One of My 9

I've been checking out lists and it's fun and all but when I tried to do my own I realized there is way too much music that's been formative to me to fit in a single 3x3 grid, so I decided I would pick 3 highlights from 3 chunks of my life where music really played a big part in my development as a human.

Top row is my childhood, and I picked the first three albums which came to mind as I pictured firing up the family stereo. All three of these albums got heavy play from me, sometimes to my parents' annoyance. To their credit, I don't remember them ever insisting that I stop, just emphatic encouragement to maybe pick a different record or 8-track.

Middle row is high school and into college. I could do a dozen of these on either of those two periods but I narrowed it down to the Femmes (this album helped guide me to so much more music like the Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, Fugazzi), Prong (one of my first forays into metal), and Slint (I remember my first listen of this album perfectly, like my brain independently recognized it was going to be a landmark and just engraved the experience).

Third row is a chunk of maybe 6 years after college. Again, there was so much music but I tried to think of three albums which opened doors for me musically and which have remained in rotation since, and these three were my gateways into completely new genres. They changed the way I listen to music for the better.