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This week, 5AM StoryTalk has been a little preoccupied with the subject of “coming of age” in cinema. I wrote about Beautiful Girls, interviewed the film’s screenwriter about it, and shared a robust list of screenplays for “coming of age” films. Now, for absolutely no reason at all — I mean, this wasn’t supposed to be a theme week or anything like that — I thought I’d pivot to music. Specifically, the albums that provided the soundtracks to your own “coming of age”.
Tell me: When you think back, what album defines your transition from “childhood” to “grown-up” like no other? Don’t just drop an artist and title either. Tell me why.
My answer is New Miserable Experience by the Gin Blossoms. It played non-stop at all my regular hangout spots, especially the local 24-hour restaurant where my friends and I would inevitably end up between 2 and 5 a.m. every Friday and Saturday morning. Each booth had its own mini-jukebox, back when people still carried coins in their pockets, and we’d give “Hey Jealousy” a play every time. I’m so close to the song, even now, I can’t even tell if it’s actually a good song. Is it? It won’t matter what you say because I will love it, with all my being, until the day I kick it.
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R.E.M.’s Murmur. I listened to that over and over. While The Who is still my favorite band, I found them during my teen angst years, so they predate being “grown up”. But Murmur is the soundtrack of my first years of being out on my own, at college and away from home. Stripes’ mumbling vocals are like anthems for introverts.
For me it was Bob Dylan’s Infidels. My family had immigrated from the Soviet Union two years before that album came out. It was the first time I realised the power of a song and understood that Dylan was the best singer in the world. 🌍 I still believe that, 42 years later
I think you've told me this before, or maybe I'm imagining that. But thank you. I try to keep track of readers' stories, but my brain feels like swiss cheese these days - kids!
It would have to be Pulp’s “Different Class”. I was in high school at the time and it reminds me of that era. Pulp wasn’t popular or well known among high school students in the US but I had heard the song “Common People” when I was 15 on a local / independent music radio station and felt that it was brilliant. I also dreamed of living in Europe / UK at that time because I felt that American culture was stifling and ended up moving to Germany after getting a scholarship to attend school there a year after listening to it.
New Miserable Experience is an amazing album and Hey Jealousy is definitely a great song. I came to it a couple of years late and it strongly reminds me of my time at uni.
I guess the album I would pick is probably Automatic For The People by REM. They were definitely the band that most strongly marked out my adult taste in music and the first time I actively sought out a band’s back catalogue. This wasn’t my entry to their music and it is not my favourite of theirs, but it was the album released while I was in sixth form and it was when REM really started to get into the public consciousness in the UK so, as you say, the songs were everywhere. There are other albums I associate strongly with that time (Nirvana’s Nevermind and Levelling The Land by the Levellers were hugely popular) but this one felt like it belonged to me.
REM was a band I didn't "get" when I was much younger, and later I realized was actually what I always needed. I love how art comes to you when you're finally ready for it, or at least ready to accept it.
The album that began my journey to adulthood is The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. It was my first glimpse into a world where strangeness and nerdism was OK. It's not an exaggeration to say that listening to David Bowie in 1973 was subversive; had the jocks in my high school found out I would have been beaten up as a f*g. I'm not gay but Bowie just opened the door to accepting myself for who I was, somebody with weird tastes and a skewed worldview. A lot followed from there
I can't imagine who I'd be if I had discovered ZIGGY as a teenager. How much easier my life would've been in so many ways. I'm glad you found it, though...or it found you, however that works.
1977 by Ash. It was 1996 and I was 14. I loved music, but all I knew was pop. Britpop had piqued my interest but I couldn't connect to the swaggery brashness of it. Then I bought 1977 on CD as there was something about the thrashing but geeky energy of Girl From Mars that resonated with me. The moment I listened to the album – specifically the track Lose Control which is incredibly loud and raw and dark – my musical taste shifted entirely and I've never looked back.
