Hello everyone and welcome back to CMM. Thanks for checking out my blog again. This time I was inspired by a trend on Facebook right now where a lot of people are posting about albums that influenced their lives or overall taste in music. On Facebook, the key is that you have to post an album once a day until you get to ten...
Yeah, I'm not doing ten blog posts over the next week and a half.
However, I do like the idea a lot and that will be the focus of this post. There are no real rules. The albums don't necessarily have to be my favorite albums today or albums from my childhood or early years of being a music fan. These are just ten albums, that in one way or another, be it as a fan or musician, influenced me heavily.
Creed - "My Own Prison" (1997)
My Own Prison was released in late 1997 and I specifically remember the title track being one of those early radio hits in my life that would get stuck in my head and if it happened to be on the radio I would have to listen to it every time. A friend of mine growing up had this CD and I would end up borrowing it for months. This was already well into Creed's peak of popularity in 2000-01. The hit parader of Human Clay was fresh in my mind, Creed was on top of the world and when I saw the "My Own Prison" CD it was a flashback to 1997-98. It may not seem like a long time, but two years as a young teen thinking back "oh I loved that song when I was 10" is a long time.
In many ways, this could also be the album I was most nostalgic for since even upon borrowing the CD a few years later, I was already feeling nostalgic for the title track. After playing the entire album multiple times over on a portable CD player I was very much influenced to start playing guitar around that time. Once I started playing, songs like "My Own Prison", "What's This Life For", and Human Clay favorites like "Beautiful" and "What If" became favorites of mine to jam. I guess that would also mean Mark Tremonti was my earliest influence to start playing guitar, which is interesting because my style today isn't really similar to his, but everyone starts somewhere and tastes always change. In my book Mark Tremonti will always be important to me as a guitarist and in my opinion, he is also vastly underrated and I think has earned a higher ranking on "best guitarist" lists if he even appears at all.
Creed over the years has become the butt of a few jokes. They were kind of like Nickelback before Nickelback -- that over-played radio rock band that was on every award show, every movie soundtrack that you couldn't escape that would eventually be the victim of public backlash. You won't see me shy away from my Creed appreciation, though. As I've said, Mark Tremonti is a great talent and singer Scott Stapp is also up there. Stapp was and is very much a throwback to the charismatic lead singer that looked great on posters and album inner-sleeves and while performing live confidently held the audience in his hand. It's too bad this band fell apart after such a meteoric rise and only 3 albums. They reunited 5 years after their breakup in 2009, still relatively young in their mid-30s and released the album "Full Circle" which was a good album, but the reunion was short-lived. At least the band got to celebrate this album, along with their biggest hit release, Human Clay, live before disbanding again.
Warren Zevon - "Learning To Flinch" (1993)
Released in 1993, this is essentially Warren Zevon "Unplugged" without money, hype, and hoopla of an MTV production at the time. I got into this album many years later and also after Warren Zevon's death 10 years later in 2003. Again, part of it is nostalgia. It was my dad who owned this CD and would play it while working or in the car. The lead track, "Splendid Isolation", is what hooked me. The crisp sound of Zevon's 12 string guitar plays throughout the album aside from tracks that call for him to sit behind a piano like much of his early hits, 'Excitable Boy', 'Hasten Down The Wind', and of course the big one, 'Werewolves Of London'.
This album very much influenced my folk tastes. It is 17 tracks and 75 minutes long and a great listen from start to finish. Warren sounds great. His playing is great. The audience sound is perfectly mixed in with even some of the on-stage banter left in to make you feel like you're really there like every great live album should. Any time the topic of great live albums comes up, this rarely gets mentioned, but it has always been on my list and this is my blog so here it is again.
I recommend you give this album a listen. It is a true solo performance with just Warren, his voice and guitar or piano. Not a full band. So, be aware of that going in. Expect more of a campfire vibe and less of an Alice in Chains, full band in Brooklyn, New York airing in primetime on cable vibe.
