What album first awakened you to music?

For me, it was the first Franz Ferdinand album. My mom bought the CD for me when I was in the seventh or eighth (12-13 y.o.)grade and the effect that album had on my taste in music is still very apparent. Before that album, I only listened to video game music, whatever was targeted to pre-teens (like boybands and Disney singers), or whatever my parents listened to.

I still think that album is fantastic and it has remained a favorite for as long as I've been aware of it.

After Franz Ferdinand, I discovered Nirvana's Nevermind and trance music. Even now, my choice of music usually falls along those three points - indie rock, electronic, grunge.

edited 25th Feb '13 7:31:57 PM by Completion

for expermental stuff it was sunn's white2

tool's undertow and aenima is what got me going.

now i listen to dark ambient,drone doom,noise,metal music.

edited 25th Feb '13 5:05:56 PM by dronepeanut2

White Pony by Deftones, it was the third album I'd ever heard. Their music in general kinda got me into listening to any genre of music thanks to the broad range of sounds they tend to do.

edited 25th Feb '13 6:59:49 PM by NULLcHiLD27

Since When by 54-40, I would say. Prior to that, I listened to a lot of Metallica, and a few similar bands. My musical tastes began to mellow after that album.

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I'm going to say it was Flood by They Might Be Giants: I was mainly listening to top 40 radio and whatever my parents put on (some of which still had some impact on my current tastes I suppose), when my half-sister put "Birdhouse In Your Soul" on a mix tape meant for my musical edification, then later bot me a cassette of the whole album. I feel like on the whole the Genre Roulette element of this album was a part of why my tastes are a bit eclectic.

I suppose for me it wasn't so much just one album as it was a mish-mash of things.

• As a kid, I watched Cartoon Network a lot, and, honestly, looking back, they featured a lot of alternative bands (They Might Be Giants, The Apples In Stereo, Shonen Knife, The Hives, the list goes on...) on that channel in music videos and ad bumps and all that. These are all bands I listen to now.

• They Might Be Giants was the very first alternative act I ever actually got into, starting, as mentioned, from hearing their stuff on Cartoon Network, and then eventually I downloaded a few of their songs, culminating in my purchase of...the Indestructible Object EP. Then Flood, and not too long after Apollo 18 (which is still one of my favorite albums of theirs, though not the favorite of mine—that honor belongs to Mink Car) and The Else (the first album of theirs I bought when it was still new...and I never realized until at least three years later that it had that other Cast Your Pod to the Wind CD included with it. Me stupid).

• The Apples In Stereo was similar—though it took me a while with them, the first album of theirs I got, New Magnetic Wonder, was also my first taste of indie pop, even if I just thought it was just rock at the time.

• The first band that I ever got into that nobody could ever be reasonably expected to know*
  HIPSTER ALERT!
  was Pepper's Ghost, a now defunct Phillie-based rock band with one foot in the '70s and the other in The Beatles. I first heard of them from, of all things, the Drake And Josh soundtrack (which I will fully admit to only buying because of the rendition of 'Soul Man' by the titular characters on it) and loved the two songs of their on it, so I checked 'em out and I was hooked, and I still am. This was in middle school, though, before my *true* awakening.
  • As an aside, that CD was filled with alternative bands, and I unfortunately neglected to give them all a fair chance in my judgemental youth. Gotta dig that up again and give it another spin.

However, those were just kinda flukes*

. The album that really, truly opened my eyes to music? The Beatles' 1 compilation. That was essentially my Beatles 101, and I have since been a straight A student in that. Obsessed with the Beatles to an unhealthy degree now. I know that most respectable serious music fans completely discount and denigrate that album for being redundant and unnecessary...but I'd argue that if it could turn someone like me who previously never even liked The Beatles into the huge Beatlemaniac that I am today, it's worth a shot. For every Beatles fan who just grew up with them, there will be another whose first Beatles album was 1. And, since it's got all of their 27 number one hits*

Of course, that depends on which charts you're using, as certain charts would say that "Please Please Me" and, to a lesser degree, "Strawberry Fields Forever" should have been on there, but that's just splitting hairs

on a single disc, I'd say that ain't half bad of an introduction.

I suppose one more, mention, there's three main groups that really got me into modern rock music—they'd be The Killers, The Gaslight Anthem (Jersey represent!!), and Cage The Elephant. Before listening to them, I was more or less a classic rock elitist, with Bon Jovi really being the only thing that slipped past my radar there.*

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I could go on about all sorts of other musical awakenings I've had, but I don't think you really want to hear about that at all.

edited 25th Feb '13 11:53:15 PM by 0dd1

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I was so sheltered musically, listening only to country because if my mom didn't like it, I figured I wouldn't like it either. I think just maturing made me realize that it's okay to like non-country music.

Also, I never really learned to think critically about music until I joined a music forum. Every time a new single comes out, it gets a thread, and other people discuss the song. Their discussions got me wrapped up in joining the conversation. Combine that with my (slight) maturity and the grip of Asperger's weakening on me, and I really got a handle on realizing that music can stir emotions, can make you laugh, cry, rage, etc.

The Beatles were also a sort of awakening that opened me up to classic rock, something that I ignored because I was tired of listening to what my parents listened to. The Killers were more important to my music development, though; my sister had purchased that CD for herself... which I promptly stole. I overlooked The Killers in my original post, but really they're just as important as Franz Ferdinand to me.

edited 26th Feb '13 7:36:25 AM by Completion

For me, it was *Coheed And Cambria*'s Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV: From Fear Through The Eyes of Madness.