Just prior to my first year attending school in Canada, and with babysitting money burning a hole in our pockets, my friend and I took our first without-parental-guidance trip to Toronto.
Freed from usual constraints, we got off the bus and hit the ladies toilets in order to give ourselves a makeover. Sandals were stashed in bags - it was 1972, going barefoot was mandatory - and T shirts were exchanged for halter tops.
After browsing the books in Coles for ages I eventually bought Diary of a Witch by Sybil Leek and Eric Segal's Love Story.
Sam the Record Man was the last stop of the day - I left with Aqualung.
I heard the album and saw the movie and my mind nearly exploded. I"d never heard or seen anything like David Byrne before. I still listen to the band and his solo work whenever I need a jolt of inspiration.
The Gin Blossoms, exactly this album (New Miserable Experience) was the first CD I bought for myself in my teens, and I still have my copy after nearly 30 years later. I was 14, about to be 15, and I recall it as a significant moment/purchase for me, in more ways than one. I remember feeling intimidated in that music/record store (The Wall, in a mall in the suburbs of Philadelphia) and that purchase was something extra meaningful and somehow empowering for me. It is wonderful to see this post, along with all of the comments. I just loved reading that this particular music also had a lasting impact on you; I know it did for me, too. It is lovely and wild how music remains with us, and somehow seeps into our marrow. Thanks for sharing this musical memory. ✨🎶✨
Music can transports me to a precise moment in my life, just like a random smell can. I can find myself sitting with my friends in high school, in a movie theater in my twenties, or on the dance floor at my wedding. We all have soundtracks. It's wonderful when I hear that I share a few tracks with other people.
Welcome to the black parade by my chemical romance. Got me through the toughest year of middle school and is still the album I will listen start to finish on a car ride or in the gym
Raising Hell by Run DMC was the start of my musical coming of age. First cassette I bought with my own money. Initiation into rap/hip-hop. Later, Ten and Nevermind felt like albums that would forever be my version of rock and roll. Adults didn’t listen to grunge and even then, it felt like music that would be specific to that time.
The Smiths first album - it was the first album I bought in a city other than the one I grew up in, the first album I bought in my first year of uni, the first album I bought with the first girl I lived with, the first album by the Smiths. Reel around the fountain indeed!?
For me it was The Dreaming by Kate Bush. I'd loved the first three albums, especially the third one, where she started experimenting with the Fairlight, and when the Dreaming came out just after I started at uni it was this massive event i'd been counting the days to. And the album was the complete opposite of instant. It was bonkers. Insane. Like nothing ever. It took me a whole month of endless listening to appreciate it at all, it's inventiveness, depth, subtlety, but finally I began to really love it. It felt like my musical taste and appreciation had just matured massively in order that I could even understand what I was hearing. Other fantastic albums came out that year and I loved so many of them, but The Dreaming reinvented what rock music could be, and then it reinvented what I could be.
I guess guns and roses appetite for destruction defined my growing up from high school till the time I moved out of mom and dad's. Great memories. So many albums had a huge impact the list is endless.
It's so strange to me that that album was such a huge part of the culture when I was in high school, but that it somehow never permeated any of my friends circles. I've never been able to figure out why that is.
Well, Cole, that's a multi-tiered query, I think. :)
There are, of course, several tiers in which we come of age. There's coming into adolescence, there's hitting our late teens and graduating high school, and there's the actual waypoint of whenever an individual transitions from young adulthood into bona fide adulthood (secret tip: nobody ever really does that, they just say they do ;)).
So, my coming of age, in terms of leaving grade school pre-adolescent childhood into the dawning years of teenage fuckery and more awareness of the wide world, was accompanied by a trio of infamous albums by three globally acclaimed artists, two of them dark horses and the other a wildly popular MTV offering...those would be Van Halen's Fair Warning, Rush's Permanent Waves, and The Police's Synchronicity. Not too coinkydinkily, those three bands remain my three favorite bands. Surprise. ;)
In terms of when I hit senior year of high school, readying myself for collegiate adventures and braving the world outside of mom n' dad's house, it'd again have to be Van Halen, this time their first album with Sammy Hagar, 5150.