Mastodon - "Crack The Skye" (2009)
I'm sure many of you in metal circles know this album well, but if you don't, Crack The Skye is a 2009 progressive metal album that was released at the perfect time for me. As a teen in the 2000's I was not a fan of a lot of the music that was current at the time, which includes rock and metal. The genre basically stripped away a lot of what made it great. The raw sound, the aggression, the guitar solos. In the early 2000's a lot of hard rock sounded the same. It was very polished. Very generic. Very copycat in the radio formula, which happens in every generation. Record labels know what's hot and wants other artists to pump out hits in the same manner of what's trending at the time.
However, it wasn't much of a hit with me. Don't get me wrong. I didn't exactly hate nu-metal. I loved Korn in the early years of my metal discovery. Like everyone else, System of a Down's Toxicity had a cozy spot in my CD collection. However, when the genre basically starts pandering to dance club and rap crowds and post-grunge bands basically start regurgitating the same song over and over again it made for a very dull period and also made me ignore new bands.
Mastodon gave me a lesson in why it is dangerous to blindly dismiss all new music just because you don't like the current trends of the day. Not just in rock, but any genre. I may not like the pop/bro-country age of country music at all, but there's still great traditionalists out there making actual good country music. This album here started what would be a new decade of me seeking out and accepting new rock acts. From this album, the trickle-down effect lead to me getting into bands like The Sword, November's Doom, and even going back to check out some bands from the 2000's that I possibly ignored out of my bias against current rock bands such as Nightwish and Within Temptation who put out a great album in 2007 that I still play a couple times a year today.
Basically for me, Crack The Skye was such a raw, well-written, hard album that sounded like nothing else I ever heard and struck such a chord with me that it opened up the door for me to check out other current music, so I owe this release a lot. I hope I never become the guy who says "rock died here". Go on YouTube right now. Do a quick search about when rock music "died" and chances are you're gonna see a bunch of bald guys or grey hairs saying "it died in 1996" or "it died in 2000" or even "it died when music videos became popular". No. Rock music didn't die in the 90s. You just stopped searching out good new rock music in the 90s and put the classics up on such a high pedestal that they can't be touched by anything that comes out. In all honesty, my favorite decade for rock is the 1970s, followed closely by the 1990s, but that doesn't mean there's nothing out there in the 2010s or now 2020s that can't fit just as nicely in your collection. There is and for any rock or metal fan, I'd strongly recommend this album in your collection. The instruments sound great. Its not too progressive to the point where the songs sound awkward and overly self-indulgent. The vocals are great. The songs are catchy. The 2000s may be my least favorite decade for rock music, but this album closed out the decade on the highest of high notes and lead us to what was a pretty strong 2010s decade with Mastodon sustaining quality albums and growing popularity and a little band called Ghost that would release their incredible debut album the next year who as of right now are on top of the rock world as far as young acts go. If you're a music lover, I'm not saying you have to love all new music, but you better stay aware if you want to stay in touch.
Elton John - "Tumbleweed Connection" (1970)
From something modern that I got to experience as a new release to something that was released 18 years before I was born. Tumbleweed Connection is Elton John's third album and it is considered a bit of an obscure release due to it not spawning any hit singles... or any singles for that matter. Not many of the songs appear on best-of compilations or setlists, but it is popular with Elton fans.
Tumbleweed is a roots rock album with country overtones that illustrates a concept of heartland Americana themes. The album is great from start to finish and fits my core tastes like a glove... When I'm not in the mood for metal and more extreme genres anyway.
Tumbleweed is a great mix of rock, folk, blues, country, and even a little gospel. It is all these styles in one, while at the same time being a focused record and not bouncing all over the place to the point where it's hard to follow.
This album will always be a favorite of mine. I love all of Elton's 70's material and I'm sure I will review more of his work in the future, but this release will always be my favorite of his, even though it very much stands out as different from anything else he would release. Just think -- This album is just 3 years before the pop-rock double-LP masterpiece,
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road that would post some of Elton's most definitive songs and also define his trademark flamboyant look(s) and persona.
However, here we get down-home Elton. A much less flashy Elton, but still songs rife with trademark Elton heart. This album, along with some of that Warren Zevon album I mentioned earlier, inspired me to take up the piano, so of course, it is important to me for that reason as well on top of it being an incredible release. If you're a rock fan and you always found Elton's hits to be a bit too soft or poppy, I suggest giving this album a spin. If you like some of the country/rock blurrings that came out of southern California in the late 60s and early 70s you may like this album.