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Well my mom would always play neo soul when i was a child and i love the genre to this day, especially Erykah Badu, and i began making music after listening to "Discovery" by Daft Punk

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The REM anthology Eponymous and Concrete Blonde's Bloodletting were the first two albums that I really latched onto back when I was a wean.

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

Aside from the classic rock albums and greatest hits compilations my parents had when I was little, one of the first albums I really got into was Radiohead's Kid A.

At the time, I kept hearing and reading a lot about Radiohead, but I hadn't heard any of their music. Then Kid A randomly showed up at the store one day (this was back when dial up was the only connection available in my area so downloading music was basically out of the question) so I bought it to see what all the fuss around this Radiohead band was about.

I was expecting something that sounded a bit more like a rock album because I kept hearing Radiohead described as a rock band, but I didn't expect one album with only ten tracks to introduce me to so many genres. The most obvious one was how the album convinced me to actually listen to electronic music in general, but it even got me into genres I didn't expect to get into (ie: "The National Anthem" got me into jazz and fusion because I wanted to hear more music like it).

I wouldn't say it first awakened me to music in general, as I was listening to other "alternative" artists before them, but only a handful of albums have come close to altering the way I listened to music like Kid A.

If you mean, the album that made me realize there was more to music than just what was on the Billboard Top 40 Singles chart, probably On the Third Day by Electric Light Orchestra.

Confirmed Bachelors: the dramedy hit of 1883!

That is a damn good album

Though I must admit, my first (and forever favorite) ELO album was A New World Record. I think On the Third Day was my second, though.

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By the way, I never fully answered the question. Oops.

I would say that the album that really awakened me was Horse of a Different Color by Big & Rich. I loved "Wild West Show" after I first heard it, and enjoyed the heck out of the next three singles too (including the notorious "Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)"). They just had so much energy and passion in their work, such creative sounds on each track, interesting production, and clever lyrics. The goofier songs were every bit as excellent as the more serious ones.

Big & Rich seemed to lose all that energy in a hurry, though. The next album had some amazing ballads ("8th of November", "Never Mind Me") and more serious songs ("Leap of Faith"), but some of the novelty songs on it were kinda weak. I didn't even buy the third album, since I heard it was awful outside "Lost in This Moment", a dead-serious wedding ballad that, while certainly well-done, didn't seem like the Big & Rich I knew. They followed it up with two weak novelty songs, then went on hiatus.

They came back in the past year with a beautiful ballad called "That's Why I Pray", but from what I hear, the corresponding album is just mediocre. I didn't even want to touch the next single because it was titled "Party Like Cowboyz".

Hmm... Depends what you mean by awakened.

Orbital's Brown Album was my first real introduction to music, back when I was a kid in the nineties.

Blues artists like Howling Wolf and John Lee Hooker introduced me to blues, while Led Zeppelin and The Beatles introduced me to rock.

Pink Floyd introduced me to the finesses of music, while Nirvana's Nevermind introduced me to the importance of listening properly.

But in all honesty, it was Cardiacs' 1984 masterpiece The Seaside that truly awakened me to music. It awakened me to the immense number of possibilities in music, it redefined what I saw as a good tune, and most of all it gave me nine of the best songs ever written to sing along to, attempt to dance to, and annoy my neighbours with.

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On my wild goose chase to find that one ELO song I knew from the radio, with that classical-sounding string hook that I liked*

, I wound up going on a birthday jaunt with my great aunt to the record store, who bought me OT3D on cassette. In retrospect, if she had known the album contained the word “f***ing” in the lyrics to one of the songs, she may have refused.

Anyway, it didn’t have the song I wanted, but I wore the tape out on my cheap J.C. Penney tape recorder, particularly the Side One suite, which totally blew my ten-year-old mind.

edited 17th Mar '13 1:30:08 PM by Bananaquit

Confirmed Bachelors: the dramedy hit of 1883!

You know something, for the longest time until it was pointed out to me, I never even realized it had that word in it. Of course, it's pretty hard to understand at all what Jeff Lynne's singing under all those layered tracks of vocals.

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Don't know about music in general, but Opeth's Blackwater Park was the first album I owned that really pushed the limits of what extreme music could sound like (for comparison, my experience with heavier-than-normal music prior to this band consisted mostly of Metallica and Slipknot). There have been plenty of other albums important to my musical development since then, but that's the one that stands out the most.

Somehow you know that the time is right.

Weird as it might sound, I guess the first album I actually listened properly was Backstreet Boys' Millenium. The first album that started molding my current taste, though, was Hybrid Theory.

edited 18th Mar '13 2:02:17 PM by NEO

No regret shall pass over the threshold!

Well the first song I have a distinct memory of hearing is "All My Life" by K-Ci and Jojo, in 1998. I got it stuck in my head and didn't find out who sang the song until almost 10 years later. The first album I remember listening to fully is probably The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill by Lauryn Hill.

"Weird Al" Yankovic, Dare To Be Stupid.

This probably says something about me.

edited 19th Mar '13 9:18:28 AM by FalconPain

Depends on what you mean, Beck's Odelay got me paying attention to music, but Rush's 2112 got me out of my stupid pretentious metalhead phase

"I could eat a knob at night" - Karl Pilkington

Boston's debut album. Ironically, I've listened to it probably only one to three times since the year after I bought the album.

edited 21st Mar '13 10:15:59 PM by SuperKing93