As far as actual adulthood transition, nah, I never hit that. I think. ;) But...I do think, given the apex of Generation X, the core of that 'lost' gen being anyone who gradated high school between 1980 and 1990...I just don't think there's two albums that define Gen X's worldwide 'coming of age' more than Michael Jackson's Thriller and AC/DC's Back in Black.
I like that you wrote all these paragraphs just to get to, "The only correct answer is THRILLER and BACK IN BLACK, stupid." And it's really hard to argue with that on a cultural level.
It's a difficult choice for me, but my gut reaction is Warren Zevon's self-titled album for Asylum. It came out when I living in L.A., going to college, doing stand-up and trying to break into TV. All while falling in love for the first time. It turned out to be ultimately a pretty dark journey for me, and that album matches a lot of what I was feeling back then.
I used to see Zevon around town and the album almost felt like a secret that only a few people knew. But Lord, the songs. "Poor Poor Pitiful Me," "Hasten Down The Wind," Muhammed's Radio," "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead," "Desperados Under The Eaves," "Join Me In L.A." That album is my "Pet Sounds." Eleven tracks that become an unintentional soundtrack to a formative part of my life.
And when I say formative part of my life, I really mean it. The fact that I am still writing about it nearly 40 years later is either sad or healing. I find myself unable to figure out which:
Hey jealousy played non stop on the bus ride to school along with No Rain from Blind Melon. Takes me right back when I hear them. Green Day’s Kerplunk album was my intro to finding kindred spirits thru music. Easily represented 15 year old me and was an oasis for me in high school
When I was a wee goth lad I developed an obsession for the THE CROW franchise, of which I still consider the sequel City of Angels to be better than the first, and I had not only all the movies in VHS (including the ludicrously awful "Stairway to Heaven", a terrible feature length edit of the already notoriously bad television series) but also their respective scores and OSTs on CD.
THE CROW and THE CROW: CITY OF ANGELS OSTs are bliss. They sum up to me the variety of approaches and passion to 90s alt- and hard-rock as it made its way into nu metal. Many of the songs from those albums, like "Color Me Once" by the Violent Femmes and "Knock Me Out" by Linda Perry feat. Grace Slick hit my nerves in places music rarely reaches. My wife and I don't do the "sit down and quietly listen to an album" thing as much as we probably should, but early on in our relationship she walked into me zoning out to the first one and we listened to both back to back then.
Pretty much add Tool's AENIMA to the mix and you've captured my goth clothed, JOHNNY THE HOMICIDAL MANIAC reading, dealing-with-insomnia-with-journalling-and-drawing high school years pat.
I'm pretty excited. I'm probably not going to catch it theatrically, but I like that the descriptions of the plot indicate a clearer causality drawn between Eric and Shelley's past and WHY they were targeted by the gang. The original movies' relationship to violence and crime was relatively cartoonish in retrospect.
That said whereas Skarsgard can clearly embody The Crow, the movie's success in my mind will be whether the villains and their mooks are as colorful as the likes of David Patrick Kelly and Iggy Pop. That's a big ask. To me that's why The Crow: Wicked Prayer wasn't quite as memorable or fulfilling. I remember Edward Furlong moping around, I can't remember who he was fighting against.
Achtung Baby. I listened to it on my Discman over and over on a family vacation in early high school. It was the first time I started sort of pulling away from the family unit. Something about the mix of dark and light on that album just resonated perfectly with me. And it turns out that while it was one of my definitive high school albums, it was one of my older sister’s definitive college albums. That was a pretty cool thing to discover.
"The Very Best of The Spinners" (Rhino Records) was one of the first CDs I bought with my own money, an outgrowth of the kind of stuff I was listening to on the radio at that time. I've added considerably to my collection of Black music on CD ever since.
