If I never write about music again—that thing which I have never produced nor felt drawn to singing or playing—I must at least document music’s influence on my life, for it has been great. I’m going to do that with 10 albums.
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I cannot deny that I judge people and places—and commercials, and cars—based on what music is playing. I, with no musical talent, little knowledge of music theory or history, and little sense of knowing where a certain popular sample comes from, judge based on music.
Simultaneously, though, I appreciate music. Not all the time, of course. Not all music.
With these two scales—judgment and appreciation—I measure music. One scale uses a “good vs. bad” meter and the other uses a “enjoyable vs. irritating” one. With these two scales, I’ve found the following: I find most music is good, I find less than most music is really enjoyable, and I find more than a little music is unexciting. I love listening to a small slice of music from a variety of genres, and though I admit there’s much good music out there, I find some of it too commercial or uninspiring.
To some extent, our judgment being affected by music is something we cannot avoid. “Music sets the tone” is as redundant as it is truthful, because people’s personalities are colored by their music, places enlivened by it.
So it’s not necessarily fair to judge someone or something based on music, but it’s not necessarily a bad or uncommon thing.
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I take music very seriously for three primary reasons.
First, when certain experiences of my life are soundtracked, I recall those memories by listening to that music again in the future. For example, I remember living in Costa Rica pre-COVID, listening to “Friday Morning” by Khruangbin—a delicious and delicate jam that caps a brilliant album by just floating away—every Saturday morning, smoking weed and then walking to my Spanish class with Ana, my amazing Argentinian teacher. That one song—even just at its mention, nevermind if it’s playing—will forever link to a memory that unfolds into warm nostalgia. And there are many, many songs connected in my mind in such a way. I’m so grateful for it.
Second, music motivates me to accomplish, to perform, to practice. Music is a helpful aide for exercise, sex, cooking, writing, and playing sports. Sometimes the right song can set you on your way, clear the path, or set the stage.
Third, music prevents me from overthinking. Some music is meditative, forcing you to slow down and breathe deeper. It’s an outstretched hand during the marathon that doesn’t give you five and cheer you on but rather pulls you away from the race and gives you a moment to collect your thoughts.
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I can and love to dance. This is thanks to genetics, practice, and, of course, good music. Some music just begs for bodily involvement.
I don’t like karaoke though, I’m sorry. I appreciate it though, y’all can have fun without me.
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In recent years, besides Khruangbin (go Houston!) I’ve fallen in love with the music of JPEGMAFIA, Peggy Gou, Vampire Weekend, and Vegyn.
From my mom, I remember starting with a lot of Led Zeppelin, Michael Jackson, and Donna Summers. From my dad I got an early appreciation of rap (censored DMX is a fun childhood memory) and synth-pop music, especially New Order, and he got me started on Coldplay, which ended up being a musical obsession of my youth.
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I would define my “musical core” as the albums on this list and other music that has had the most influence on my life. My musical core spans broader than my time on earth. In other words, I don’t just listen to stuff that’s been created since I’ve been alive, and I think that’s probably true of most people. Everyone’s musical core is probably greater than they are. Mine stretches back to at least some Debussy in the 1800s and traditional Chinese zither music that must’ve been played even hundreds of years earlier. And it stretches forward toward amazing stuff being released every year.
Honorable mentions from my core, not already listed above: The Doors, Tame Impala, Sigur Rós, The Bloody Beetroots, Real Estate, Mac DeMarco, Hans Zimmer, Moby, and Daft Punk.
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In no particular order, these are my favorite albums—the ones that have impressed upon my life the most—of my almost 30 years alive on earth.
Feel free to judge me based on these albums, you probably can’t help it.
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I recognize that I don’t own the rights to any of this music nor its art, but I want to include album art because it’s important and I judge based on that too…
- In Colour, Jamie xx (2015, electronic)
Highlights: all of it
This album will easily be one of my favorites until the day I die. First of all, the rainbow and the white square. If the rainbow represents the vibrancy of the music as well as strong LGBTQ+ support, then the white square is me, joyously sampling this or that from the audio palette and feeling confident with where I fall on the spectrum.
Why do I think I love electronic music the most? I think it’s a combination of three things: it’s great for moving—both traveling and dancing—it can sample from seemingly every other genre, and it can create a heavy yet pondering space.
I love nearly all of Jamie xx’s work. The DJ/producer is part of the band The xx, whose two other members are very forwardly gay in their solo music careers. One reason why I love their music both together and solo is because I feel that I could be safely gay—if I were actually homosexual. Regardless, it’s like the music carves out a safe space for authenticity, and I could be whoever I want to when listening to it. I like a lot of music because it gives me that same feeling of freedom.
