1001 Albums Summary

You're the first born, and therefore never had the mythical 'older brother with the cool record collection' to advise you. Luckily, Brian did. The brother's college CD collection began to trickle into the Jeep Cherokee that picked you up for school most days in high school. The entire record is a texture, maybe it’s the accordion or the mandolin. The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight -- it always made you tear up. It immediately felt nostalgic, despite it only being a few years old. Something in Stipe's voice, the loneliness, the reverb, the impressionism of the lyrics. The Jeep swaying dangerously along the curves of a country lane, the gravity of time pulling you along.

Dark and pulsating, cinematic & slightly foppish singing. Like if art school students were good at synths and drugs. 1990 seems like a time when darkness was manageable and the answer was a party. Remember when NIN used to scare you? That time you first her Animal in the bedroom of a friend, along with Big Ones from Aerosmith. It felt like getting away with something. Illicit. That a world was just beneath this one that you weren't allowed to know about, but once you did, there was no going back. But with older ears and a world that feels like a spinning piece of clay, off centered on a wheel that is speeding up, the old songs that scared you felt like an exercise in imagination. "Personal Jesus." "Policy of Truth"

As you get older, it feels like there will be fewer opportunities to dance all night. To move, unencumbered by what other people think, or what your body thinks it can still do. Maybe, though, there will be a place under the pines where someone has set up the big speakers, and it is dark enough to forget where you are, and who you are, and even who else is there with you. Maybe the tracks are long enough that it all becomes one song. Maybe the beat goes on and on and on…