Here are some records that changed my life.
They aren’t necessarily my ‘top 10’ – nor my favourites of all time.
They are, however, long play albums that, at least for today (I’d likely have a completely different list another day) I recognise as having altered my consciousness or perspective in some way – musical, political, spiritual or otherwise.
They are are presented in no particular order:
– Fear of A Black Planet – Public Enemy – I’ve loved hip hop and rap for a long time, now – but it was 1989’s (‘the number, another summer, get down, slammin’ to the funky drummer’) bombastic invasion of Black Planet that solidified my love of conscious / political hip hop and, arguably more importantly, revolutionized young teenage suburban white me around sonics, rhythm, race, anger and injustice in a way that still shapes my politics today.
– War and The Joshua Tree (tie) – U2 – As unhip as they are, U2 continue to this day to be my greatest ‘guilty pleasure’. I first picked up War on vinyl as a 14-year old from the Cheapies Records near my dad’s office in Mississauga (I still have that copy) – and my life changed when I dropped the needle onto the opening track, Sunday, Bloody Sunday (and listened right through until ‘40′). The Joshua Tree is one of the greatest albums of all time – with hardly a weak moment – and I Still Haven’t Found was a lifeline for me as I wrestled through faith and doubt. I could add lots more LP’s to this list from this band; October is my personal ‘fan fave’ and Achtung Baby – ‘the sound of 4 men chopping down the Joshua Tree’, is brilliant too, too. U2 was the ultimate soundtrack to my awkward growing up and it’s phases of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction.
– Amazing Grace – Aretha Franklin – I’m a huge fan (and now vinyl collector) of African-American gospel music. Though white southern gospel genre was a staple in my house growing up (my dad was a concert promoter and friend of groups like the Blackwood Brothers, the Oak Ridge Boys, the Imperials, etc), I’ve been entranced with the traditional black gospel genre since I drove cross country and picked up old Golden Gate Quartet recordings on AM radio in the middle of nowhere, Indiana – and it’s folks the Blind Boys of Alabama (and Mississippi), Sallie Martin, Sr. Rosette Tharpe, Mahalia Jackson, The Staple Singers, Rev. James Cleveland and the like who have my heart (and my pocketbook) these days. This was one of the earlier records in this genre in my collection – and is such an amazing homecoming for Franklin. Every impassioned sweaty note from young Aretha is incredible – as is the band and choir – all of it. The title song, Amazing Grace, Precious Lord / You’ve Got A Friend and Just A Closer Walk in particular bring me that much closer to the great reconciliation of all things! I love that there’s also now a movie of this concert; complete with members of the Rolling Stones taking it all in, of course.
– Humans – Bruce Cockburn – I’ve been into Bruce since I signed out the Waiting For A Miracle compilation from the Burlington, ON library in middle school. Though he’s a generation older than me, Bruce’s interests and experiences through his life; Christian mysticism, political liberation movements, and honest and broken love – seem to parallel my own journey. Some days I prefer his earlier nature mystic LPs (Lord of the Starfields might be my alltime fave song – along with All The Diamonds) – but it’s this LP, an honest chronicle of his marriage breakdown with the backdrop of ‘things falling apart’ all around – that I still find to be his very best and most honest work. A runner up for me would be his dark and moody Charity of Night LP. Perhaps due to the track How I Spent My Fall Vacation, I put on Humans on the turntable every Autumn (along with Neil Young’s Harvest and U2’s October)
– What’s Goin’ On – Marvin Gaye – This 1971 Motown LP is a masterpiece of politics, soul, non-violence, lament, mysticism, (early!) ecological consciousness and (Christian) spirituality. I could just put this album on repeat and slip away for days into this tapestry of beauty and hope not marred by escapism.
– Miseducation of Lauren Hill – Lauren Hill – Another masterpiece – hardly a weak moment – confident, brash, strong, brilliantly rhymed, sung and produced – and infused with both her politics and (at the time, Methodist) spirituality. My ex and I named my son Zion because of For Zion. I’m too aware that there are far too many male artists on this list – but Lauren could take any of them on – just like Nina Simone defecating on a microphone. For many of my younger female friends (especially bipoc folks – I think that Sarah McLachlan or Alanis Morrisette or the Indigo Girls might old that honour for some others) this album was a coming-of-age soundtrack and a watershed.