With this album in particular, I love when producers use talking/voice samples well (“Gosh”), I love steel drums (“Obvs”), and I love beats that seem fit for doing a lot of drugs and bobbing your body up and down while surrounded by strangers (“The Rest Is Noise”).
- Blonde, Frank Ocean (2016, pop)
Highlights: also all of it, but especially Nikes, Solo, Nights, and Siegfried
Speaking of LGBTQ+ support, we have the man who made the album that soundtracked some of the earliest and most enjoyable sexual experiences I had with my then-future wife. This was on repeat.
I love Frank Ocean’s voice, I must admit. Blonde is a melancholic, thoughtful, a little weird, a little playful depiction of modern life. It touches on materialism, lonerism, social media, drugs, sex, relationships, and summer. It fills me with warm visions of poolside conversations, sweaty dancing, and long drives.
This album brings me back to early summer at Stony Brook University. I used to walk the quiet campus alone at night with only this album to accompany me. S-solo.
- Feels, Animal Collective (2005, indie rock)
Highlights: Did You See the Words, The Purple Bottle, Banshee Beat
This wins coolest album cover of the list, in my opinion. The art, like the music, can be described with the following words: childhood, dreamlike, cryptic, experimental, nonsensical, unusual. I have loved the music of Animal Collective for many years, and it consistently brings me new ways of dreaming and new feelings of nostalgia. Their stuff simply inspires my imagination.
The art and music of Animal Collective has always been a mosaic, a mixture, a… collective, truly. I listen to songs from at least 13 of their albums that span at least 20 years and that go in so many different musical directions. And they have fun song titles such as “Queen in My Pictures,” “Man of Oil,” “What Would I Want? Sky,” and “Applesauce.”
- Familiars, The Antlers (2014, alternative)
Highlights: Palace, Hotel, Parade
This man Peter Silberman has, along with a future voice on this list, one of my favorite voices in music (yes, more than sexy Frank). Silberman once suffered through a terrible bout of tinnitus, which is a big fear of mine. When COVID took away my hearing in one ear for a couple of weeks, I feared music would never be the same. So when I hear this dude sing now, I feel most grateful to be able to hear any music at all.
Like this album art, the music of The Antlers is compassionate. They depict intimacy between a hospice patient and their caretaker, they implore us not to commit violence, and on this album, they warn not to lose your identity in a world of others. Their music always brings me to thinking about my relationships with all the people in my life: where we’re at, how I can improve things, how I wish things were different…
- good kid, m.A.A.d city, Kendrick Lamar (2012, hip-hop/rap)
Highlights: The Art of Peer Pressure, Money Trees, Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst
I truly fell in love with rap music with this album, and I only slightly cringe when I remember blasting it in my dad’s SUV with my brother and friends on the way to our private Catholic high school. The irony of privilege is strong, but who else did Kendrick make this album for if not for the wealthy suburban kids who need to be learned about the violent struggles of humanity?
I remember standing under the lifeguard chair of my music-obsessed friend Phil when we worked at a pool in our high school years. He had said, with supreme confidence, that Kendrick was on his way to being one of the greats. Over 10 years later, it’s undoubtable. Kendrick’s cultural and musical impact has been studied and explained at length, so I don’t have to add much that people don’t already know.
I love storytelling, and this album showcases Kendrick’s gift in this department. It’s a simple, scary story: a kid trying to be good in a city suffering from violence, drug addiction, and crime. There are girls he wants to be good for, obviously, but it’s hard when peer pressure or money can lead you to do ethically questionable things. And, as is common, religion comes to be seen as a way out from the temptation of vice.
- A Rush of Blood to the Head, Coldplay (2002, alternative)
Highlights: Politik, God Put a Smile Upon Your Face, A Rush of Blood to the Head
I have not listened to Coldplay much since college—so over seven years—but they were a musical obsession for a solid period of my youth. It must have been a combination of a couple of things: Chris Martin’s voice, the emotion, the catchiness, the piano, the music videos, the acoustic guitar. I went to their shows, I got their CDs, I bought their shirts…
From 2000-2008, Coldplay made four albums that I will always love dearly, and this is at the top of the list. On high-energy songs like Politik, Chris Martin would bang on the piano with his foot during sweaty live concerts, and so when our dog used to make that kicking motion when you tickled that spot, we called it “the Coldplay.”
