My ongoing interest in R.E.M. led me to Filthy Friends, the supergroup that included Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey, as well as Corin Tucker. In wanting to learn more about Tucker's better-known band, I started with The Hot Rock, and it's still my favorite S-K album.
The YouTube algorithm learned pretty quickly that I wanted to listen to all things S-K-related, so it fed me an interview that Tucker did for Laura Kidd's podcast Attention Engineer. Prior to this, I had not heard of Attention Engineer or either of Laura's musical projects, Penfriend and She Makes War. I'm pretty sure that She Makes War's Direction of Travel was the first of Laura's albums I had listened to in full. and the five-year anniversary listening party that she had for the record was definitely the first listening party I had ever attended. I joined Laura's Patreon fan group, The Correspondent's Club, which has added a whole new social element to my music fandom.
It didn't take long for my S-K fandom to spill over into drummer Janet Weiss' other band, Quasi. Soon enough, I was as engaged with the Quasi discography as I was with S-K's. The Sword of God was one of those albums that I happened to discover at just the right time to fully absorbs its messages. The track "Seal the Deal" is the centerpiece of the album for me, and it was critical in helping me process the identity crisis that losing most of my work during COVID triggered. Rather than go through that in detail here, I'll refer to you a piece I wrote for Bandcamp Daily about it.
Just as YouTube's algorithm led me to Laura Kidd, it also introduced me to Deep Sea Diver. Apparently knowing that I wanted to hear even more indie rock from the Pacific Northwest, it gave me Deep Sea Diver's COVID-era Tiny Desk performance. I still watch it pretty regularly. The video was my gateway to Impossible Weight and ultimately led to Deep Sea Diver's other albums. I actually think their latest, Billboard Heart, is easily their best album, but my DSD fandom began with Impossible Weight, and it arguably contains their three best songs ("Shattering the Hourglass," "Lights Out," and "Wishing"). Even more than Sleater-Kinney, Deep Sea Diver has jump-started my love of listening to music and exploring new-to-me bands.
One final note...I was thrilled to get 29 album recommendations to publish in the last YMAAA newsletter, and if I hadn't messed up, it could have been 3o. After I had published it, I got a message from Louise Post, who wanted to contribute to the list. When I reached out to YMAAA guests for recommendations, I gave a deadline for submissions, but for some reason, I forgot to do that with Louise. Her recommendation was for Reaver by the Brontosaur, which she calls "the best record you never knew came out in 2022." I discovered in researching the Brontosaur that the band is fronted by Louise's husband Tony Parks.
If you haven't checked out the original Recommendation Roundup, I hope you'll give it a read. I would like to do something more with the list, either on an upcoming episode or in this newsletter. I hope to listen to all 30 albums in full, but whether it's all of them or a portion, I want to report back on my listening experiences. If you have suggestions, as always, please leave 'em in the comments!