Metallica - "Metallica" (1991)
Better known as "The Black Album", this record is certainly no stranger to any metal fans reading this. Like most fans of metal, this served as an eye-opening gateway album to a new world of rock. "Enter Sandman" in a lot of ways is like heavy metal's "Smoke On The Water". Everyone who picks up a guitar learns that riff and when I first started playing guitar "Enter Sandman" was one of the first songs I tried learning.
If you read my review of Boston's 1976 debut album, I feel like much of the same can be said about Metallica's fifth effort here. The album is often slagged by metal purist as Metallica "going mainstream" and trying to sound radio friendly. Look at what was on the radio at the time. The Black Album came out a year after "Cherry Pie" by Warrant was a top 10 hit in the US and shortly before Nirvana's
"Nevermind" dropped and completely changed the landscape of rock radio. Nevertheless, much like Boston's self-titled album, Metallica's self-titled has a distinctive sound and is peppered with huge hit songs that are still in heavy radio rotation today. The aforementioned lead single "Enter Sandman", "Sad But True", "The Unforgiven", "Wherever I May Roam" and the ballad "Nothing Else Matters" are all rock radio staples today thirty years later.
Not only is this a big, important album to me personally, it is an important album in music history. It is a legitimate heavy metal album that was a mainstream success and sold a ton of copies. Over 16 million in the US alone. I know the 80's saw glam rock acts that were labeled "metal" that had a lot of commercial success, but this album is full, heavy, free of all sugary pop cliches and became the standard for metal success. The album cover is all black. No pretty-boy singer on the cover or half-nude model in a wet t-shirt to help move copies. Nothing extra. No games. Just a straight-up metal record that came at the right time when metal needed a reminder of what it really was. Loud and aggressive. Not pretty. Not flashy. Not colorful. Metallica didn't "go mainstream". They took the mainstream metal scene and gave it a swift kick in the crotch before leaving it for dead. That's why in the 90s Metallica was the most successful live band of that decade and every other hair act that enjoyed massive success before The Black Album was suddenly struggling at the gate and seen as relics of a past era.
I wouldn't say The Black Album is my favorite Metallica record, but its importance to me both as a musician and a fan (and the music industry) cannot be understated. They remain one of my top favorite bands today and someday I'll get around to reviewing all of their records.
Neil Young - Harvest Moon (1992)
As a big fan of Neil Young's work, I could have gone with a number of albums, including "Harvest", the now legendary folk-rock effort that came out 20 years earlier to which this album is a bit of a sequel of.
Harvest Moon was my introduction to Niel Young, along with his MTV Unplugged performance.
Harvest Moon is a throwback album done right. There are a lot of aging music artists who go through a phase where they want to create an album similar to their early works. Often times they miss the mark and come off as forced and dishonest. This release, however, stands on its own and is more than just a nostalgic gimmick album. It is as quality as anything else Neil has released in his entire career and while I like some of Neil's work after
Harvest Moon, I would say in my opinion that this was his last truly, undeniably great album.
Moon featured many musicians who appeared on his 1972 best-selling album
Harvest and Young also used 1970s era analog recording equipment instead of modern digital tools for a warmer recording and to capture a bit of the essence of the original Harvest album. The result was an honest, clean, stripped-down roots-rock album that spoke to both older fans and a growing younger audience who saw an appreciation in less flashy rock music coming out the 80s in favor of the unplugged movement. Yes, I know "Unplugged" wasn't all great and spawned a lot of elitism in the rock community where there was this mindset where rockers had to play acoustic to prove that they were "real musicians", but with Niel, this fit him like a glove. Young was one of many artists who found it hard to find footing in the pretty-boy flashy and colorful MTV music video age of the 80s. By the time 1992 came around, he was ready for a career resurgence and came back with the perfect album to both introduce himself to younger fans and remind older fans that he's still capable of being the same singer-songwriter that spoke to you in the 70s.
For me personally, this album and many others by Young helped shape my acoustic guitar playing. I've always liked the walking strums on songs like Unknown Legend and double drop D drones of a song like War of Man. The same styles and techniques you can hear on classics like "Hey Hey, My My" and "Don't Let It Bring You Down".