- Selected Ambient Works, Vol. II, Aphex Twin (1994, ambient/electronic)
Highlights: #3, Blue Calx, #20
I love a lot of ambient music because this genre more than others teaches us that a collection of sounds can completely set the mood of a place, a moment, or a setting. Sometimes, you don’t need words to tell a story.
#3 is the sound of floating, but taking a long, descending float. You peek through the clouds and see the green of our beautiful earth spinning.
Blue Calx is the sound of drowning, but going down into an underwater city. Or running a timed course underwater.
#20 is the sound of a colorful meadow on a hillside in your dreams. It’s bright, quiet, and you’re laying down looking directly into the eyes of someone you love.
For over 30 years, Aphex Twin has produced many ambient as well as in-your-face electronic gems. His music can get very intense, fit for driving fast, and it can get very introspective, fit for stillness and meditation.
A gentle piano track of his called “Aisatsana [102]” has been my alarm ringtone for many years. Even though it’s not on this album, check it out and see if it can’t wake you up more gently.
- Bleach, Nirvana (1989, grunge/punk rock)
Highlights: School, Negative Creep, Mr. Mustache
I like for music to gently caress me and I like for music to punch me in the face too. Slipknot, Metallica, System of a Down, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, and Nirvana.
It gives angry depressive themes, and I have tended to get angry-depressed. It’s like a more fiery form of frustration that comes from witnessing the atrocities and inefficiencies of human existence. About to explode, because the world is so unfair.
“Won’t you believe it, it’s just my luck. No recess”, complains Kurt on “School”. “I’m a negative creep and I’m stoned”, he laments on “Negative Creep”. “Yes, I eat cow, I am not proud”, he admits on “Mr. Mustache”. Sometimes you just feel like screaming, and that’s okay.
- Depression Cherry, Beach House (2015, dream pop)
Highlights: Levitation, Beyond Love, PPP
Victoria Legrand has my favorite voice in music. Beach House soundtracked my wedding, and I want them to soundtrack my funeral as well. If I could have chosen a song to be born to, it too would have come from their catalog.
This album is dream pop melancholy at its finest. Depression Cherry is like the color of my sadness when I contemplate the world, its people, and all their flaws. It’s not a blue sadness because there is warmth in there. With Beach House, I learn to accept and appreciate imperfection and gradual change.
“Levitation” is a slow rise from young to old, small to big, child to adult. “Beyond Love” asks us to imagine what love involves besides the common things we see with our eyes: love can be aggressive, nightmarish even, but we can’t live without it. And on “PPP”, one of my favorite Beach House tracks, Legrand says that like tracing figure eights on ice, love asks us to “place all you’re given in infinite trust”.
- Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, M83 (2011, electronic)
Highlights: Raconte-Moi Une Histoire, My Tears Are Becoming a Sea, Outro
I’ve always loved to ponder the size and grandeur of outer space. The universe has scales beyond our intuition, spaces that make you feel insignificant. This album, in a good way, makes me feel small, like a flea looking up into an unending abyss. M83 is named after Messier 83, a bright spiral galaxy that lies 15 million light-years away.
This album invites you to take part in the dreams of children, where an epic imagination is fitting and not seen as naive. Some tracks, like “My Tears Are Becoming a Sea”, have just a couple of lines: “I’m slowly drifting to you. The stars and the planets are calling me. A billion years away from you. I’m on my way. I’m on…” Grandiose space imagery mixed with the anticipation only a child can convey when declaring “I’m on my way!”
Reality is stranger than fiction, and it’s also more epic. Beyond just this album, M83 has a deep catalog of electronic ambient music that reflects these truths.
- Extra: Twin Peaks (Soundtrack From), Angelo Badalamenti (1990, soundtrack)
Highlights: Audrey’s Dance, The Bookhouse Boys, Dance of the Dream Man
Just kidding, the list must be 11 because this must be on the list. Thank you Michael for my first vinyl!
Through Angelo Badalamenti I fell in love with Twin Peaks, and through Twin Peaks I fell in love with Angelo Badalamenti. This album is a perfect example of music matched with environment. Twin Peaks has mysterious violence, thick, dark forests, the friendly skepticism of small-town America, black coffee and pie at the diner, owls, secret societies, and, of course, dreams. It’s probably my favorite TV show of all time.
This album soundtracked my wedding cocktail hour because it conveys comfort, dreaminess, intimacy and intrigue, all of which are fitting when surrounded by loved ones.
Ma(’)s Espacio 