My life in albums

I was aimlessly browsing the interwebs when I came across the blog kept by the lovely ladies of Pixiwoo. They had posts up on the soundtracks of their lives and I thought: hey! I could do something like that! What they did was list albums they listened to in their lives. I didn’t start listening to actual albums until I was 12, so none of the music listed here would have entered my life before that time. I will do an overview of the songs I listened to before I took music seriously some other time in the future. For now, here are 27 albums, one for each year I’ve been on this planet, that I have listened to obsessively in my life time.

My teens

1. Backstreet Boys – Millennium
2. Anouk – Together Alone
3. All Saints – All Saints
4. Alanis Morissette – Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie
5. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Californication
6. Robbie Williams – I’ve Been Expecting you
7. Kirsten – The Chick Singer

I have to include Backstreet of course. I listened to them 24/7. It surprising even to me that there are other albums that I listened to when I was in high school. I actually bought both the Anouk (Dutch singer) & Robbie Williams albums because I was fed up with BSB music for a little while. I broke a stereo playing All Saints and I think it’s safe to say RHCP was the first rock band I listened to. Kirsten is another Dutch singer whose first album I dug. I was gifted this copy of her first album by a friend. I’ve never succeeded in finding the actual CD in all those years.

My teens – continued

1. Deep Purple – 24 Carat Purple
2. Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon

Apart from CDs I also listened to records quite a bit, as I had my mom’s old record player on my room. These were my favorite two records until my brother dropped and scratched the Deep Purple one. I find the one in the picture on a flea market in Amsterdam for 1 euro years later and repurchased it myself. The Pink Floyd record is my favorite album of all time. My mom bought this when she was 13/14 and it has a distinct scratchy noise during one song that is the result of how the album is pressed. Hence any CD edition sounds to me like fake to this day.

The college years

1. Sting – Mercury Falling
2. Duran Duran – Greatest Hits
3. Christina Aguilera – Stripped
4. Bloc Party – Weekend in the City
5. Muse – Origin of Symmetry
6. Coldplay – Parachutes
7. R.E.M. – Out of Time

I was obsessed by Sting when I first went to college. So it doesn’t really matter which one of his albums I list here. I listened to all of them till there was no tomorrow. Then there was this period where I was obsessed with Duran Duran. There older stuff is still the best. Two completely different albums that I liked equally nonetheless are Christina Aguilera’s and Bloc Party’s CDs. Played them to death. Same goes for Muse & Coldplay. I actually disliked both bands for a long time after these albums as I’d just heard too much of it. Then there was this classic R.E.M. album that I couldn’t get enough of. Excuse the stickers, but it was a freebee from my job at the library as they got rid of all their ‘old’ CDs while I worked there.

Genre specific

1. Various Artists – Teen Spirit
2. Various Artists – Skaters Paradise
3. Limp Bizkit – Significant Other
4. Blue Note Trip – Saturday Night/ Sunday Morning
5. St. Germain – Tourist

Then there were the times when I went through two very specific styles of music, though not at the same time. First of all I went through an ‘alternative’ period. Hence the VA CDs and Limp Bizkit. When I was a student I worked at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague one summer, which meant my first encounter with Jazz music. I bought these two albums as a result of that job cleaning up after people’s messes. It may have been a dreadful job, but it did give me my love affair with jazz music.

More recent obsessions

1. Röyksopp – Melody A.M.
2. Justin Timberlake – FutureSexLoveSounds
3. Hooverphonic – No More Sweet Music
4. Interpol – Turn on the Bright Lights
5. Justin Nozuka – Holly
6. Florence & the Machine – Lungs

These are all from the time when I was a student/ going on to become a teacher. The Florence & the Machine album being the latest. I literally had these albums on repeat for ages. I have tons of other recent albums that I love, but I haven’t figured out yet whether I’ve been obsessed with them enough to list them here.

Q: Which albums have defined your life?