Omg, yes!! The Rubberband Man was played during every basketball game warm ups when I was a sophomore in high school. And I still can sing every word to Sadie, Games People Play, Mighty Love, etc. The Spinners are the entire soundtrack to my high school years.
I love The Spinners. Really, just about anything Thom Bell ever did. Even the aborted album with Elton John, which resulted in some pretty good tracks. Some of them back by members of The Spinners.
Two albums lulled me to sleep through high school. The first was Neil Young's LIVE RUST and the second was PINK FLOYD'S THE WALL. Both albums heavily into storytelling (NY - Short Stories, PF - Feature Film), so that all makes sense as to who I am today.
I was thinking about what “coming of age” really meant and all the high-brow things it could mean - but honestly the album that I had the most college-age, no-parents-to-deceive, you’re-a-man now sex listening to is “Clarity” by Jimmy Eat World
I think "coming of age" means different things to different people. For me, it's the last two years of high school and first three years post-high school. It's a blurry time, in which I discovered who I was and who I wasn't. Now, I wish I'd been listening to more Jimmy Eat World, though. Heh.
David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Tho released before my time, I’d sing/scream the songs (ground control to major tom, take your protein pills and put your helmet on) aloud in harmony with my friends in Olympia late at night at the park and dancing together to the song life on mars. Radiohead OK computer, because their music to me encapsulated the post modern ennui of growing up at the start of a new millennium. (Grandaddy makes a similar case in “2000 man” from their album Software Slump.) Public Enemy, black steel. Massive Attack, teardrop. PJ Harvey, down by the water. Sonic Youth, bull in the heather. Talking heads, genius of love and born under punches. Belle and Sebastian, electronic renaissance. Patti Smith, horses. Lauryn Hill, that thing. That’s way too many, way more than one track. but it’s so hard for me to pick just one. Gin blossoms is ideal 90s kids music at its strongest imo. Thank you for asking readers about their formative memories of music!
Gin Blossoms isn't even the beginning of it! What we listened to on repeat made no sense when looked at as a whole: White Zombie, Meatloaf, Concrete Blonde, Jim Croce, Janis Joplin, and so on. Thanks for sharing a glimpse at your personal soundtrack!
The Opposite of December by Poison the Well was/is probably the most transformative album of my teenage years. It was the first metalcore album I picked for myself, the first one I obsessed over, the first one I memorized all the lyrics for.
Poison the Well is still a great band, and I still get excited when they release new albums. But nothing beats the feeling of that first-love album. And my first love was The Opposite of December.
Earl Sweatshirt’s “Some Rap Songs” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Rap_Songs) came out during my freshman year of college and helped me become more introspective and reflective at a time when I was actively discovering my own identity and in the earliest stages of developing my adult sense of self.
The album also ushered-in a more mainstream awareness of a broader genre of underground rap that was heavily sample-driven/melodic, lyrically dense, and less reliant on the predictable rap/trap drum patterns of that era.
It also partially inspired me to make music of my own; I made a mixtape during the spring break of my freshman year (entitled “Spring Break Sillies”) and regularly made beats into sophomore/junior year. It’s been a few years since I’ve made new music but I am still a proud owner of Ableton 11 and I still am always listening for sounds begging to be sampled into something new (the short intro song on my first substack essay was produced by me: https://open.substack.com/pub/thestupideconomy/p/coming-soon).
I credit so much of my artistic identity to my favorite rappers, Earl Sweatshirt being one of the most prominent and influential among them.
I'm still trying to find a moment to read this article you shared, as everything else you wrote here has me wanting to take a deep dive with you on the subject. More soon, Arlen. Thanks for sharing!
R.E.M.’s Murmur. I listened to that over and over. While The Who is still my favorite band, I found them during my teen angst years, so they predate being “grown up”. But Murmur is the soundtrack of my first years of being out on my own, at college and away from home. Stripes’ mumbling vocals are like anthems for introverts.
Second REM pick on here, Bill. Thanks for sharing.