Nightwish - Century Child (2002)
Released in May of 2002, this is one of those albums (and artists) that I became more acquainted with after I fell in love with that Mastodon record in 2009 and was more open to giving 2000s era acts a listen. I got into Nightwish around the summer of 2009 when I was 21 years old thanks to a friend who was a big fan of the band and this album, in particular, became my favorite. I would go on to purchase many of the band's albums, but this was the first that I would play endlessly for a long time to come.
Nightwish really broadened my horizons by taking to their symphonic metal sound and rock/metal bands fronted with a female vocalist were not too common in my collection at the time. From Nightwish, they blew the doors open for me getting into bands like Within Temptation, Epica and After Forever. As I mentioned earlier, Within Temptation's 2007
"The Heart of Everything" album would end up being one of my favorites of that decade and this Nightwish record is to thank for sparking my interest in this subgenre of metal that I largely ignored in my teens.
Waylon Jennings - "The Rambin' Man" (1974)
Waylon Jennings is my favorite old classic country singer. Before I got into Waylon, at about the age of 19 or 20, I was very much a casual country fan and his style and sound on this album is what helped shape me into a legitimate fan of country music... And probably also why like fans 25 years older than me I have such a distaste for modern radio country. ;)
The Ramblin' Man continues to also shape the image and sound of the progressive outlaw country movement which Waylon was a key figure in. The "Outlaw" way partly came from Waylon liberating himself from a very strict Nashville establishment who wanted the country singer to sound and dress a certain way with very little artistic freedom. When it came to the point where the establishment was having other people play guitar on his albums without him playing.
"They wouldn't let you do anything. You had to dress a certain way: you had to do everything a certain way... They kept trying to destroy me... I just went about my business and did things my way... You start messing with my music, I get mean."
Waylon's release a year earlier
"Lonesome, On'ry and Mean" could perhaps be
the outlaw country record, but this was my main introduction to Waylon and the more I think about his aggressive "outlaw" push in the country music scene, the more I think that in 2020 we need another Waylon type more than ever to break down the current pop radio establishment. Luckily we will always have these timeless classics, though and they will continue to shape and influence younger generations of fans and musicians just like it did for me almost a decade after Waylon's own death.
KISS - "Alive!" (1975)
Before I finish this up, I wanted to include something not necessarily new, but something that has made an impact on me as a music fan within the last 5 years just to take a step away from nostalgia for a moment.
KISS is a band we all know and one that even people who never really listened to have various opinions about. Be it their makeup or Gene Simmons' outspoken personality. The corporate image of the band really spearheading the mass marketing of the branding of a band. I personally did not really get into Kiss until my late 20s. As a collector of music I was out, saw "Destroyer" and "Love Gun" for cheap and got them... and they kinda just sat in my collection for a bit.
So, unlike some of the artists mentioned earlier, I did not choose the first album I bought from them because I still didn't quite become a fan. I already liked the songs Detroit Rock City (from
Destroyer) and Love Gun from Love Gun, but I wasn't exactly a fan yet. However, being a fan of live albums, Kiss
Alive! was always one that came up in conversations. It contains songs from their first 3 albums (so no Destroyer or Love Gun tunes for that matter) and while flea marketing I saw this double-disc collection for a cool $4 and purchased it.
Upon listening, I quickly became a fan. Yes, I know,
Alive! isn't fully "live", but to me that doesn't really matter as long as the album sounds live and this album is pretty much your front-row seat to a prime Kiss concert in the mid-'70s. This album made Kiss superstars and also made me a fan 40 years later. Much of the songs on here I find myself enjoying more than their studio album counterparts. Listening to
Alive! is basically like listening to a best-of compilation of Kiss' first 3 albums on steroids.
After really taking to this album, I would go on to buy all of Kiss' original '70s albums and eventually some of their '80s albums, 1992's "Revenge",
Alive III and what I feel is a very underrated and overlooked MTV Unplugged live album that was pretty much the spark that caused the original band to reunite in full makeup in 1996. As for
Destroyer and
Love Gun -- of course, I'd eventually find myself giving those albums another chance and very much enjoying them. However, if I had to pick my favorite Kiss studio record, it would probably be the 1976 album
"Rock and Roll Over" which came out after Destroyer and before Love Gun so, who knows, had that been my first Kiss album, maybe I would have become a real fan a lot sooner.
