Lately, as I try to be more intentional in my memoir writing process, I have been considering what the key albums in my life are. What do I mean by “altered my brain chemistry”? Well, these are all albums that I encountered before the age of 20, and they had considerable influence on who I was becoming.
But: these are not my favourite albums of all time (though some happen to be!). Honestly, I don’t even consider all of them to be stylistically great. But what unites them is that I’d be a different person without them. Here is my story, and here are the common threads weaving through my life.
NB: The following list is ordered chronologically according to my discovery, not by release date.
Air — Moon Safari (1998)
Don’t tell my dad I said this, but I am grateful to him for instilling in me a love and reverence of music early on in life, thanks to his extensive CD and vinyl collection.
I’m not sure if we actually played this album in the car on holidays to France, or if my mind just fabricated that memory because Air are a French band and we went on holidays to France in the 90s. In fact, growing up in the household I did, I’m surprised we were listening to a song that literally just whispers the words sexy boy over and over.
Fast-forward to my teens, when I watched the romcom 10 Things I Hate About You for the first time. There’s that scene where they drop the flyers down the school stairwell, and as they flutter in the air, ‘Sexy Boy’ is playing. That’s one of the first times I can remember observing a cultural artefact featured in something else. I felt like a little connoisseur.
Deeply atmospheric, and relaxing yet never boring, Moon Safari is now one of my go-to albums when I need to just chill, remember what life is all about… and also romanticise life on the European continent, I guess? Maybe my encounter with this album at a young age helped plant the idea of studying French in my head.
No Doubt — Tragic Kingdom (1995)
It all started when I read the Meg Cabot book All-American Girl, whose protagonist, Sam, loves No Doubt and their frontwoman, Gwen Stefani. The band was already on my radar, as their album Rock Steady had come out a couple of years prior, but I wasn’t familiar with their work before that.
At this point, I was starting to build up an obsession with California, or at least the version of Los Angeles that was propagated in alt-media in the 2000s, and believed I was destined to live there (don’t ask why; I hate hot weather and I still can’t drive). The surfable beaches, the supposedly boring suburbs… I wanted it all. You could say that Tragic Kingdom is an ode to it, with the album culminating in a histrionic rant against Disneyland Anaheim.
But before we reach that point, there’s ‘Just A Girl’, my first feminist anthem (whose distinctive intro is currently popular as a TikTok sound). And since much of the album is thematically centred around Stefani’s break-up with bandmate Tony Kanal, there are plenty of ska-tinged ballads that wrenched my heart. I’d just developed my first fuck-my-life, all-consuming crush, so I could relate sooo much, you know? I absolutely wore out this CD on my Walkman and most of all I just wanted to be Gwen Stefani.
The Killers — Hot Fuss (2004)
I’m 13 years old and I’ve just seen The Killers’ brand-new debut album on CD in my local Tesco, of all places. This was back when you could still buy CDs at Tesco, and at that, there were some random “indie” titles there from time to time, like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Strokes.
‘I bet you’ll be cooler than everyone else at your school,’ said my mum.
Whenever my pocket money allowed, I bought the legendary British music newspaper NME, where I read about bands like The Killers. Indeed, at this point, nobody else I knew in real life — for this was also around the time I started seeking music friends online — seemed to be into this kind of thing. Hot Fuss did end up being an album that would form the basis of what I consider to be the only real friendship I had at secondary school, and my sister and I also had some fun times singing along to it.
Melodramatic lyrics crooned by the suave Brandon Flowers, synthy effects coupled with post-punk guitars, debauchery and passion in the Nevada desert: it was all so exciting to our young minds. I stopped following The Killers sometime around their third album, but Hot Fuss gave me a very moreish taste of what we retrospectively call indie sleaze.
Pixies — Doolittle (1989)
Okay, so as a teen, I knew Nirvana. Obviously. But I’d read that Kurt Cobain got inspiration from the Pixies. So when I was browsing HMV in Ipswich one day and saw this CD for a very good price, of course I picked it up.
From that very first grunting Kim Deal bassline that opens ‘Debaser’, I was hooked. And those weird lyrics — slicin’ up eyeballs, a reference to Buñuel and Dalí’s surrealist film Un chien andalou. Black Francis, the band’s frontman, was clearly a man of culture! This was the first music I’d listened to where the singer actually screamed, too; it primed me for other screaming genres of music. But most of all, alongside this, it was paradoxically catchy and singalongable. I couldn’t get enough of the Pixies’ catalogue after that, the lyrics getting increasingly risqué. To me they’re the ultimate indie rock band, and they were my gateway into so much more.
Unfortunately, I still haven’t seen them live. I was supposed to, at a one-day festival in Berlin in 2022, but someone in the band got COVID, so their headlining appearance was cancelled.
Arcade Fire — Funeral (2004)
Remember my obsession with Los Angeles? Upgrade: obsession with Montreal, which is where Arcade Fire were formed, alongside many other Canadian indie bands I was really into at the time.
Arcade Fire are so famous now that it seems futile to introduce them. My first exposure was through catching the video to ‘Rebellion (Lies)’ on TV and deciding I needed to become a fan of this band, stat.
I bought the album and from the enchanting opening track, ‘Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)’, which is about digging a tunnel through the snow to your lover’s house, I knew it was going to hold a very special place in my life indeed. The music just felt so sincere. A highlight of my life was standing on a street corner in Montreal’s Quartier Latin in thick snow, and it started snowing again, so much I couldn’t see ahead of me, and I put that song on.
Another bonus is that some of the songs are partially in French, as that is the native tongue of Régine Chassagne, whose family originates from Haiti. It might sound weird, but Funeral helped me discover the extent of the French-speaking world.