For me it was Bob Dylan’s Infidels. My family had immigrated from the Soviet Union two years before that album came out. It was the first time I realised the power of a song and understood that Dylan was the best singer in the world. 🌍 I still believe that, 42 years later
Where had you immigrated from and to, Alex?
We emigrated from Belorussian Republic of the Soviet Union (now it's the country of Belarus) to the United States in 1979.
I think you've told me this before, or maybe I'm imagining that. But thank you. I try to keep track of readers' stories, but my brain feels like swiss cheese these days - kids!
It would have to be Pulp’s “Different Class”. I was in high school at the time and it reminds me of that era. Pulp wasn’t popular or well known among high school students in the US but I had heard the song “Common People” when I was 15 on a local / independent music radio station and felt that it was brilliant. I also dreamed of living in Europe / UK at that time because I felt that American culture was stifling and ended up moving to Germany after getting a scholarship to attend school there a year after listening to it.
I love this pick.
New Miserable Experience is an amazing album and Hey Jealousy is definitely a great song. I came to it a couple of years late and it strongly reminds me of my time at uni.
I guess the album I would pick is probably Automatic For The People by REM. They were definitely the band that most strongly marked out my adult taste in music and the first time I actively sought out a band’s back catalogue. This wasn’t my entry to their music and it is not my favourite of theirs, but it was the album released while I was in sixth form and it was when REM really started to get into the public consciousness in the UK so, as you say, the songs were everywhere. There are other albums I associate strongly with that time (Nirvana’s Nevermind and Levelling The Land by the Levellers were hugely popular) but this one felt like it belonged to me.
REM was a band I didn't "get" when I was much younger, and later I realized was actually what I always needed. I love how art comes to you when you're finally ready for it, or at least ready to accept it.
This is the wonderful thing about music. It waits for you! So many bands I’ve come to late - and what a joy of discovery that is!
The album that began my journey to adulthood is The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. It was my first glimpse into a world where strangeness and nerdism was OK. It's not an exaggeration to say that listening to David Bowie in 1973 was subversive; had the jocks in my high school found out I would have been beaten up as a f*g. I'm not gay but Bowie just opened the door to accepting myself for who I was, somebody with weird tastes and a skewed worldview. A lot followed from there
I can't imagine who I'd be if I had discovered ZIGGY as a teenager. How much easier my life would've been in so many ways. I'm glad you found it, though...or it found you, however that works.
Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here. It's still one of my all-time favorites.
https://youtu.be/YLIy2t-KAc0?si=SRbjmx4G7fWWRjQX
Tool 'Aenima.
Ha, I mentioned this album too.
1977 by Ash. It was 1996 and I was 14. I loved music, but all I knew was pop. Britpop had piqued my interest but I couldn't connect to the swaggery brashness of it. Then I bought 1977 on CD as there was something about the thrashing but geeky energy of Girl From Mars that resonated with me. The moment I listened to the album – specifically the track Lose Control which is incredibly loud and raw and dark – my musical taste shifted entirely and I've never looked back.
I don't know this album at all, Hayley, but you've convinced me to give it a go!
Please report back!
Cole! How is this possible? It’s a brilliant album!
That would have to be Jethro Tull's Aqualung.
Just prior to my first year attending school in Canada, and with babysitting money burning a hole in our pockets, my friend and I took our first without-parental-guidance trip to Toronto.
Freed from usual constraints, we got off the bus and hit the ladies toilets in order to give ourselves a makeover. Sandals were stashed in bags - it was 1972, going barefoot was mandatory - and T shirts were exchanged for halter tops.
After browsing the books in Coles for ages I eventually bought Diary of a Witch by Sybil Leek and Eric Segal's Love Story.
Sam the Record Man was the last stop of the day - I left with Aqualung.
I love all the details around this album's presence in your life. Thank you for sharing!
Stop Making Sense by Talking Heads.
I heard the album and saw the movie and my mind nearly exploded. I"d never heard or seen anything like David Byrne before. I still listen to the band and his solo work whenever I need a jolt of inspiration.
