I like music. I always have. I like listening to it, playing it, and singing it. I can remember being a toddler in our first house’s den listening to music on my dad’s stereo. My dad liked it loud and I followed suit. Well, as much as I could…
Side story – I remember in high school “installing” some box speakers from my home stereo in my truck by putting them in the back king cab fold out seats and keeping them in place with seat belts. As worthwhile a conversation as it is, my jury-rigged installation isn’t the point of this story. What is the point is I remember driving my dad around for the first time after installing them and playing some Aerosmith. I believe it was Dude Looks Like a Lady. At any rate, I turned it up loud. At least I thought so. Before the first verse was over, Dad reached over and cranked it to 11 and then calmly remarked, “Yeah, those sound pretty good.”
At least I think that’s what he said. I couldn’t really hear him over Steven Tyler.
My boys have managed to inherit my love of loud music (especially the youngest), and my daughter has really started to embrace music the last year or so. Just not loud. Heaven forbid you have it loud. Oddly enough, however, when she listens with ear buds I’ve had to tell her in the past to turn them down because I could hear them, but put her in a loud car and she wants none of it. But when she’s not in the car the boys we see how good those speakers can sound. As Dad once said, they “sound pretty good”.
Now, there are several bands that I enjoy listening to almost anything they produce. I can’t really say that I have a favorite song (any more than I can say I have a favorite movie) because there’s just too many out there that I love. I certainly couldn’t pick a favorite album because almost every album from a band I like is peppered with songs I’d rather ignore. I always enjoyed singles rather than entire albums. However, there have been certain albums in my life that for various reasons I enjoy the whole thing. That usually means I can sing the lyrics to every song (or at least a close approximation of the lyrics that for the most part work in showers, cars, and karaoke sessions). Now, that doesn’t mean that on those albums I love every song on the album – just that I can enjoy the entire thing.
As I was fleshing this blog post out, I realized that I had too many stories, memories, and comments on each album than one blog post can handle. So, I decided to make this a series of posts instead of just one extra-large one. I’ll list all the albums here and then spotlight them individually in their own posts over the next few weeks or so (in no particular order). Stay tuned for the new posts!
(Plus, in case I happen to think of albums that I forgot about, I can easily add them to the list and future readers will never know! Muhahahahaha…)
When I started making the list, I initially thought it would be fairly short, but then I kept thinking of albums to add. I tried to focus on artists/bands but I deliberately did not include greatest hits albums (okay, there’s sort of one exception with this) because those are a little outside the spirit of this list (though there are several of those that I love). I also omitted soundtracks and comedy albums. Finally, I should note that even in the albums that I did come up with, many have a track that I could do without, even though I will still listen to it when playing through a whole album. Hey, nobody’s perfect right? The albums are in no particular order*.
*unless you’re anal like me and then you’ll notice they’re in alphabetical order by album title…
| Album Title | Artist | My Review | Listen/Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|
| A Day Less Young | Big White Undies | (coming soon!) |    |
| Abbey Road | The Beatles | (coming soon!) |   |
| Alapalooza | “Weird Al” Yankovic | (coming soon!) |   |
| Blender | Collective Soul | Review |   |
| Collective Soul | Collective Soul | (coming soon!) |   |
| Dookie | Green Day | (coming soon!) |   |
| Dosage | Collective Soul | Review |   |
| Easy | Cowboy Mouth | (coming soon!) |   |
| Even Worse | “Weird Al” Yankovic | (coming soon!) |   |
| Everything You Want | Vertical Horizon | (coming soon!) |   |
| God Shuffled His Feet | Crash Test Dummies | (coming soon!) |   |
| Hey! Album | Marvelous 3 | (coming soon!) |   |
| Jagged Little Pill | Alanis Morissette | (coming soon!) |   |
| Let It Be | The Beatles | (coming soon!) |   |
| Meet the Raisins! | The California Raisins | (coming soon!) |   |
| Monster | R.E.M. | (coming soon!) |   |
| Off the Deep End | “Weird Al” Yankovic | (coming soon!) |   |
| Weezer (Blue Album) | Weezer | (coming soon!) |   |
| Youth | Collective Soul | (coming soon!) |   |