If I knew someone who was looking to get into Kiss I would strongly suggest listening to this album first. I normally wouldn't suggest a live album to be someone's introduction to a band, but Kiss is different. A lot of what made Kiss
Kiss was their live energy and studio re-dubbing or not, the band manage to capture that live essence on a record the best they could.
Black Sabbath - "The Best of Black Sabbath" (2000)
Normally I wouldn't want to include compilation albums on this type of list, but I had to make an exception this time. This collection wasn't the first album I ever bought, but its close. Interestingly enough, this isn't even an official Black Sabbath album. It is a compilation released by a record label with no input from the band or their management. That's fine, though, because, in my opinion, this is the best "best of" compilation for Black Sabbath ever released. I picked up this 2-CD set at Walmart when I was 14 years old and instantly fell in love with this band. Ozzy Osbourne was riding a new wave of celebrity with his MTV reality program
"The Osbournes" so I knew who Ozzy was... or so I thought. This is really who Ozzy was. The dark, eerie, wild frontman of one of the most dangerous bands of the 1970s that also started what would become heavy metal music.
The album is a 32 song collection that lists select tracts in chronological order from their first album until 1983's
"Born Again" with Deep Purple vocalist Ian Gillan. Except for the last three tracks on disc two, the entire collection covers the original Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward era of the band. The remaining tracks are the comeback classic with singer Ronnie James Dio "Heaven and Hell", "Turn Up The Night" from
Mob Rules and "Zero the Hero" from the aforementioned
Born Again album with Gillan.
I wore these discs out so much on my portable CD player that I would use while walking to and from school and on long car rides. Eventually, I would branch out and buy Black Sabbath's actual official studio albums, but the impact I got from this one collection would probably shape my tastes and personal music style more than anything in my collection. The one constant in any era of Black Sabbath is Tony Iommi on guitar. Today I would probably say he is my favorite guitarist and I don't think here's any doubt that his dirty sound and rough blues-based solos have influenced me the most as a musician. I picked up this collection around the same time I had started playing guitar.
Paranoid would be the first Black Sabbath song that I would learn how to play. I'd then go on to learn many Black Sabbath tunes from all eras of the band and their music would follow me through my teens, twenties and now my thirties. While over the years I have fallen in and out with other bands, Black Sabbath has retained a heavy play in my personal collection and if I'm ever sitting around and I want to jam a few songs on guitar, I can never go wrong by playing some classic Black Sabbath and getting lost in their unique sound today the same way I did when I was 14.
Eventually, I would go on to complete my collection of Black Sabbath studio records including the currently out-of-print albums featuring Tony Martin on vocals. When their last album,
13, was released, I got it the day it came out. When the band announced their farewell tour, I saw them with my dad (who I think bought me this first Black Sabbath collection) at the Great Woods Center in Mansfield, Massachusetts and also got
"The End" ep that was only sold at the venues to once again complete the collection.
There's no doubt that Black Sabbath influenced me the most as a musician and a fan. To this day I'll check out pretty much any doom metal band that retains that classic Sabbath sound and that would also be my favorite subgenre of metal which has grown a lot and branched out into many different styles that all originated with this band. Much the same way my Black Sabbath and overall music fan-hood would originate from this unofficial record company cash-in compilation sitting on a Wal-Mart shelf in the early 2000s.
Closing thoughts...
Thank you for reading about the 10 albums that influenced me the most. This took a while to think about, but I believe I picked the right 10. Of course, these aren't necessarily my top 10 favorite albums. Maybe I will do a list like that someday, but these 10 certainly will always mean a lot to me.
After talking about
Alive! I was inspired to do a top 5 or top 10 favorite live albums blog, so expect that to happen some time int he future.
Thanks again for reading, everyone. Leave a comment below and let me know some of the albums that helped shape you the most. The best thing about this sort of question is that we will all have different answers and I hope you enjoyed reading mine.
Take care and God bless.
CMM.