This album made its mark on me much later in life. I wish I'd found it when you did.
The Gin Blossoms, exactly this album (New Miserable Experience) was the first CD I bought for myself in my teens, and I still have my copy after nearly 30 years later. I was 14, about to be 15, and I recall it as a significant moment/purchase for me, in more ways than one. I remember feeling intimidated in that music/record store (The Wall, in a mall in the suburbs of Philadelphia) and that purchase was something extra meaningful and somehow empowering for me. It is wonderful to see this post, along with all of the comments. I just loved reading that this particular music also had a lasting impact on you; I know it did for me, too. It is lovely and wild how music remains with us, and somehow seeps into our marrow. Thanks for sharing this musical memory. ✨🎶✨
Music can transports me to a precise moment in my life, just like a random smell can. I can find myself sitting with my friends in high school, in a movie theater in my twenties, or on the dance floor at my wedding. We all have soundtracks. It's wonderful when I hear that I share a few tracks with other people.
Welcome to the black parade by my chemical romance. Got me through the toughest year of middle school and is still the album I will listen start to finish on a car ride or in the gym
When I first heard that album, I knew it would change many teenagers' lives. It would've changed mine had it been released when I was one.
Raising Hell by Run DMC was the start of my musical coming of age. First cassette I bought with my own money. Initiation into rap/hip-hop. Later, Ten and Nevermind felt like albums that would forever be my version of rock and roll. Adults didn’t listen to grunge and even then, it felt like music that would be specific to that time.
The Smiths first album - it was the first album I bought in a city other than the one I grew up in, the first album I bought in my first year of uni, the first album I bought with the first girl I lived with, the first album by the Smiths. Reel around the fountain indeed!?
For me it was The Dreaming by Kate Bush. I'd loved the first three albums, especially the third one, where she started experimenting with the Fairlight, and when the Dreaming came out just after I started at uni it was this massive event i'd been counting the days to. And the album was the complete opposite of instant. It was bonkers. Insane. Like nothing ever. It took me a whole month of endless listening to appreciate it at all, it's inventiveness, depth, subtlety, but finally I began to really love it. It felt like my musical taste and appreciation had just matured massively in order that I could even understand what I was hearing. Other fantastic albums came out that year and I loved so many of them, but The Dreaming reinvented what rock music could be, and then it reinvented what I could be.
I clearly need to spend more time listening to THE DREAMING, Julian. Thanks for the inspiration!
I guess guns and roses appetite for destruction defined my growing up from high school till the time I moved out of mom and dad's. Great memories. So many albums had a huge impact the list is endless.
It's so strange to me that that album was such a huge part of the culture when I was in high school, but that it somehow never permeated any of my friends circles. I've never been able to figure out why that is.
Yeah that is weird that band was everywhere.
Well, Cole, that's a multi-tiered query, I think. :)
There are, of course, several tiers in which we come of age. There's coming into adolescence, there's hitting our late teens and graduating high school, and there's the actual waypoint of whenever an individual transitions from young adulthood into bona fide adulthood (secret tip: nobody ever really does that, they just say they do ;)).
So, my coming of age, in terms of leaving grade school pre-adolescent childhood into the dawning years of teenage fuckery and more awareness of the wide world, was accompanied by a trio of infamous albums by three globally acclaimed artists, two of them dark horses and the other a wildly popular MTV offering...those would be Van Halen's Fair Warning, Rush's Permanent Waves, and The Police's Synchronicity. Not too coinkydinkily, those three bands remain my three favorite bands. Surprise. ;)
In terms of when I hit senior year of high school, readying myself for collegiate adventures and braving the world outside of mom n' dad's house, it'd again have to be Van Halen, this time their first album with Sammy Hagar, 5150.
As far as actual adulthood transition, nah, I never hit that. I think. ;) But...I do think, given the apex of Generation X, the core of that 'lost' gen being anyone who gradated high school between 1980 and 1990...I just don't think there's two albums that define Gen X's worldwide 'coming of age' more than Michael Jackson's Thriller and AC/DC's Back in Black.
