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Great albums in your life
For me music has always been a big part of my life, and the different albums I’ve owned over the years can catalogue different times in my life in terms of the feelings and emotions from those times. It’s amazing how music that you haven’t heard in a while, especially from a cherished album can trigger volumes of memories. Visited an old friend today, and he put on a new vinyl he found recently, Enigma MCMXC AD from 1991, a cherished album for me that like a time machine transported me back to that time.
There are about half a dozen great albums in my life when I think about it:
1..Three Little Pigs – My first album my parents got me when I was in Kindergarten. I didn’t need to see the cartoon, as my imagination filled in all the parts. This is more a story album mixed in with childrens songs about the Three Little Pigs fairy tale.
2..Beach Boys – Pet Sounds: One of my early favourite vinyls I bought in my teens. It was the pinnacle of the Beach Boys experience for me. Sloop John B is my favourite Beach Boys song, and one I experienced live in a small venue at a telecom conference in 2000 where Mike Love of the Beach Boys and Dean Torrence of Jan and Dean were special guests. I remember rocking out to Sloop John B about 40 feet away from Mike Love as he sang this song.
3..Beatles – Blue and Red albums: My big Beatley experience on a week long high school biology field trip. One of the students brought along a cassette and a ghetto blaster, and it was the Beatles sing along for a week. What a remarkable experience. I felt Beatlemania in all it’s glory!
4..AC/DC – Highway to Hell: A particularly tough time in my life after I burned out in my 3rd year at University and couldn’t continue. It was a couple of years in my early 20s I took off to figure out my life. The hypnotic guitar sounds of AC/DC soothed my troubled soul in those days.
5..Enigma – MCMXC AD: A cassette I wore out in the tape deck of my mustang on my many trips to Palm Springs CA blasting through the desert under the giant windmills. It was a kind of a spiritual experience. A great album to listen to late at night in the middle of a desert, a lonely highway, or under a vast starry night sky. The passion and emotions of those times come roaring back when I hear a song off this album.
6..Beethoven – Piano Concerto No 5 (Emperor): One of many classical albums, but I had what I could only describe as a “divine moment” listening to this piece one day looking at the ocean on the Oregon coast. Got hooked on classical ever since and started piano lessons.
7..MonaLisa Twins – 2007 Concert, When We’re Together, Orange, and Duo Sessions. I was in a dark sad place in 2017 during a tough time in my life grieving. One day a couple of angels reached down and grabbed me and I heard “If you coooome to San Franciscooooh, summertime will be a loving theeeeere….” I felt immense beauty and hope again. San Francisco, The Wide, Wide Land, Close To You….
Share your “Great Albums in your life”
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72 Replies
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“…I could cry but there’s one thing I have to keep telling myself to get by, nothing good ever lasts forever, my oh my”
I feel my heart string pulling and yearning. Such a moving song.
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Great topic, Jung!
I’ve mentioned this one a couple of times before, but the single most important album in my life was Fonzie’s Favorites. Yes, I bought it when I was eleven years old simply because it had a big picture of the Fonz on the front, but it was my first real introduction to non-children’s music (pre-Beatles rock and roll), and I listened to it over and over until I felt I was living in the late 50’s / early 60’s . And it was a natural bridge to the Beatles-era stuff that I discovered several years later.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/40/76/15/407615b7f48712a50828fd5433656a2e.jpg
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Hi David, thanks for sharing your story. It certainly must have been a great album if it made you listen to it over and over and was your intro to pre Beatles rock and roll. Happy Days use to be one of my go to after school shows. Some nice songs on Fonzies’ favourites, like “In The Still of the Night”.
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Thanks for posting that video, Jung! That’s actually the first time I’ve ever SEEN the group that recorded what many consider to be the definitive doo-wop song. I love the synchronized low-energy dance moves that characterized live performances in that genre.
Here is what was my very favorite track off that album. The “bah-bah-bah” lead-in to the final verse just floored me. You may know that Herman’s Hermits had a hit with their own cover of this song:
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Here is a nice Beach Boys cover of this song that I really liked.
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Once again, Jung, you’ve unearthed some Beach Boys gold!
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A really nice topic Jung, but also somehow difficult: I have collected in the course of my life now many music albums from very different styles, as probably many here in the forum and now to say: this is my favorite, I find difficult and I’m just like you: in different episodes of my life were very different music styles in vogue. So I take the ones that mean something very special to me. Albums to which I have a very special emotional connection, because they have accompanied me in very special situations of my life. My very first LP, which I loved, was a Christmas record. I must have been 5 or 6 years old. A narrative voice told about the little boy Peter (Peterchen), how he experienced the time before Christmas, what he saw and felt. Christmas carols were then played to match. Too bad that I no longer have this LP. And then came countless fairy tale records, some almost scary: „The devil with the three golden hairs“, „From One Who Went Out to Learn to Fear“, both Grimm’s fairy tales.
But that didn’t really have much to do with music. My first Albums were actually MC’s (music cassettes), because as a 11 year old I didn’t have a record player, only a cassette recorder. At first I just recorded music from the television. Current pop songs and soft rock ballads. And so I gained my first experience as a sound engineer: equipped with my cassette recorder, pointing the mono microphone at the TV, pressing the play and record buttons and putting my finger on the pause button to be able to start or stop the recording at any time.
My first “real” music album was “The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl”, also an MC, which my mother had bought me. The red and the blue album of the Beatles I got from friends who had transferred the albums to MC. When I was 14, I finally had my own record player and a stereo system. Now it could really start with the LP’s. Unfortunately I forgot which was my first self-bought LP. It must have been an album by the Beatles. Only which one? Otherwise, I bought some “Best of” albums at the beginning of my music career to get an overview of different bands.
