Happy Thanksgiving from us, but particularly from this cat who was snoozing in the sun amongst fallen autumn leaves on our deck.

because i had to do another set for age 22-present
part one here:
https://mltshp.com/p/1RX8C

tried to grab a few gems that stuck with me in the ensuing decades (picking up in the 00s, the 10s, and giving a brief nod to the wild mass of new music i’ve been enjoying in this hellscape decade).

i'm hesitant to declare music from the last few years in my favorites, knowing how quickly my tastes can change, but i have to say there have been SO many amazing albums in this last year alone. it reminds me that i'm not done growing and taking in new things. to that end, i picked two (amazing) 2020s albums from artists i've loved for a long time, american football and deafheaven.

source: https://bsky.app/profile...

I think I mostly like music without singing. Yet vocals are slightly in the majority here.
#my9 #mlt9

Decided to focus on albums I listened to on repeat from the age of 13-18, ones that changed my young brain's chemistry. No real deep cuts here but it's fun to reflect on the path I've taken.

nearly made it: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

Inapplicable because it isn't an album but very important: the oldies station my mom always had on in the car.

i loved seeing everyone’s lists over the last few days (shoutout to @dogwelder’s top tier set) and i spent way too much time thinking about all of the embarrassing things i could put on this list.

decided to slim it down to the “formative” albums up to age 21. i could have added so many more, from the dumb magic of “what’s the story morning glory” (oasis, 1995) to the wonky rollercoaster of “ride the fader” (chavez, 1997). excluded a couple of formative artists that i just don't want to give the attention to anymore, fought myself between brief bursts of outsize influence and staying power.

i might go back and do a second list for 21-42 (current age) just so i can continue to torture myself

Not shown, but had a huge effect on young me:

* Replays of the Rick Dees/Casey Kasem Weekly Top 40 my family listened to in the car on drives to and from the cabin
* Opera and Classical music from Looney Tunes

I literally had to flip a coin between Interpol and Massive Attack as well as which Modest Mouse album - "Long Drive . . ." is also an essential.

For most people the R.E.M. album is Murmur, but since it first came out when I was barely alive maybe it just didn't have the same impact on me due to its decade plus influence on music by the time I came around to R.E.M., or maybe I just wasn't cool enough. Teenage Williwaw, however, wore out Reckoning in both cassette and C.D. form.

Townes and Jimi are doing an incredible amount of heavy lifting here.

Everyone's doing it ...

via https://www.my9albums.com/
#my9 #mlt9

This is tough because there were so many albums that I felt made me but those parts of me no longer exist.

not sure these are really all-time top 9, but it is a sampler of things that I really loved at one time, and mostly still do.

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.

Choosing nine regular albums turned out to be way too frustrating, so I cheated and went with a Live theme. Listed here chronologically.

A quick administrative note (and I hope you'll realize it's very difficult for me to stick to just one): The Sadies album here is two concerts in one: The first is a proper show by the original band, which is of course fantastic. But I'm including it for Disc 2, which is a rollicking all-star revue kicked off by Jon Spencer and featuring appearances by, among others, Gary Louris (of The Jayhawks), Neko Case, and Jon Langford of The Mekons who leads the finale performance of "Memphis, Egypt" that is just sooooooo good.

38th anniversary of National Coming Out Day!

I've been out of the closet for 36 of those years, and still happily queer.

Fuck the fascists, fuck the right wing, I can love whom I want, and I'll fight like hell for those rights to be maintained for all queers, especially kids.

1. Last Splash is good throughout and has the best rock song ever: Cannonball
2. Love and Theft: a mesmerizing croonings of an old man of god who is still a player, ignore the opening song
3. Nashville Skyline: saw it in the basement of my girlfriend's host when she was an au pair.. still means something years after a 10 year marriage. This is the only album I can sing and perform on guitar in its entirety
4. Felt Mountain: knew what it would sound like before hearing it or even knowing who Goldfrapp was: it's amazing: sci-fi meets the lover's blues
5. Amorino: Have you even heard of a singer who whispers her songs rather than singing them before?! Great pairing with a jazz ensemble
6. Yoshimi: Borrowed this from my brother and never gave it back
7. Furnace Room Lullaby: An amazing country album for a musician that is not counted as country musician. I don't particularly like country, but I love this. Introduced to me by a lesbian friend at work.
8. Automechanic: Gritty girl with a heart musing about what if she didn't try to be a musician. Found her from the song "Well OK Honey"
9. Neveroodoreven: Remember hearing the transformed cover of Daydream in a car commercial. Not really one for spooky-esque themes, but this is so well done. And "Backseat of my car" is one of my alltime favs

I tried to get these roughly in the order I started listening to them.

I probably could have worked R.E.M.'s _Murmur_ or _Reckoning_ in place of one of the prog albums.

These are the ones that probably most affected the *way* I listen to music.

If I had done this yesterday or tomorrow this would look totally different.

It's genuinely an interesting exercise trying to recall what I was listening to when I was a teenager and pre-teen, when coolness didn't matter and there was no concept of influence. My dad was into borscht belt comedy, the albums he bought tended to be ones that my mom could get along with too, so we had more or less everything by the Smothers Brothers, Allan Sherman, Bob Newhart, and even a couple of Bill Cosby's earliest albums, and us kids played them to death. Later when we had the ability to check out stuff from the library on our own, we were getting George Carlin albums (much to my mother's regret), Steve Martin and hippy music. I rarely listen to any of the records in the pic any more, either I played them so often they're memorized, or my tastes have drifted to other things. But I wouldn't appreciate what I listen to now in the way that I do without having heard these first.

Now that I think about it I should've used just one comedy album as a placeholder for the rest to make room for an example of the late 70s/early 80s dirtbag prog I was listening to as a high schooler, something from Rush, Styx, or Kansas. On the other hand, man we listened to a lot of comedy records as kids.

source: https://bsky.app/profile...

Liverpool supporter's sign at the first game Man City have played since they were officially found to have breached financial rules (off-books payments and money transferred from the UAE misrepresented as sponsorships, plus cooking the books to disguise same) 115 times over a nine year period. Here's "Wonderwall"!