YMMV. :D
I like that you wrote all these paragraphs just to get to, "The only correct answer is THRILLER and BACK IN BLACK, stupid." And it's really hard to argue with that on a cultural level.
Haha. That sounds like you’re not a fan of my style :)
Oh no, it's a real compliment.
The album that defined my "coming of age?"
It's a difficult choice for me, but my gut reaction is Warren Zevon's self-titled album for Asylum. It came out when I living in L.A., going to college, doing stand-up and trying to break into TV. All while falling in love for the first time. It turned out to be ultimately a pretty dark journey for me, and that album matches a lot of what I was feeling back then.
I used to see Zevon around town and the album almost felt like a secret that only a few people knew. But Lord, the songs. "Poor Poor Pitiful Me," "Hasten Down The Wind," Muhammed's Radio," "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead," "Desperados Under The Eaves," "Join Me In L.A." That album is my "Pet Sounds." Eleven tracks that become an unintentional soundtrack to a formative part of my life.
And when I say formative part of my life, I really mean it. The fact that I am still writing about it nearly 40 years later is either sad or healing. I find myself unable to figure out which:
https://www.allyourscreens.com/reviews/988-review-lost-ollie
What an album, Rick. I wish I'd had Zevon in my life as a teenager. I think my primary friends circle would've never stopped playing it.
Hey jealousy played non stop on the bus ride to school along with No Rain from Blind Melon. Takes me right back when I hear them. Green Day’s Kerplunk album was my intro to finding kindred spirits thru music. Easily represented 15 year old me and was an oasis for me in high school
Thanks for sharing, Michael!
When I was a wee goth lad I developed an obsession for the THE CROW franchise, of which I still consider the sequel City of Angels to be better than the first, and I had not only all the movies in VHS (including the ludicrously awful "Stairway to Heaven", a terrible feature length edit of the already notoriously bad television series) but also their respective scores and OSTs on CD.
THE CROW and THE CROW: CITY OF ANGELS OSTs are bliss. They sum up to me the variety of approaches and passion to 90s alt- and hard-rock as it made its way into nu metal. Many of the songs from those albums, like "Color Me Once" by the Violent Femmes and "Knock Me Out" by Linda Perry feat. Grace Slick hit my nerves in places music rarely reaches. My wife and I don't do the "sit down and quietly listen to an album" thing as much as we probably should, but early on in our relationship she walked into me zoning out to the first one and we listened to both back to back then.
Pretty much add Tool's AENIMA to the mix and you've captured my goth clothed, JOHNNY THE HOMICIDAL MANIAC reading, dealing-with-insomnia-with-journalling-and-drawing high school years pat.
That is...a whole lot of passion. Heh. Are you excited about the new film?
I'm pretty excited. I'm probably not going to catch it theatrically, but I like that the descriptions of the plot indicate a clearer causality drawn between Eric and Shelley's past and WHY they were targeted by the gang. The original movies' relationship to violence and crime was relatively cartoonish in retrospect.
That said whereas Skarsgard can clearly embody The Crow, the movie's success in my mind will be whether the villains and their mooks are as colorful as the likes of David Patrick Kelly and Iggy Pop. That's a big ask. To me that's why The Crow: Wicked Prayer wasn't quite as memorable or fulfilling. I remember Edward Furlong moping around, I can't remember who he was fighting against.
And... The soundtrack better rock, haha.
Achtung Baby. I listened to it on my Discman over and over on a family vacation in early high school. It was the first time I started sort of pulling away from the family unit. Something about the mix of dark and light on that album just resonated perfectly with me. And it turns out that while it was one of my definitive high school albums, it was one of my older sister’s definitive college albums. That was a pretty cool thing to discover.
"The Very Best of The Spinners" (Rhino Records) was one of the first CDs I bought with my own money, an outgrowth of the kind of stuff I was listening to on the radio at that time. I've added considerably to my collection of Black music on CD ever since.