– Disintegration – The Cure – I loved, and still love what I affectionately call ’80’s whiny white boy music’; The Smiths, Depeche Mode, Joy Division, early Tears For Fears, New Order and – yes, the Cure. I adore so much of The Cure’s music (especially up to this album) – but this one is a nearly perfect magnificent opus of self-absorbed melancholy that I still go back to time-and-time again when I’m feeling particularly lonely or sorry for myself. I covered Pictures of You in the high school band I was in.
– Meddle, The Wall and Dark Side of the Moon (3-way tie) – Pink Floyd – Floyd defined my high school years and my initial sonic rebellion. I love the first two psychedelic Floyd albums (Piper and Saucerful) a lot, but it’s the atmospherics of Meddle – especially the epic 23.5 minute Echoes that shook my world and inspired / transformed my sonic imagination (as well as Phantom of the Opera, but that’s another story). I still put Echoes on during long, dark, late night drives. The Wall is tied here because it was my first experience of Floyd and of concept albums (along with the movie – and speaks well to the rise of fascism today, even in its messiness) – and Dark Side because it’s, well, a mad masterpiece from beginning to end.
– A Love Supreme – John Coltrane – This is what’s been called Coltrane’s “definitive tone poem” and the liner notes give a good insight into where his head and heart were at as he made this music. I like a lot of Jazz; Coltrane’s Soul Trane or Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue could also be on my list. But it’s A Love Supreme which I put on when I need jazz that’s real, raw, spiritual and a bit chaotic (ok some of it is more than a little bit chaotic) – but somehow brings it all home to the Love Divine. As Coltrane, himself, notes in those liner notes: ELATION-ELEGANCE-EXALTATION / All from God / Thank you God. Amen.
– Passio – Arvo Pärt and Symphony 3 – Henryk Górecki – The minimalism of these 20th 20th-21st century classical composers (Estonian and Polish, respectively) dovetails nicely with my admiration of minimalist ambient music. I still listen to Passio on Good Friday. Gorecki is a perfect lament for the horrors of the 20th century. Some honourable mentions along the lines of these two would also go to the Hiliard Ensemble and sax player Jan Garbarek’s collab Officium (which I bought because it had a sticker with praises from Michael Stipe on the CD) and the Gavin Bryar’s 25 minute long track Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet.
– Wrecking Ball – Emmylou Harris – I love a lot of country, old timey & bluegrass music – and Emmylou has journeyed through much of those worlds. She’s a legend. I also love Daniel Lanois as a producer; I used to bike past Grant Ave. studio in nearby Hamilton hoping to get a glimpse of him – including his work with Robbie Robertson, Dylan, U2 & Willie Nelson. It’s that chemistry of Harris and Lanois – featuring covers of Gillian Welch’s Orphan Girl and Dylan’s Every Grain of Sand (a song likely in my top 10 songs) that makes this an essential work – and not-to-mention a perfect break-up album especially the song Goodbye which I’ve listened to over a few post-breakup beers. Growing up next to the Hammer (Hamilton, ON), I could understand the lyrics: Well I work the double shift / In a bookstore on St. Clair / While he pushed the burning ingots / In Dofasco’s stinking air.
– Come To The Quiet – John Michael Talbot – In the chaos of a Pentecostal youth group event, I had what I still consider to be an important mystical vision which served to foreshadow the more ‘contemplative’ and liturgical spiritual path that I’m on. That moment felt monastic and peaceful – and this album of psalms from Roman Catholic charismatic Franciscan artist and neo-monastic John Michael Talbot could have been the soundtrack to it. The album features a ‘morning’ and an ‘evening’ side, presenting near verbatim psalms and canticles connected to morning and evening prayer cycles in the Roman Catholic Divine Office (daily prayer). It was Talbot who taught me a lot about catholic prayer, the creeds, the confession (especially through the LP The Lord’s Supper) and Franciscan and the beauty of the wider Christian mystical traditions. To this day, as I pray the morning and evening offices, as I do most days, his versions of the psalms on this album still come to mind or tongue. Talbot’s first two pre-Catholic “Jesus-hippie” albums are great, too.
