We all have one — an album that sparked a change in the way we listen to music and what we choose to listen to. Some of our music staff looked back into their history of music-listening and wrote about that one defining album that changed their perspective. Read about their experiences below:
Lauren: Paper Route, Absence (2009)
In 8th grade, one of my friends asked me to go see Paramore at The Pageant in St. Louis, and I was so pumped for it, so I looked up the opener which was Paper Route. I listened to Absence and fell in love with it. They had a sound that I had never heard before, especially coming from a person who mainly listened to well-known bands/top 20 music. It’s still one of those albums that I can listen to straight through and it’s just as great as the first time. They definitely steered me towards my love for indie rock, unique sounds, and finding bands/musicians that I’ve never heard of before.
PS: my dad didn’t even end up letting me go to the concert, and I’m still mad 6 years later

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Parker: Sufjan Steven’s, Illinois (2005)

It was late in the summer of 2005, and my older brother Frank bought the album at a record store in Washington D.C. while we were on vacation there. He was excited; he bought an edition of the album with Superman on the cover, something that was removed in later editions because of a copyright issue with DC Comics. Frank is seven years older than me and was headed into his senior year of high school, which was such a pivotal time in flux of both life and taste in entertainment, and, to me, Frank was trailblazer — he was cool, and I tried my hardest to like what he liked. Thankfully what he liked was good, and I’m grateful that his taste in music has influenced me to this day. We listened to that album a lot on that trip and in the year following before Frank left to go to school in Rolla. The album is great. The instrumentation is incredibly bold and made me thirst for the robust string and horn sections and yearn for the ethereal choral backing and fluttering flutes. The subject matter was pertinent to our lives because both of our parents had lived in Springfield, Illinois (separately, coincidentally) and we could ask about some of the specifically Illinoisan allusions that Stevens made. It made Illinois seem mythical, like a lost world of Americana that only Sufjan Stevens and some of our relatives knew about. It was magical, mysterious, and damn masterful. This album has truly changed the way I listen to music by making me appreciate the nuances of artistry and teaching me to envelop my imagination into the sonic world. It taught me to not just listen to music, but to feel it also, and I am truly thankful for Sufjan Stevens for making the album and my brother Frank for immersing me in that experience.

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Chris: Lou Reed, Transformer (1972)

Lou Reed’s 1972 album, Transformer, changed my perspective in music and what could be “aggressively anti-establishment”. Prior to this my music palate had been Iggy Pop, The Clash and the like. Transformer taught me I can be aggressively anti-establishment, subtly.

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 Emily: Yo La Tengo, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One (1997)

 When I was 16 my older brother and I shared a black 1997 Volvo wagon, which I didn’t get it to myself often. My brother filled the car with his 311 and Sublime CD’s (he has since moved on to better music, don’t worry) leaving me with little room for my own music. Shortly after I got my drivers’ license, I just so happened to have burned Yo La Tengo’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One onto a blank CD – mostly because it had “Autumn Sweater” on it, and that was the only Yo La Tengo song I’d heard. Whenever I got the chance to drive ‘black beauty’ (my dad named her) on my own, I listened to this album, and slowly but surely I fell completely in love with it. Being way too lazy to burn any other CD, I Can Hear… was always my go to. I was all about catchy folk pop at the time, stuff with simple melodies that I didn’t have to think too much about to get into, but this album taught me to appreciate subtlety and depth, and how to be patient when I listen to music. It didn’t take me long to realize that I Can Hear… struck something in me, and I just clicked with it. Songs like “Damage” and “Deeper into Movies” were particularly influential in refining my taste. “Spec Bebop” was the first song I ever truly got lost in, and I can’t even talk about all the different emotions “Sucarcube” still makes me feel. Learning to love this album opened me up to music that I still refer to as my favorite today — Broken Social Scene’s Feel Good Lost, Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me, and Yo La Tengo’s entire discography overall. It’s got a very special place in my heart, and I never drove that Volvo without wanting to listen to it (RIP black beauty </3).

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 Iyas: At the Drive in, Relationship of Command (2000)

Prior to hearing At the Drive In’s Relationship of Command, I’d existed in a musically comatose state that involved cycling through Led Zeppelin I-IV and trying to get my friends to listen to Pink Floyd’s “Echoes.” I lived for that guitar solo in “Stairway to Heaven,” and the pentatonic scale was tattooed into my brain. Surely, I thought, everything that needed to be said musically could be found within those two groups’ discographies. In ATDI’s music, however, I found a means of expression that I didn’t know was possible. When Cedric shriek-shouts “so who’s in charge here?!” on “Arcarsenal,” it becomes clear that something bigger than the band is forcing itself out through their instruments and vocal chords; lightning rods for that ball of White Light/White Heat that everyone carries within them. Although Cedric’s lyrics make no sense on a superficial level, the conveyed emotions are crystal-clear.