Omg, yes!! The Rubberband Man was played during every basketball game warm ups when I was a sophomore in high school. And I still can sing every word to Sadie, Games People Play, Mighty Love, etc. The Spinners are the entire soundtrack to my high school years.
I love The Spinners. Really, just about anything Thom Bell ever did. Even the aborted album with Elton John, which resulted in some pretty good tracks. Some of them back by members of The Spinners.
Two albums lulled me to sleep through high school. The first was Neil Young's LIVE RUST and the second was PINK FLOYD'S THE WALL. Both albums heavily into storytelling (NY - Short Stories, PF - Feature Film), so that all makes sense as to who I am today.
I was thinking about what “coming of age” really meant and all the high-brow things it could mean - but honestly the album that I had the most college-age, no-parents-to-deceive, you’re-a-man now sex listening to is “Clarity” by Jimmy Eat World
I think "coming of age" means different things to different people. For me, it's the last two years of high school and first three years post-high school. It's a blurry time, in which I discovered who I was and who I wasn't. Now, I wish I'd been listening to more Jimmy Eat World, though. Heh.
David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Tho released before my time, I’d sing/scream the songs (ground control to major tom, take your protein pills and put your helmet on) aloud in harmony with my friends in Olympia late at night at the park and dancing together to the song life on mars. Radiohead OK computer, because their music to me encapsulated the post modern ennui of growing up at the start of a new millennium. (Grandaddy makes a similar case in “2000 man” from their album Software Slump.) Public Enemy, black steel. Massive Attack, teardrop. PJ Harvey, down by the water. Sonic Youth, bull in the heather. Talking heads, genius of love and born under punches. Belle and Sebastian, electronic renaissance. Patti Smith, horses. Lauryn Hill, that thing. That’s way too many, way more than one track. but it’s so hard for me to pick just one. Gin blossoms is ideal 90s kids music at its strongest imo. Thank you for asking readers about their formative memories of music!
Gin Blossoms isn't even the beginning of it! What we listened to on repeat made no sense when looked at as a whole: White Zombie, Meatloaf, Concrete Blonde, Jim Croce, Janis Joplin, and so on. Thanks for sharing a glimpse at your personal soundtrack!
I love Jim Croce. It’s not a name that gets mentioned enough!
That would be Metallica's Kill'em All :)
The Opposite of December by Poison the Well was/is probably the most transformative album of my teenage years. It was the first metalcore album I picked for myself, the first one I obsessed over, the first one I memorized all the lyrics for.
Poison the Well is still a great band, and I still get excited when they release new albums. But nothing beats the feeling of that first-love album. And my first love was The Opposite of December.
Thanks for sharing, Fallon!
Earl Sweatshirt’s “Some Rap Songs” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Rap_Songs) came out during my freshman year of college and helped me become more introspective and reflective at a time when I was actively discovering my own identity and in the earliest stages of developing my adult sense of self.
The album also ushered-in a more mainstream awareness of a broader genre of underground rap that was heavily sample-driven/melodic, lyrically dense, and less reliant on the predictable rap/trap drum patterns of that era.
It also partially inspired me to make music of my own; I made a mixtape during the spring break of my freshman year (entitled “Spring Break Sillies”) and regularly made beats into sophomore/junior year. It’s been a few years since I’ve made new music but I am still a proud owner of Ableton 11 and I still am always listening for sounds begging to be sampled into something new (the short intro song on my first substack essay was produced by me: https://open.substack.com/pub/thestupideconomy/p/coming-soon).
I credit so much of my artistic identity to my favorite rappers, Earl Sweatshirt being one of the most prominent and influential among them.
I'm still trying to find a moment to read this article you shared, as everything else you wrote here has me wanting to take a deep dive with you on the subject. More soon, Arlen. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for sharing so many details of your biography, Chris!
So many good memories as a teenager, listening to this album.