“Songs are our way of keeping time.”
Paul Simon
I grew up with albums as companions. Whole seasons of my life pressed into vinyl and CDs, spooled through cassette tapes, and even tucked onto the occasional MiniDisc for good measure.
For me, albums weren’t just collections of songs—they were seasons. They were car rides and heartbreaks, Saturday afternoons with headphones, vinyl spinning in my parents’ living room. Each one carried its own atmosphere, and when I return to them now, it’s not just the music I hear. It’s the emotions and memories stitched into those tracks.
Of course, the way I listen changed over time. Like a lot of people, the 2010s scattered my habits into playlists, streams, and one-off songs. That’s a different kind of joy, but this list isn’t about that.
This list is about the era when albums were my unit of meaning.
What follows isn’t a critic’s canon. It’s my own. A top 20 that might change tomorrow, but today tells the truest story of me: the albums that shaped me, moved me, and still pull at something deep whenever I press play.
A Fine Frenzy, One Cell in the Sea
This album literally showed up in my hands.
It came from Evan, the husband of one of my wife’s friends. You know how those “husband pairings” go—you’re not sure if you’re actually going to like each other, you’re just along for the ride. But music cracked that door open. We both played guitar, both loved getting lost in the right album. And one day Evan says, “You’ve got to hear this record.”
It was by a young artist named A Fine Frenzy—Alison Sudol. I had never heard of her. Honestly, I don’t think I ever would have found it on my own. Maybe a stray song on the radio. But Evan didn’t give me a song. He handed me the whole album. And from the very first notes of Come On, Come Out, I was gone. Swept into something delicate, poetic, and somehow huge at the same time.
It wasn’t just discovering a new artist, it was discovering a shared language with a friend. And it’s funny: every time I go back to One Cell in the Sea, I don’t just hear Alison Sudol’s voice. I hear that moment—two husbands awkwardly figuring out if we actually like each other—and realizing we did.
Sometimes the right album doesn’t just find you. Sometimes it brings you a friend, too.
The Beatles, Abbey Road
I thought I knew Abbey Road.
My mom handed me the cassette when I was a teenager, and I wore that thing out in my Walkman. It had that squeaky plastic case that always cracked at the hinge, the one you had to tape back together after a few weeks. And inside it was my education.
On that cassette, Side A started with Here Comes the Sun. Which made perfect sense to me. That’s how you start an album. Light breaking through the clouds. It was almost biblical. Then, halfway through, Come Together swaggered in with that bassline, and I thought: Wow. The Beatles really knew what they were doing here.
Sunshine first, darkness second, and then—just when you thought they’d run out of tricks—the masterful medley at the end to tie the whole thing together like the finale of a Broadway show.
To teenage me, it felt like perfect architecture.
I didn’t just like the sequencing—I built my whole understanding of the album around it. I bragged about it. “Oh, Abbey Road? Yeah, genius structure. Hope, then grit. The architecture is flawless.”
And I believed that for decades. Until I hit my 40s, bought myself a fresh vinyl copy, and dropped the needle. Ready for George Harrison to welcome me with open arms.
Instead, BAM! Come Together. Right out of the gate.
I stared at the turntable in disbelief. Track one? TRACK ONE?! My entire teenage theology of Abbey Road collapsed in that moment. Turns out, the Beatles never consulted the cassette division at Capitol Records before sequencing their magnum opus.
So yeah, I’ve been living a lie my whole life. And here’s the kicker: I still kind of like my version better. I still hear Here Comes the Sun as the opener, every time. Which probably says more about me than it does about the Beatles.
Some people have the Mandela Effect. I’ve got the Abbey Road Effect.
Billy Joel, Greatest Hits Volume I & II
My friend Jerry insists Greatest Hits albums don’t count.
“It’s cheating,” he says, as though we’re drafting a fantasy team and I’ve just picked both Jordan and Pippen with one slot.
And from a purist’s standpoint, I get it. But… I’m not a purist.
I grew up in a house where Greatest Hits albums weren’t shortcuts, they were the main course. The track order, the sequencing, the way the songs stacked up one after another—that was my canon.
And Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits left its mark on me.
Two volumes, two discs, plenty to love—but it was Volume I that gave heartbeat to entire seasons of my life.
Piano Man alone drops me straight back into Gio’s Pizzeria in Brownsville. Friday nights with friends, quarters in the jukebox, the smell of pizza hanging in the air. Old enough to drive ourselves, to laugh too loud, to claim a night out as ours.
But the deeper imprint came my sophomore year of high school, when I was more or less adopted by a group of senior girls. Which, for the record, is both as thrilling and as confusing as it sounds.
Because here’s the thing: I didn’t know what to do with that kind of social upgrade. I was fifteen. I still had braces. Suddenly I was riding around with people who could vote. I had no business being there. I was just happy nobody asked me why I was in the car.
Yes, there were crushes, awkward subplots, and plenty of me soaking it all in, quietly amazed they kept letting me hang around. But more than the drama, there was music. And Billy Joel was the constant.
Volume I became our shared pulse. Freedom, romance, heartbreak, hope—it was all in there. And somehow, Billy Joel was the glue holding together this bizarre teenage ecosystem where a scrawny sophomore could hang with seniors and, for a whole year, believe he belonged.
Cat Stevens, Greatest Hits
My friend Jerry would roll his eyes here. Another Greatest Hits album? He’d call it padding the list, like sneaking CliffsNotes into an English exam. But again: I’m not a purist. In my house, these albums weren’t shortcuts, they were scripture.
This one sat in my parents’ vinyl collection until they did the unthinkable: they decided they didn’t want a vinyl collection anymore. A mystifying decision. But one I benefited from, since I inherited Cat Stevens Greatest Hits. And to me, it still feels sacred.
I remember the cover first. An illustrated Cat Stevens who, in my mind, looked exactly like my dad’s best friend, Joe. Which meant, for years, I half-believed Joe must be musically gifted. He wasn’t, but the association stuck.
The songs are timeless: Wild World, Hard Headed Woman, Moonshadow, Peace Train, Father and Son. Each one is like a friend who shows up exactly when you need them.
The only strike against the album comes at the very end: Another Saturday Night. A clunker. With so many other incredible songs in his catalog, it feels like an afterthought tacked onto the party.
But I don’t skip it.
Disliking that song has become part of the liturgy. A ritual of sorts. Because this isn’t just a record—it’s an heirloom. And like all heirlooms, it’s perfect in its imperfections.
Collective Soul, Collective Soul (self-titled)
If I’ve ever been truly obsessed with a band, it was Collective Soul. Not casual fan obsessed. I mean obsessed to the point where other people were starting to get concerned.
It started one night when Brownsville finally got its first “rock” station. I couldn’t sleep, fiddled with the radio dial, and out of the static came… Shine. That opening riff. That “yeah.” The guitar solo. That was it. I was done.
Some kids found God. I found Ed Roland.
But here’s where the obsession really took root. Their second album—the self-titled one—was the first time I understood what a release day meant. Back then, Tuesdays carried a kind of electricity. New music, new stories, all waiting for you at the record store.
But when that record came out in 1995, I wasn’t even home. I was in San Antonio with Jerry…for a nerd competition. Which is a sentence I don’t love admitting out loud.
Some kids had football games. I had…whatever this was. Polo shirts tucked into khakis, solving math problems, answering trivia about state birds. It wasn’t exactly Friday Night Lights.
But in the middle of that, I looked at Jerry and said, “We gotta get out of here.”
So between rounds, we slipped away to a magic kingdom. Not Disney. North Star Mall.
And when we got there, I didn’t walk to the music store—I sprinted. Bought that CD like it was gold bullion. Carried the bag around like someone might tackle me in the food court yelling, “Sir, that’s Collective Soul. You’re gonna have to put that back.”
And then came the moment.
On the bus ride back, I unwrapped that CD with the reverence of a holy artifact. Those of a certain age know the struggle: peeling shrink wrap with your teeth, the sticker strip that never comes off in one piece, and those brittle plastic hinges designed to last exactly 36 hours.