“Cranes perched in scows, in the windows they would peek snuck inside the sound of sleep don’t sweat the hemorrhaging gland”

It is Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s delivery that imbues these words with ferocity and intensity the likes of which I had never been exposed to before; through free association he was able to throw out the constraints of language in favor of pure self-expression. Omar Rodriguez Lopez lays down some ugly, sometimes psychedelic, dissonant chord progressions/melodies that are somehow incredibly catchy. Not to mention those amazing start-stop dynamics that’ll have you looking like an inflatable advertising man if you try to dance along. These musicians’ blatant disregard for accepted musical rules has instilled in me an ever-growing hunger for dissonance and weird sounds. With some help from the One Armed Scissor (just had to make that joke…) I was cut away from Breyers Vanilla Ice-cream sounds and allowed to explore genres I’d never heard of before — drone, post-punk, post-hardcore, noise-rock, black metal, krautrock.

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Evan: Arcade Fire, Funeral (2004)

In 2008 I was really, really badass. Just to give you an insight on 12 year old me, I wore skater shoes, I had the longest hair, and I detested Tha Carter III – settling instead for “true art” in the form of Avenged Sevenfold, The Offspring, Nirvana, and Rise Against (8th grade me even went so far as to say that it would be a crime if Rise Against didn’t get inducted into the Rock n Roll hall of fame, unfortunately). I had my share of guilty pleasures; Justin Timberlake’s, FutureSex/LoveSounds was a personal favorite of mine, though you would never hear me say it. I was certain that in order to be cool, I needed to listen to music that was fast, loud, utilized guitars, and was full of swear words. I thought that all the music you heard on the radio was shit, rap was just people talking over beats, country and jazz were for old people, and classical music couldn’t bore me more.
Funeral, however, destroyed my image of music in the best possible way. Listening to the sweeping chorus of “Wake Up” for the first time, I was convinced this was as weird as music could possibly get. There were more than 4 people in the band (!), hardly any noticeable guitars (!!), classical instrumentation (!!!) and above all else, real human emotion (!!!!). I was unsure what to think after my initial listen. I was intrigued, yet cautious so not to seem like a giant wuss for liking something with so few distorted guitars. I listened again, and again, and again. I listened to the entire album on repeat for days, probably weeks even, trying to figure out what it was that kept driving me back to this album that was so… not badass. At the time, I never could figure it out, though Funeral did open my mind to a new world. My taste in music began to shift. I began to emphasize originality over sameness, musicality over loudness, and emotion over “coolness.” I began to seek out strange music: Deerhunter, The Microphones, Toro y Moi, and Pavement all found their way to my iPod Nano shortly after. I got into rap, falling in love with OutKast, which prompted me to get into soul and jazz. I even found myself falling in love with Elton John. What Funeral did for me was provide me with a critical insight on who I am as a person. It was the first album to make me “feel.” It was cathartic, melancholic, angry, uplifting, hopeful, ugly, and beautiful — often within the same song. It opened my mind to not only new music, but new ideas that I never would’ve thought of. In many ways, Funeral is the reason I am the person I am today. And I couldn’t be happier about it.

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Elorm: Fall Out Boy, Folie a Deux (2008)

The music that Fall Out Boy started out making and the music that they make today is totally different. Their changes have been polarizing for many of their fans. During the midpoint of their music career, though, Fall Out Boy released an album that took my perspective on music to a new level. I listened to Folie a Deux after a friend gave me his CD, and the experience was life changing. The album doesn’t have typical pop punk style that Fall Out Boy is known for; it’s soulful, symphonic, and sophisticated as well. They didn’t really speak with teenage angst; the subject matter was culturally relevant and mature. The album brought me to the awareness of lyricism outside of hip-hop. I’d never heard anything so smartly composed in rock music or ever been so concerned with figuring out the true meaning behind an album’s lyrics in my life; the cryptic song titles only enhanced that experience. I would go on just about every website I could find, trying to dissect the lyrics and titles (by doing this I actually kind of predicted Fall Out Boy’s hiatus a year in advance, but that’s another story). Although a lot of the original Fall Out Boy fans did not like this album, I feel like it’s their best, and I would not care as much about music as I do now without Folie a Deux.

