Microblog: The Albums That Shaped Me Part 2. Albums 4-6

The Waterboys: The Fisherman Blues. Purchased June 1988

Day 4 of an 11 day (or longer) Albums that Shaped Me Challenge. Ireland’s The Waterboys entered my cassette deck in 1986, when 1985’s This is the Sea and 1983’s A Pagan Place went into high rotation while I lived in Orlando. In June of 1988, The Fisherman’s Blues changed the game, from what they called “The Big Music”, grandiose songs, to a rockabilly Irish Folk Music sound. The epic, We Will Not Be Lovers and the sublime Sweet Thing changed me in a good way.

Duran Duran: Rio. Purchased Spring 1983

Day 5 of an allegedly 11 Day challenge to present the albums that shaped me. Duran Duran, Rio. Released in 1982, I first heard “Hungry Like the Wolf” in the early part of 1983 while attending Drivers Education at NCCC. I sat in the lunchroom waiting to drive the Dodge Aries K car and the song just jumped out at me. It’s an insult to call them a “boy band”. They wrote and played every song, a slab of what the press called New Romantic, but the genie was out of the bottle for me and wouldn’t go back in. For this 10th grader, I was more able to relate to Duran Duran with their hair, clothes and youthful passion than I could to the classic rock bands I had been listening to previously. Onto New Wave…

Beach Boys: Pet Sounds. Purchased Spring 1988

Day 6 of the Albums that Shaped Me Challenge. Released in 1966, The Beach Boys Pet Sounds wasn’t something that interested me growing up. By the mid-80’s The Beach Boys were a nostalgia filled traveling carnival that couldn’t be any further removed from what I considered hip or cool. My friend Colin however had eclectic taste in music in high school and he was a Beach Boy fan and I respected that enough to listen. I bought Pet Sounds in 1988 and took it to sea with me on a several month cruise around the Western Pacific. Blown away. The album is a complete work, with no throw away tracks. Perfection in every detail possible. To this day I think that when I die, angels will sound like Carl Wilson. An incredible achievement and a reminder of what was lost when music stopped being made organically and auto tune and computers took over.