Personal History of Music Category
A Personal History of Music, Day 10: “Basement Apartment” by Sarah Harmer
Posted on June 10, 2022 8 Comments
I don’t usually turn to Time for musical recommendations, but in late 2000, I happened to have a subscription to the magazine and the magazine, in turn, happened to recommend Sarah Harmer’s album You Were Here as the top debut album of 2000, and one of the top ten albums of the year. The next […]
A Personal History of Music, Day 9: “Big Bright World” by Garbage
Posted on June 9, 2022 13 Comments
Some bands and musicians you have to grow into, and/or have deep introspective thoughts about, and some you get right from the word “go,” no additional thinking required. For me Garbage is in the second category. I first heard them with the single “Queer,” and two things were immediately clear: The band had perfected a […]
A Personal History of Music, Day 8: “Sweet Surrender” by Sarah McLachlan
Posted on June 8, 2022 10 Comments
A quarter of a century ago — so long ago that this site did not even exist — I wrote a long essay entitled “Why I Have a Soft Spot for Sarah McLachlan.” To get right to the spoiler, it was because, in no small way, I identified with her. As I wrote at the […]
A Personal History of Music, Day 7: “Willow” by Joan Armatrading
Posted on June 7, 2022 13 Comments
This is the oldest song in my Personal History of Music, dating from Armatrading’s 1977 album Show Some Emotion, but that’s not when I encountered it. I encountered it nearly 20 years later, when it popped up on the soundtrack of the 1995 film Boys on the Side, which starred Drew Barrymore, Whoopi Goldberg and […]
A Personal History of Music, Day 6: “Style” by Taylor Swift
Posted on June 6, 2022 18 Comments
My path to Taylor Swift and my appreciation of her as a musician and songwriter was a bit backward from how I think it’s usually done, either by me or by other folks. Usually there’s the music first: a song or album that catches our ear and makes us want to listen, and having listened, […]
A Personal History of Music, Day 5: “Love Is a Stranger” by the Eurythmics
Posted on June 5, 2022 20 Comments
Over on Reddit, there’s an interest group (or “subreddit”) called “Im14AndThisIsDeep,” where the gist of the subreddit is to show a bunch of images/statements/gifs/etc that seem deeply profound if you are young and inexperienced, and, uhhhh, less so if you have any knowledge of the world under your proverbial belt. The group is not very […]
A Personal History of Music, Day 4: “Kiteflyer’s Hill” by Eddi Reader
Posted on June 4, 2022 9 Comments
The thing about Eddi Reader is that there are just too many songs to choose from to represent her excellence: Nearly all the songs from Fairground Attraction, the neo-skiffle band she emerged from with a bang (including the just-about-perfect pop song called, appropriately, “Perfect”), and a whole spread of singles from her solo work. But […]
A Personal History of Music, Day 3: “Where Will I Be” by Emmylou Harris
Posted on June 3, 2022 19 Comments
In March of 1996, I left the job I had been working at for five years — film critic for the Fresno Bee — and joined a then up-and-coming technology company called America Online as their in-house writer and editor. I had joined AOL for two reasons: The first was that the Bee wanted to […]
A Personal History of Music, Day 2: “Maps” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Posted on June 2, 2022 12 Comments
“Maps” may or may not be the best rock song of the 21st Century (it was released as a single in September of 2003), but I can say that when I heard it for the first time, my reaction to was “Holy shit, that one’s a keeper.” The song had the quality in which it […]
A Personal History of Music, Day 1: “Only You” by Yaz(oo)
Posted on June 1, 2022 38 Comments
For June of 2022, I’ve decided that once a day, every day, I’m going to write a post celebrating some of the music and musicians who were (and are) important to me over the years. Over the course of this month, I’ll cover music that spans more than 40 years, from 1977 to 2018, which […]
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