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Tommy: Kid Cudi, Man on the Moon (2009)

I used to listen to music that made me look cool. I was a skinny, shy, awkward pre-teen who would sag his pants and wear backwards baseball caps two sizes too big for his still developing skull. Why? Because all the Top 40 rap stars were doing it….well, if you really want to call them stars. The mid 2000s have a bad reputation for producing some of the most shallow and campy one hit wonders ever known to the genre. And of course my naivety got the best of me. However, by the time I was 14 I began to really discover myself and grow into my affinity for hard rock. The rest is kind of history, and you can listen to my heavy metal show every Tuesday at midnight on KCOU. It was merely a phase; I had proudly given up my baller-in-training status to become an individual. Really though, I was conforming to the white, suburban normalcy that was expected of me. Hip hop was more or less dead, or at least dead to me at that point. But later on, during my sophomore year of high school, the up and coming Kid Cudi burst onto the scene with a critically acclaimed album that would change my outlook on hip-hop music, music in general, and life.

2009’s Man on the Moon: The End of the Day would go on to become the soundtrack to my adolescence, and more or less (at least so far, and aptly so if you get the song reference) the soundtrack to my life. As far as I was concerned at that point, hip hop either consisted of one-off club hits with accompanying ludicrous dance moves, or poetically critical assessments of the black experience by OG’s like Mos Def and Common. Where could a vanilla boy in an upper middle class vanilla town pick back up? As it turns out, Scott Mescudi was a lot like me. Coming from Shaker Heights, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb with a median family income of just over $100,000, Cudi was an introverted loner drawn to the arts, just trying to find his place in the humdrum environment of a typical American high school.

As it turned out, I needed his music more than I could have ever imagined. Hip-hop to me was all about bravado and beats– a sound that could only come from the grittiest of city streets. Kid Cudi came into the game embracing his underdog identity. “Homie, rule of thumb/ It don’t really matter just where you’re from/ All that really matter is where you’re goin,” he raps on “Cudi Zone.” But where was I going? I always struggled with self-acceptance and self worth; I didn’t have any real, applicable talents or hobbies at a time when all my peers were engulfed in the everyday bliss of extracurricular activities. I was, and still am, the one whose notebooks are adorned with intricate pen doodles, and who silently stares at his ceiling every evening for an hour. At this point you’re probably reading this thinking I’m some oddball hopeless romantic or something like that…If it weren’t for Kid Cudi, I might have to agree. “I’ve got some issues that nobody can see/ And all of these emotions are pouring out of me,” Cudi sings on “Soundtrack 2 My Life.” Ok, so I was reassured that I didn’t need a colorful past to live a colorful future, and that it was ok to have pent up angst, but so what? The fact of the matter was, he was making some of the most innovate, futuristic music to hit the rap game in a while, all inspired by the ordinary. In a way, there was a lot of emo sprit within Cudi. He put his heart and soul into making music for all the misfits out there. His lyrics on MOTM cover topics like winning over girls, social acceptance, the endless cycle of hoping and dreaming, and just not giving a f***. Through the listening to the album, I found the inspiration I never knew I needed. I was living in my head, and for once in my life I was excited about it.

MOTM is more than just a mere shrine to my nostalgia, however. The album signaled a renaissance in hip-hop. Introspective acts like Odd Future, Milo, and Yung Lean would go on to follow in Cudi’s footsteps. The production style on the album takes elements from various genres of music and incorporates instruments such as violin, guitar, and piano. It comes as no surprise that Kanye West was the one to take Cudi under his wing and help produce his groundbreaking debut (he is also featured on the Lady Gaga-sampling “Make Her Say’ alongside Common). A concept album, MOTMexplores the “lonely stoner” persona that Cudi had given himself. As a matter of fact, it’s really a double concept album; A psychedelic space motif suggested in the name is supported by song titles like “Enter Galactic,” and “Up Up and Away,” in addition to narrative commentary by Common at the end of select tracks. The narration establishes Cudi as the protagonist on a journey through the inner workings of his own psyche. Heralded by many as the first “psychedelic hip hop album” of its kind, MOTM explores the troubled mind as a vast galaxy. It’s the kind of music you light up a blunt and look up at the stars to. It’s very much an exploration of the self and a search for truth and meaning. Kid Cudi dared to descend to where other rappers had seldom ventured–into their consciousnesses.

Discovering this album and the artist who made it gave me a refreshing new outlook on hip-hop. I realized that to make the realest music in the game, you just have to be real with people, and real to yourself. Kid Cudi bared all and took it in stride. It was all I played as I drove around aimlessly with my best friend in his Honda Accord, looking for something to do, looking for answers. MOTM made me ok with who I was, and who I may (or may not) become. And while I still get hung up on the endless societal pressures that come with being an adult, I can always turn to these words off of the title track:

“I never gave a f***. I never gave a f*** about what ni**** thought about me, man. I mean I did but like, f*** it. You know what I’m sayin’?”

Because at heart, Cudi and I will always be kids