C’mon, everyone has one album, maybe not their favorite musically, but one that REALLY spoke to them on a very personal and visceral level. For me, its Tori Amos’ Boys for Pele. She’s fucking awesome, and BfP was this beautiful, poetic, and often wrenchingly honest journey into the female psyche, particularly its pain, and its bittersweet self-depreciation. Still, it ends with a song of profound hope. If I want someone to get to know me, I play them Boys for Pele, and those who do know me, say, “Oh yeah, Soraya. That’s YOU.”
It has to be “Very Proud of Ya” by AFI. I bought that album and listed to it at least three times through as soon as I got it home. I remember thinking “Shit, this is my whole life on a record!” Nothing else has ever grabbed me like that and never let go.
When we are talking pure lyrics, the album that is 100% me would Rush - Roll the Bones.
The entire album is basically about fate, and lack thereof. Bottom line: your life is the product of your decisions.
Too bad it’s about the worst produced Rush album ever. Some songs are true gems (“Bravado” will be played on my funeral) and deserved better finishing.
Roll the Bones is the most coherent Rush album there is. Fate, chance, and the random events that shape our lives.
Rush quote!
I don’t believe in destiny
Or the guiding hand of fate
I don’t believe in forever
Or love as a mystical state
I don’t believe in the stars or the planets
Or angels watching from above
But I believe there’s a ghost of a chance
We can find someone to love and make it last
My album is also by Rush, but is “Moving Pictures”. Besides the rock jam session of “YYZ” (Toronto’s airport code, isn’t it?), the lyrics to “Limelight” spoke to me:
While I don’t know if it’s the album that IS me, Paul Simon’s Graceland blew me away when I first heard it, along with Ladysmith Black Mombazo, the vocal group that provides a lot of the backing on the album. I began listening to it around the same time apartheid was breaking down in South Africa, and around the same time when I seriously began thinking about going to S. African for a year as an exchange student, AND around the same time I started getting seriously into African dance. The organization that was going to send me decided it was too politically dangerous to send a 16 year old white chick to a racially charged environment, but for some reason I have always had, and will continue to have, a strong emotional tie to South Africa. And that album aways brings that back to me. Someday, I’m going to spend a month or two there, volunteering.
Oh come on people … Grace Under Pressure is surely Rush’s finest - that or maybe A Farewell to Kings. I love Rush dearly but have fundamental problems with everything they did after they left Mercury Records.
I would pick Grace Under Pressure as THE album in question … or maybe Blastronaut by the Lee Harvey Oswald Band (pure, unadulterated genius). But you know, Van Halen’s 1984 means an awful lot to me too. Especially in the summertime when the surf’s up.
King of America by Elvis Costello is me when I’m in a reasonably happy mood, but I turn into Blood and Chocolate when I’m depressed. But it’s all 1986, so that’s close enough.
And I just spent about ten minutes typing in and deleting song lyrics, which I think I’ll spare you all.
I first listened to this album after a particularly bad break up and I had moved 800 miles away from my ex.
The album (for the most part) is a progression of the break up of a relationship and everything Ben Folds is saying was exactly how I was feeling. I felt like he was reading my mind. It really helped me heal. Ben Folds has to be one of the best (new) songwriters I’ve heard.
Eric Johnson’s Ah Via Musicon. Especially the first four tracks. He’s a session guitarist of extraordinary talent and fine voice that I’d never heard of until about 5 years ago. Everytime I get this album out and play it, it just blows me away.