Twenty Albums of Inspiration

I think it's about time I put something a bit different on this blog (but it's still about music) and something that might take a fair few days to do. So thinking about music, I've decided to write about just twenty albums that have inspired me one way or another...    

 Twenty Albums of Inspiration

It’s difficult to pick just twenty albums that have either inspired (or indeed, influenced me). Forty- odd years of listening to music; thousands and thousands of songs, and probably millions of hours. 

How to pick just twenty albums? I have pondered this over the past few days and really got myself tied up into knots over it. The more I thought about it I came to the realisation that if I wasn’t careful I’d be merely be collating a list of my favourite albums rather than those that have been inspiring. For that reason, there were some omissions that have left me feeling a bit guilty. Neil Young’s “Tonight’s the Night”, Prince’s “Black Album”, Sunn 0)))’s “Monoliths and Dimensions” as well as a whole host of Muslimgauze possibilities were rejected.  Selections from Miles Davis and John Coltrane also have lost out. A whole shed load of blues artists didn’t make the cut; mostly because they never really issued albums in their lifetimes and although I have been very much inspired by individual songs they’d probably one just be one track on a cobbled together compilation.

I also decided to reject the notion of including any bootlegs or live (unofficial) albums.  This is a bit of shame because this meant missing out on probably one of greatest live albums ever-a recording of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band in Milwaukee in 1973 when  the show was interrupted by a bomb scare five or six songs into his set. The place was evacuated and Springsteen and the band retreated to a nearby hotel where they got royally pissed. This didn’t stop the show though and they returned to the venue at midnight along with the audience. They then proceeded to play until 3 a.m. and for the life of me I just do not understand why this has never been officially released.

I also rejected the idea of picking a representative selection of albums either by genre or trying to work in some sort of chronological order to it all i.e. starting in the 1920’s and working through to 2013. This would have been just too considered and although it had a certain attraction to it, the whole thing would have just seemed a bit show- offy. This therefore leads to nothing much from the 1960’s or 70’s and hardly anything from the past decade either. Is it that nothing from the turn of the millennium has really been inspiring or simply that I haven’t got my finger on the pulse?  Maybe it takes time for music to inspire or maybe there’s nothing that inspirational anymore.  

Anyway, here we go (from tomorrow) with the first of the twenty I’ve picked….