Long story short, here are a few albums that have accompanied me throughout my life for many years and that mean something special to me. Timeless music and a lot of great memories:
- „The Red“ and „The Blue“ Album by The Beatles
- „Decade“ Neil Young (Music for dreaming, sinking, meditating)
- „Shades of Deep Purple“ Deep Purple
- „Catch as Catch can„ Kim Wilde (I have all her albums, I find the synthi-pop of the 80s just “geil” (great), until today).
- „Oxygene“ und „Equinoxe“ Jean Michel Jarre (often copied but always unmatched)
- „Get the Knack“ The Knack
- „Living in the material world“ George Harrison
- „Shaved Fish“ John Lennon
- „Cosmic Thing“ The-B 52’s
- „Genesis“ Genesis
- „Blue Sky mining“ Midnight Oil
- „Five Miles Out“ Mike Oldfield
- „Eye in the sky“ Alan Parson’s Project (I initially found too soft, in the meantime I have all his albums)
- „Appetite for Destruction“ Gun’s and Roses
- „Never Mind“ Nirvana
- „Vision Thing“ Sisters of Mercy
- „Thunder and Consolation“ New Model Army
- „Some great Reward“ Depeche Mode (here too I have all albums in the meantime)
and many, many more……
PS: Sorry for writing so much, but lately I suffer from the “old people syndrome”: Once they start to tell, they don’t stop 🙂
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Hi Jurgen,
Thanks for sharing your experiences, and always enjoy reading your posts no matter how long. It’s interesting a lot of children’s fairy tales are based on very violent or grim stories (excuse the pun). I can relate to your cassette recorder story. I had one when I was about 12 or 13 and use to record a lot of music straight from the radio straight from the speakers. Onn project I enjoyed was recording the theme song to many popular TV programs like Mash, Gilligan’s Island, Rockford Files, Hawaii 5-0 etc. I felt like I had a little recording studio. Recorders were a lot of fun and fascinating. Some great videos, thanks for posting those.
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Well Jung…. A great topic but a loaded one, at least for me …lol… I run rampid in this area in my album/CDs/Cassette Tape collection but I’ll simplify it for sake of this topuc thread….
My top Albums I cherish most ….
#1 —- All MLT stuff
#2 —- My Patsy Cline 4 CD Box set
#3 —-My Glass Tiger stuff
#4 —- My Dusty Springfield stuff
#5 —- My Mamas and Papas/Cass Elliot/Denny Doherty solo Stuff
Also have others I have but too many to list….so these I listed here will have to do ….????
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One of these days I should write this list down since it seems to always get asked and the only 3 that are fixed positions are the top 3…
1) Buffalo Springfield, Buffalo Springfield
2) Simon and Garfunkel, Wednesday Morning 3AM
3) Beatles, Rubber Soul
4) Jimmy Hendrix, Electric Ladyland
5) Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin
6) Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Will the Circle Be Unbroken
6) Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
7) Moody Blues, In Search of the Lost Chord,
8) James Taylor, James Taylor
9) Carly Simon, No Secrets
10) Neil Young, Live Rust
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Jung, I know what you mean about music triggering old memories. I remember that Enigma album. It brings back memories of a girl I was dating when that album came out. Memories I tucked away a long time ago.Ugh, thanks a lot. LOLI have specific memories that are triggered by songs and odors. Whenever I smell a campfire I am immediately taken back to a campground my family went to each summer when I was a kid. It’s weird, but kool. I had a lot of great adventures there. Wherever and whenever I smell a campfire these memories appear.As for songs, “Sailing” by Christopher Cross. I hear the opening of this song and I am swept away to age 16 sailing with my Dad on Lake George. It’s a thirty-two mile long lake in the Adirondack Mountains which are in northern New York. Some days we would just sit in the middle of the lake for hours waiting for a breeze and talk about everything or nothing. Another boat we would see a lot was named “Going Nowhere Fast”. That kind of summed it up.Well it’s It’s not far to back to sanityAt least it’s not for meIf the wind is right you can sail away and find serenityPeaceJP(Earbuds recommended) -
Hi JP, it’s kind of funny, I also have a link to a certain girl I dated with the Enigma album. In fact she got me the subsequent Enigma 2 and 3 albums. The music is very mystique and out of this world spiritual and sensual.
Christopher Cross “Sailing” I remember well and is a beautiful song. Thanks for sharing your story around it.
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Thanks Jacki and Jim for sharing your list of memorable albums. I know sometimes it’s hard to choose your favourite albums, but for me this is about the ones that have a link to some important and meaningful memories of people, places and situations. Most memorable and favourite would in some cases be one in the same.
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Hi Jung,
I have another album here that has accompanied me for many years. It’s produced by the German band Propaganda. They released a total of two albums of music and were scorned by the music critics at the time: music that was too cold and too sober. Strictly speaking, they were ahead of their time, just like the group “Kraftwerk” once were.
I know that I am not hitting the mainstream with this kind of music here in the forum, because it is electronic synthi-pop. Doesn’t seem to be much in demand here. After many years I still like to listen to the albums. They bring back fond memories of the 80s in me. Just like Kim Wilde or Depeche Mode do.
They were at the top of the charts for a while with this song. The rest of the tracks on the album are not so smooth and chart-worthy, but very cool if you like electronic sound. They were kind of the „hard rockers“ of the synth-pop scene (rough, fast beats and carrying synth sounds).
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