Finally, I slid the disc into my Discman.
And here’s where it gets good: I had a splitter. Two pairs of headphones. Which in the ’90s was basically social currency. Jerry plugs in, I hit play—
Click. Hiss. One second of silence.
Jerry looks at me like, “Is it working?”
And then… Collective Soul.
And suddenly the whole bus disappeared. The nerd competition, the cheap carpet smell, kids yelling in the back… all gone. Just two kids, two headphones, one brand-new album. And in that instant, the world cracked open.
That’s the magic of hearing an album the exact moment it lands. For me, that magic will always be Collective Soul in ’95—two kids away from home, skipping out for rock and roll, while the rest of our team was still arguing about the state bird of Wyoming.
Collective Soul, Dosage
When I left home for college, I left behind more than curfews and cafeteria food—I left behind dial-up. No more AOL chirps, no more “You’ve got mail” minutes ticking away like a cab meter. Suddenly I had high-speed internet. Which meant freedom. Which meant… time to build something.
And what I built was obvious: a shrine to Collective Soul. My band. My obsession.
This was the late ’90s, when most bands didn’t even have official websites. So I carved one out on a place called Geocities. And if you don’t remember Geocities—it was basically the wild west of the internet. Neon backgrounds, blinking text, animated GIFs that looked like they’d been coded by raccoons. It was perfect.
What started as me throwing up a fan page quickly turned into…something bigger. People found it. Sponsors showed up. Even folks from the label started paying attention. Suddenly I’m in college, running what’s basically a part-time job that didn’t pay—unless you count life lessons.
I was learning how to design, how to hustle, how to turn obsession into something that almost looked like business. And somehow, in the middle of all that, I even met the band.
At one point, the site had grown so much it was printed on the back cover of their album Blender. Which is surreal. Most college kids dream of their name on a diploma—I had mine on a Collective Soul record. In 6-point font, right next to the legal disclaimers and the barcode. Immortalized forever, basically as fine print.
So when Dosage was released in February of 1999, my fandom was at its absolute peak. The internet was still young, fandom still felt like the wild west, and somehow I was sitting in the middle of it.
One “industry insider” who followed the site mailed me an advance copy. Not a download. Not a leak. A physical CD, weeks before release. When that padded envelope hit the mailbox, it felt less like mail and more like contraband.
I tore it open on the spot, like it might self-destruct if I waited too long. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t just listening to music—I was first. I listened first, shared first, hyped first.
Imagine the power of being a 19-year-old with exclusive access to…Collective Soul. The neighbors probably thought I was running a drug ring. Nope. Just a fan site. With very strong opinions about track order.
And the best part? The album delivered.
Dosage wasn’t just another release. It was proof that sometimes obsession pays off. That if you love something fiercely enough to build around it, sometimes life will find a way to reward you.
And in this case, the reward wasn’t money, or fame, or even anything practical. It was a Collective Soul CD. Weeks before anyone else got it. Smuggled by the US Postal Service.
Counting Crows, August and Everything After
Jerry introduced me to a lot of music, but I didn’t always make it easy on him.
I remember one particular afternoon when he told me about this new band called Counting Crows. I hadn’t heard a single song of theirs—not Mr. Jones, not A Murder of One, nothing. But for reasons that are lost to time, I decided they were bad. Full stop. Not because I had evidence. Just because I was 15. And stubborn. Which, at that age, is the same thing.
Then… Round Here came on the radio.
And then… the Mr. Jones video showed up on MTV.
And suddenly… I had to face a rare and shocking realization.
Maybe, just maybe, I’d been wrong.
The first chance I got, I bought August and Everything After. From the opening notes, it was breathtaking. Adam Duritz wasn’t just singing, he was bleeding into the microphone.
‘Round here, we’re carving out our names
‘Round here, we all look the same
‘Round here, we talk just like lions
But we sacrifice like lambs
‘Round here, she’s slipping through my hands…
Damn.