The Postal Service — Give Up (2003)
This is an album of songs that will make you feel like the main character, some 20 years before “feeling like the main character” was a named concept — but it was definitely a thing. That much is clear from looking at a certain type of stylised film from that era, like Garden State and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where the manic pixie dream girl archetype was established.
I didn’t discover The Postal Service until around 2007, though, when I found out it was the side project of Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard. Give Up is the band’s only LP and this singularity is part of what gives it such cult status, makes it feel like such a flawless fluke. Perfection doesn’t necessarily require appendices, of course, though the band have been doing some reunion shows in the US.
The album’s lead single, ‘Such Great Heights’ — which gained further popularity through Iron & Wine’s cover — contains the truism everything looks perfect from far away. It’s a sobering reminder not to let yourself get carried away by your imagination and fantasies. Yet when lyrics are alternately idealistic and downright confrontational on the fleetingness of life, and they are spread out on a canvas of clean, poppy beats, I can’t help but daydream myself into a world where love is uncomplicated and cosy and you can safely sequester yourselves off from nasties. Not long after discovering the album, I met someone who also yearned for such a love, and I will always have happy memories of the times we spent together in the company of these songs.
Patrick Wolf — Wind in the Wires (2005)
He stands out as one of the first artists with folk leanings that I really liked. Wolf’s music not only opened my eyes to the mysteries and wild beauty of the English countryside (rather than always wishing I was somewhere else), but his unapologetic queerness also signalled something to me, though for a while I wasn’t quite sure what it was yet.
Some recurrent themes in Wolf’s music — in which he plays multiple instruments that he often loops during his live shows — are being an outsider, and being at one with nature. The soul that comes through in Wind in the Wires is hauntingly beautiful. ‘Teignmouth’ is simply one of my favourite songs ever because of the optimistic loneliness it evokes. The whole album lent past family holidays to Cornwall a new meaning (Tristan and other figures of Arthurian legend are mentioned throughout).
Belle and Sebastian — If You’re Feeling Sinister (1996)
I half-joke that this album made me bisexual. At the very least, it was the cultural commodity that finally gave me language for it, made it feel normal, even banal.
Belle and Sebastian may be widely considered an indie staple, but I only discovered them at the age of 17, recommended by a friend who was refreshingly frank about his sexual fluidity himself.
While lead singer-songwriter Stuart Murdoch has maintained he is hetero ‘to the point of boring [him]self’, in these songs he takes on an ambiguous, external storyteller’s point of view. To accompany lyrics such as she was into S&M and Bible studies / not everyone’s cup of tea, she would admit to me with orchestral effects, playful piano, simple folky guitar, and harmonica… well, it was radical. Even more so given the setting was sleepy Scottish towns and cities where you could feasibly get into some trouble for alternately kissing boys and girls, rather than some anonymising metropolis.
It’s a running formula in the first few Belle and Sebastian releases. But Sinister is the first one I encountered, so it will forever be in my heart.
Joanna Newsom — Ys (2006)
Not only is she my biggest creative inspiration by far, but this album has already been analysed by critics to within an inch of its life… so I will try my best not to make this a gushing essay.
It was spring 2010 and Joanna Newsom had just released her third album, Have One On Me. I hadn’t been able to really get into her music before, partly because of her famously polarising singing voice. But I’d kept hearing that Ys, her second album — pronounced “ees”, after the mythical lost city in Brittany— was an incredible record, and so I was determined to give it a chance.
I’d just started university a few months ago and was having a rough time of it; among other things, I was being picked on by other girls in my halls of residence. All I wanted was for the semester to be over so I could just go home and hope that second year would be better.
As the evenings got lighter, I’d go for walks in the company of my iPod, to escape from my little room and the general foul vibes of the student housing. I usually had the goal of buying some snacks from Sainsbury’s Local, which was about 20 minutes away by foot. It was a good way to clear my head, explore my surroundings, and mentally transport myself into another place. Ys was one such album I’d listen to. It consists of five harp-based songs, totalling just under an hour (you do the math).
Aside from the length being an obvious barrier to instantly liking it, there was also the density of the lyrics to contend with. But the unusual musical architecture, Newsom harnessing her dexterity with the English language to paint rich narratives, and the resulting emotionality that shone through? It was just what I needed. I could step in at will and become swept away to some distant, timeless realm, one where my bullies were little more than specks of dust.
‘Emily’, the first song on the album, was the first one to click with me. I would say it’s one of Newsom’s overall more accessible songs, even at 12 minutes long. While the finer details of her highly verbose music are very open to interpretation, this one is broadly about her astrophysicist sister. I defy anyone to beat the ties that bind / they are barbed and spined / and hold us close forever when it comes to describing the fraught yet immutable nature of the sibling relationship.
I was floored. Who was this 24-year-old (at the time of Ys’ actual release) dispensing deep truths about the universe? As I got to know the other songs in the album — the epic ‘Only Skin’ is in itself life-changing — I realised that poring over Newsom’s words, and the sonic and structural choices accompanying them, was something I’d be happy to do for the rest of my life. This album is eternally unknowable, and yet: it’s the one I come home to, over and over.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor — Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven (2000)
Put simply, this redefined what I knew music could be, in quite a similar way to Ys: haunting string arrangements, subliminal messages, its four tracks consisting of multiple movements spread out over 90 minutes…
GY!BE are another Montreal band and they feel like the logical next step from Arcade Fire for people who want it a little heavier, a little more depressing yet redemptive in the visions their music conveys. It’s grandiose, raw, lyricless but sample-heavy, transformative, political, and not a second is wasted.
What I felt right away was that I needed to be in a big city to really appreciate it, a place with unused railway tracks and people speaking different languages. Not everyone will have the stamina needed for Lift Yr Skinny Fists and the journey it takes you on — something that could apply to this band’s whole œuvre — but for those who do, the rewards will keep coming.