Ambient I: Music For Airports – Brian Eno – I’ve loved ambient music since my later teens (and even dabble in the genre now and then) – and this was one of the first ambient LPs I owned – perhaps appropriate given that Eno pioneered the genre and coined the term. I’d later delve into lots of others in the genre; Aphex Twin, Namlook, The Orb, Wendy Carlos, Tangerine Dream, Orbital, Beaumont Hannant, The Future Sound of London, Boards of Canada, Ulrich Schnauss – and of course Eno’s many ambient works and collaborations. But this is where it all started for me. This, along with his collaboration with Dan Lanois and Eno’s brother Roger – Apollo: Atmosphere’s and Soundscapes and the Harold Budd / Eno collab The Pearl are all still on my heavy rotation list.
– The Subhumans – The Day the Country Died – I got into punk rock later in high school – my gateway drug, I think, was R.E.M.’s skater pop-punk anthem It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) – and it got harder and more political from there. I would listen to compiliation cassettes of MDC, The Dead Kennedys, Black Flag or DOA between classes in the hallway at Nelson High given to me by friends with studs, rips, patches, piercings (often large safety pins), docs and ‘mohawks’ – as well as this (UK) Subhumans tape which I bought a Records on Wheels in downtown Burlington. Even though it sometimes felt in tension with my Christian beliefs (one iteration of the acronym for MDC was ‘millions of dead Christians’), it was political anarcho-punk like the Subhumans which offered a dystopian raw working class politic that I still adhere to some days. With its often straightedge (no drugs or alcohol or smoking) ethos, it also influenced the ‘lifestyle anarchism’ of my late teens and 20s. 16 songs in 34 minutes. Brilliant.
– In Another Land – Larry Norman – I grew up on Christian Rock – and, if not forbidden, so-called ‘secular’ music was certainly eschewed in my Pentecostal household. Larry (along with Cockburn and U2) – himself a fan fave of U2 and Black Francis of the Pixies and credited for Bob Dylan’s short-lived conversion to evangelicalism – was my gateway drug out of formulaic, theologically trite, safe copycat music that defined too much of the CCM genre in the 80s. I loved the whole trilogy (creation-fall-redemption), but this one, the third, in particular, gave a musically and poetically layered look at redemption and eschatology (end times) with an edge. Though I no longer ascribe to Norman’s dispensationalist view of the end-of-things, at least this take is a bit artsier and abstract than his most famous song, I Wish We’d All Been Ready. The album features actor Dudley Moore (!?) on piano – and John Michael Talbot on banjo, too. I could probably include the first in the trilogy, the George Martin produced Only Visiting This Planet or his wild debut Upon This Rock in place of this list, depending on my mood.
– Everything Is Wrong – Moby – I met Moby once on a boat back from a rave at Toronto Island Airport and asked him if he was ‘still doing the Christian thing’ – which he said he was. Perhaps as detested as U2 – especially for his earnest vegan, ecological, far left and (at the time) Christian beliefs, I found something refreshing both in Moby as an artist and person in spite of him coming across as self-absorbed at times (one MTV person called him an ‘uptight ideolog’. I, for one, ate up the liner notes for everything is wrong. Musically, he opened a door to wider electronic and rave music for me; house, trance, drum n bass, chill – and groups like Kraftwerk (who could also be on this list with several albums)… This eclectic LP is arguably less critically acclaimed than Moby’s later album Play (which I also love) but it’s the album’s joyful house anthems Feelin’ So Real and Everytime You Touch Me which still make me dance ecstatically; as well as the beautifully disorienting mix of ambient (notably, the beautiful & anthemic God Is Moving Over the Face Of the Waters), techno and even punk across the grooves of this grand LP.
As I wrap up so many more records are coming to mind… Leonard Cohen’s The Future, Dylan’s Slow Train Coming, The Imperials Priority, Johnny’s Cash’s live prison LPs (I think I have more of a soft spot for San Quenton than Folsom), Peter Gabriel’s Passion, Joni Mitchel’s Court and Spark or Blue, Tears For Fears’ The Hurting and Songs from The Big Chair, Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity or The Man-Machine, Depeche Mode’s Music For The Masses, Cowboy Junkies’ Trinity Sessions, REM’s Document and or Automatic For The People... The Beatles’ Abbey Road or Sargeant Pepper’s — an ongoing journey…