Fifteen-year-old me was not ready to feel those feelings. But I did. And once I did, there was no going back. Counting Crows weren’t just a band anymore—they were in my bloodstream.
Don’t tell Jerry, but he was right.
Counting Crows, Recovering the Satellites
It was my freshman year of college. I was in that in-between space: no longer tethered to home, not yet rooted anywhere new.
And that’s when I met Jaime.
We’d only known each other a month, but already he felt like someone I could trust. The kind of person you let into the passenger seat of your life without checking his license. Which was fitting, because the actual passenger seat in his Dodge Colt was basically a death trap. No power steering. Or broken power steering. Either way, every turn felt like a workout video.
We both had the release date circled. On that October day, we climbed into the Colt and headed to Sam Goody at Post Oak Mall like it was a pilgrimage. Two freshmen, arms burning from wrestling the steering wheel, on a mission.
We each bought a copy, clutching the CDs like proof we belonged to something bigger. Then it was back to his dorm room—Ramen packets stacked on the dresser, that faint smell of Pine-Sol mixed with whatever the last guy spilled—where we slid the disc into his boombox and pressed play.
The magic was instant.
The songs felt like they’d been waiting for us—raw, aching, electric. We sat there in that cramped room, letting them pour over us, trading theories about lyrics, arguing over favorites until we finally agreed.
Goodnight Elisabeth. That was the one. To this day, it still feels like a hymn for people who don’t yet know who they are, only that they’re becoming. Which was fitting—because that was us. Two freshmen, unsteady and half-formed, trying to figure out who we were becoming too.
Looking back, Recovering the Satellites isn’t just my favorite Counting Crows album—it’s the soundtrack of that fragile, exhilarating season. Two brand-new friends. A busted Dodge Colt. A dorm room that smelled like Ramen and Pine-Sol.
An album that landed exactly when we needed it most.
Cowboy Mouth, Are You With Me?
Some albums feel like a secret you discovered. This one wasn’t mine—it was Shelley’s. But when she shared it, it became the soundtrack that carried her into my life.
We met at eighteen, both freshmen at Texas A&M. For me, it was love at first sight. For her, I was “a nice guy.”
Which was fine. Nice guys can work with that.
We became friends, and as friends do, we traded music. Shelley, having grown up in New Orleans, brought something different to the table: a band I’d never heard of, Cowboy Mouth.
The first time she played me the CD, I was floored. The opener, Jenny Says, blasted out of her stereo and I was hooked. Song after song, I fell for the music… and if I’m honest, for her.
Before long, Are You With Me? was the soundtrack to our friendship. And like all great soundtracks, it carried an undercurrent of something bigger.
That semester ended with me heading home, carrying Cowboy Mouth in my Discman and feelings for a girl who might never feel the same.
But when we came back, something shifted. Shelley started looking at me differently—or maybe I just started noticing the way she looked. Longer pauses. Smiles that lingered just a beat too long. That strange current you can feel when friendship begins to blur into something else.
For months, I’d carried around my puppy love like a secret I was sure the world could see written across my forehead. Suddenly it didn’t feel so one-sided. The air between us was charged in a new way—as though the universe had nudged the dimmer switch just enough for me to notice light I hadn’t seen before.
And then, one night, the impossible happened: our first kiss.
It felt less like a kiss and more like a door opening, like the soundtrack I’d been listening to for months had finally cued up its chorus. I was over the moon. It was everything I had hoped for.
Until it wasn’t.
The next week, something shifted. Again. But in the opposite direction.
Shelley grew cooler, a little more distant. Not cruel, not cold, just… careful. What had felt like the spark of something real suddenly looked like the classic cliché: two friends who’d crossed a line and weren’t sure what to do with it.
I tried to play it off, but inside I was unraveling. Every smile that used to come easily now felt cautious. Every conversation carried a weight it didn’t have before.
The kiss had happened, but we hadn’t spoken a word about it. Not a joke, not a confession, not even a nervous acknowledgment. It just hung there between us, invisible and heavy, until silence itself became its own answer. The longer we avoided it, the more it felt like maybe it hadn’t been a spark at all, but a mistake.
