My Life In Records

Whenever my family would go on a vacation, we'd always go in my dad's pickup truck. It had a radio and a cassette deck, and I'm pretty sure my dad only had, like, five or six cassettes. The one that got the most play was this Johnny Cash compilation. I remember Elvis Presley also used to get pretty heavy rotation. I'd usually sleep most of the way on those trips, but Johnny Cash still played all the time so I feel like it's really ingrained into my brain. It's a really nostalgic album for me. Plus, Johnny Cash is a badass!

This was the first album I ever bought, and I still think it's the greatest pop album of all time. My only way of discovering new music back then was from watching the Fox Family Countdown (the channel's called ABC Family now) of music videos, and at the time I remember thinking 'All Star' was the greatest song ever. Every song on the album is great though - I really can't emphasize this enough. 'Road Man'; 'Stoned'; 'THEN THE MORNING COMES'!!! If aliens ever came down to Earth and were, like, "Hey, we need the best Earthling pop music or else we're going to blow up the entire planet", I think I'd give them this.

My musical intake from, like, 7th to 9th grades consisted solely of "Weird Al" records. That was it, seriously. If I listened to Nirvana or The Strokes, it was because "Weird Al" did parodies of them. What can I say: I was obsessed with the guy. When he came to Indianapolis I got tickets for my birthday, and it was an almost religious experience. Afterwards he signed autographs, and I tried to be cool by just saying "What's up? Your show was great", but I just totally failed. I still fail anytime I meet any remotely well-known band (No Age, Animal Collective, Girl Talk: I always come off as a weird, awkward fanboy). "Weird Al"'s the reason I started recording in the first place; all of my first songs were really bad parodies and humor songs.

His song 'United States of Whatever' was used in a Tony Hawk's Underground commercial, and I thought it was awesome. This was just after my "Weird Al" phase, and Liam Lynch obviously did comedy songs too, so it was a fairly smooth transition. I became just as obsessed as I had been with "Weird Al", and I listened to this album pretty much constantly. The album's a mix of funny songs, regular songs and (as its title suggests) 'fake' songs in the style of The Pixies and Bjork. I have to admit, though: I really hadn't heard of either group at the time (hey, cut me some slack here!), but I still liked the songs. A DVD came with the CD, and I remember it had videos of his recording studio and gear, and that's probably where my interest in recording equipment first started.

I can't quite recall what I listened to between my "Weird Al" phase and my "What?!? You mean I can download music on the Internet?!!" phase, but I'm pretty sure it was mostly this. Every single song here is awesome. I attribute my love of '60s garage rock to this soundtrack. Before I had any mp3 player of any kind I had a giant CD binder, and both discs of this soundtrack were always guaranteed spots in it. Thanks to this soundtrack I soon discovered CCR, The Doors and a bunch more great bands.

Elephant was the first album I heard by them, but GBMS was the first White Stripes album I got really excited about. Me and my friend were in Driver's Ed. at the time, and right after class one day his mom drove us to Target to get the album. For a long time after this album came out, pretty much every single song I wrote was a direct copy of a song from it. Hearing 'Blue Orchid' made me go out and buy a Digitech Whammy pedal. This is the last great White Stripes album in my opinion, and I'm still a little sad they've broken up. I was really hoping they'd do one last record like their first; it's a toss-up between that one or Elephant for my favorite White Stripes album.

This and the below-mentioned National album were all I listened to during senior year in high school. This is the first Girl Talk album I ever listened to, and it definitely had a big effect on me. Unstoppable is probably my favorite Girl Talk album, but this one got me interested in sample-based music like DJ Shadow and The Avalanches ('SINCE I LEFT YOU'!!!). I remember blasting this in my car in the school parking lot, and just feeling like the coolest kid in the world. This album also got me super-interested in fair use and music piracy issues. Until just recently, I even considered going to law school because I was so interested in copyright law. Right after I heard this album, I went on to YouTube and watched every single interview Greg Gillis had done up to that point. I'm still really obsessed with whatever he does.

This was the other most-played album in my car during the winter of my senior year. It'd be 6:15am and freezing cold, and my car would still be iced-over while I drove to school, and I used to just play 'Apartment Story' over and over. One time, my school hosted an open-mic night and I played a cover of 'Gospel'. I had to sing it an octave higher, though, because I couldn't go as low as Matt Berninger! I discovered this band and probably hundreds more at the height of my 'internet music discovery' phase, a time when I found out about the joys of things like Pitchfork and Metacritic. Matt's voice... Oh my god. He could probably sing a Dr. Seuss book and still make it sound like the most depressing thing ever. This album sounds like winter in my black 1999 Oldsmobile Alero, complete with Christmas wreath air-freshener!

I'd be lying if I said this album didn't have any influence on my own music. I bought this and Animal Collective's Strawberry Jam (my first AC album!) at Borders after reading about them on Metacritic. I didn't even know Panda Bear was in Animal Collective! I don't think anybody is ever going to top or even come close to what Noah Lennox managed to accomplish on this record. Using samples in a non-hip-hop context and singing over them was a really new concept to me. Clearly a lot of other musicians were inspired by this album, and now it's kind of seen as a little derogatory to have your music compared with Person Pitch because people will automatically assume you're just trying to pose and sound like Panda Bear. On reflection, I really think Person Pitch just helped open people up to the possibilities of what one person could achieve alone, and inspired many to start making music on their own.

I bought this album right before the last family vacation I went on to The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, OH. No offense to people who live in Cleveland, but that city is a ghost town. There are so many buildings and towers and skyscrapers everywhere, but I think I saw, like, maybe five people the whole time we were there. It was really weird. It just so happened to coincide with me listening to Grouper, and the music went with the city really well. This album was also a really big influence on my album Glossolalia. The way she plays guitar and sings sounds like nothing else to me. Her song 'Stuck' is really beautiful: it has a sort of Enya-like quality to it - but on the other, more credible end of the spectrum. It all sounds quite minimal and desolate, but at the same time she builds a thick, heavy haze around herself. This has to be one of my top ten albums of all time.