10 Most Meaningful Albums

A friend of mine recently listed the top ten albums that meant something to him on his blog. We all have music that we can't hear without thinking about a certain time in our life. Nothing defines those important moments and transitional periods like music. Anyway, it was a good blog post so like any good Hollywood writer I'm going to steal his idea and do the same thing here.


1) Paul Simon's Greatest Hits Etc.---My mother and I used to dance around the living room to Me and Julio and Mother & Child Reunion when I was a little kid. To this day I can't listen to Paul Simon without smiling

2) Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams---Still a pretty young kid when this came out but I was finally finding my own music rather than just listening to my mother's. I loved the single and when I actually saw the video with Annie looking all tall and powerful in her man's styled suit I KNEW this was my group. I got the album and every other one they ever put out.

3) Prince's Erotic City (which was really released as the B-side of the Let's Go Crazy single)---In middle school there was this über-hip teacher named Stephanie. After school some of us were allowed to hang out in her classroom and play her records while she graded papers on the other side of her classroom. That's when we all discovered Erotic City. We would hover around the record player and keep the volume down low so no one else could hear what we were hearing...and NONE of us had ever heard anything like that before. Total learning experience.

4) Temple Of the Dog--- My first roommate in SF was Lisa. We would sit in our living room, sipping screwdrivers and listening to Hunger Strike and Say Hello 2 Heaven while she fantasized about marrying Chris Cornell and I fantasized about replacing Kelly as Calvin Klein's beard. For me that little album and those little moments personified my new San Francisco life.

5) Concrete Blonde’s Bloodletting---I lost my virginity listening to this…’nough said.

6) The Best of Disco---Yeah, yeah, I know. But when I went to New York I lived at the 92nd Street Y. This Y was actually a glorified coed boarding house but I LOVED it there! 80% of the people who lived there were foreign students and I quickly became part of an international social group that included a French woman, two Swedish women, one German guy, three Italian guys and one woman from the Midwest. We had sooo much fun together. Needless to say YMCA became our song.

7) Natalie Imbruglia's Left Of The Middle---to be fair this album is only significant to me because of one song: Torn. When the song was being played all the time I loved it and was constantly singing it, which, for reasons I didn't understand at the time made my then-husband very uncomfortable. The song's about a man who isn't at all like the singer thought he was when she first got involved with him. The lyrics talk about how "illusion never changed into something real..." Anyway, one day he stopped me mid-song and said, very seriously, "If you ever think that song describes me you have to tell me." It wasn't until years later that I realized that the man who I had fallen in love with was only the man my husband wanted to be (the illusion) while the man he actually was had been kept secret from me. And he was so aware of that he couldn't even handle hearing that song! I can't hear Torn now without thinking about that.

8) Mozart Requiem--Nothing calms and centers me like Mozart. During the hours of my labor this is the only album I would listen to, over and over and over again.

8½) Okay, Best of Disco gets two mentions---the morning after my now ex-husband moved out I slipped my Disco CD into the stereo and danced around with my two-year old to I Will Survive. Also, my ex (who had never exhibited ANY homophobia towards our friends or family) had become paranoid that our son was going to be gay (keep in mind that our child was two at this time). So after I Will Survive I taught my boy all the words to YMCA. When my ex came to pack the rest of his stuff my brother put the CD on and my son lit up and yelled, "Daddy, Daddy, it's the Young Man song!!!" while my ex practically clutched his chest in a panic. So now YMCA holds all sorts of satisfying memories for me.

9) The Offspring's Americana---This is what I listened to while working out HARD during the many months between filing and actually getting divorced. I would do 50 million push-ups, listening to this angry music thinking, "Yeah, if he tries to hurt me, I can take that SOB down." I never really believed my ex would EVER try anything like that but at the time thinking about punching him made me feel better and the Offspring seemed to sum up all my sarcastic humor and anger in one album

10) Solomon Burke's The Very Best of Solomon Burke--Sigh, I love me some Solomon. Sexy, chill and oh-so-melodic...he fits with my life now. I still enjoy Offspring but I'm not really angry anymore so there's no reason to listen to it all the time. I don't feel the need to make my son learn the lyrics to disco songs anymore either. I just want to listen to awesome music and my boy Solomon provides that for me. He makes me smile...kind of like Paul Simon.




Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
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