My First Record: Veronica and Annie of Oh! My Blackbird

05/01/2012 By

Veronica Kohl – “Aquarium” by Aqua

One of the first albums I can remember buying for myself, inspiring my first personal musical experience outside of my dad’s Beatles and ABBA collections, was Aqua’s “Aquarium.”  I think on this same trip to the record store I got the cassette of Chumbawumba’s “Tubthumping” but that might be a longer story to get into.

Like most youths alive in 1997, I had been exposed to the song “Barbie Girl” through the radio but upon purchasing the CD I became enthralled with nearly all of the tracks.  They were kind of psychedelic, nonsensical but had inescapably catchy melodies which I could eat a bunch of candy, dress up and jump around to.  In combination with the oddly sexual male/female vocal dynamic, the songs were just enough to entertain my easily distracted 8 year old brain. While pleasure in listening to this album now mostly comes from nostalgia, rather than an appreciation for the intricacy of the music itself, I still can’t help but bop around and sing along with the lyrics I somehow remember word for word.

Annie Sullivan- The Beatles “Blue Anthology”

I vividly remember my first record. It was the Beatles’ Blue album, the two-disc compilation CD spanning 1967-1970. I would like to preface this with a nod to the fact that the Beatles might be a cliche record/artist to pick, but in all honesty, it really was my first record!

There was a constant flow of music in my parents’ house; mostly classical, but with some pop/folk/and disco in heavy rotation( ABBA, Peter Paul & Mary, and Gilbert & Sullivan to name a few).

[Read more...]

Filed Under: My First Record Tagged With: , , , , , ,

My First Record: Joseph Westerlund of Megafaun

03/01/2012 By

By the spring of 1992, I had finally saved up enough money from my small paper route to purchase my first CD player. It was a peak moment in my otherwise geeky sixth grade existence. My next door neighbor, who was a year older than me, had already begun acquiring a significant collection of the usual suspects, such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Primus, Smashing Pumpkins, Jane’s Addiction. He sympathetically sent me home one afternoon with a copy of Boyz II Men – Cooleyhighharmony, which he had failed to sell at his parent’s yard sale the week before. I definitely wore that one out, but it was more out of necessity than by choice.

Thankfully, partially in protest to hearing that record on an incessant loop, my folks drove me to the local independent record store in Eau Claire, called Tu Trax. I picked up Alice in Chains‘ Dirt, which had been on my wish list for a while. I had already listened to this record a bunch of times while hanging out at friends’ houses, so my folks hadn’t had a buffer for what they were about to hear coming through the floor of my upstairs bedroom. It must have been somewhat of a shock to hear their son go from blasting DC Talk and Amy Grant tapes from a tiny boombox just weeks before, to “Yeah, they come to snuff the rooster,” or “What the hell am I/Thousand eyes a fly/Lucky then I’d be/In one day deceased” being delivered in that deliciously hideous, nasally bellow. The switch from tape to CD was much more than a technological advancement, it was an aesthetic evolution into adolescence as well!

[Read more...]

Filed Under: My First Record Tagged With: , , , , , , ,