And yet, I held onto one thing. Before any kiss, before any drama… we had made plans.
Cowboy Mouth was coming to town.
Her band. Our band. The very songs that had pulled me into her orbit in the first place. That date on the calendar felt like a secret twist in the plot—proof that no matter how awkward things got, the story wasn’t finished yet.
But on the day of the concert, I made a rookie mistake. I couldn’t go on without naming it. A week and a half had passed since the kiss. That’s like a decade in teen years.
So I picked up the phone, called her dorm, and left the dreaded message on her answering machine: “We need to talk.” (Which, in the ’90s, was basically the nuclear launch code of dating.)
We met. We talked. And Shelley, as gently as she could, told me we should just be friends.
That’s right. I got friend-zoned.
I nodded, smiled politely, and died a thousand quiet deaths inside.
I walked away from that talk gutted, trying to smile through the sting. The “just friends” verdict rang in my ears like a gavel, final and crushing. But the night wasn’t over. There was still the concert.
And so, a few hours later, there we were—standing shoulder to shoulder in a crowded theater, the air thick with sweat and anticipation. The lights dropped, the drums thundered, and Cowboy Mouth tore onto the stage like a hurricane.
It was a revelation.
Everything I’d been listening to on repeat, everything Shelley had first put in my hands, came alive in a way I couldn’t have imagined. The floor shook. The crowd shouted every word. The band wasn’t just playing songs—they were detonating them, turning heartbreak into celebration, loneliness into communion.
And beside me was Shelley. The same girl who, hours earlier, had broken my heart with kindness. Now she was laughing, dancing, singing every lyric at the top of her lungs. And somehow, so was I.
We didn’t become Stephen-and-Shelley that night. But the concert gave us something else: a reset. A way to be in the same space again without the weight of the kiss hanging between us. A reminder that whatever this was, it wasn’t over.
Little did we know, the best was yet to come.
Don McLean, The Best of Don McLean
Another Greatest Hits album. Somewhere, Jerry is groaning. But in my house, this wasn’t filler—it was furniture. The heartbeat and hum of Saturday afternoons and family dinners, always humming from the cassette deck like background radiation.
It started, of course, with American Pie. Everyone knew that one. But what got me wasn’t the eight-minute singalong—it was everything else in Don McLean’s catalog. These weren’t just songs, they were open invitations for anyone with an acoustic guitar and a hopeless romantic streak. Which, at fifteen, was me in a nutshell.
I had a stack of albums and mixtapes I rotated through while mowing the lawn or hauling bags of leaves. But The Best of Don McLean was always in heavy rotation. I knew its track list like the back of my hand. His cover of Roy Orbison’s Crying nearly broke me in half every time. There I’d be, pushing the mower in ninety-degree heat, daydreaming about girls who didn’t know I existed, and Don McLean somehow convinced me there was nobility in unrequited love.
He made heartbreak feel like a hobby.
What made it even better, though, was that it wasn’t just mine. This was one of the few albums that bridged the gap between me and my parents. We all loved it. We could put it on during dinner, out on the porch, or while cleaning up the kitchen, and no one would roll their eyes. That made it rare: music that felt like mine, but also belonged to all of us.
The Best of Don McLean was a cassette that lived in our family room, our car, and eventually in my own Walkman. It was evergreen, timeless, and maybe the first album that taught me music could hold both your secret longings and your shared joys—sometimes in the very same song.
Keane, Hopes and Fears
Every once in a while, Shelley and I stumble onto an album where our tastes line up perfectly—two circles in a Venn diagram becoming one. Hopes and Fears was one of those albums.
It showed up early in our marriage, when life was equal parts wonder and chaos. We were young and naïve and counting every dollar. But we were also deliriously in love, convinced that optimism alone might just pay the rent. And through it all, this album was there, filling the tiny spaces we called home with something bigger than we knew how to name.
Tom Chaplin’s voice was the undoing. It didn’t just sing—it soared, it pleaded, it promised. She Has No Time became our touchstone, the track we’d always return to. There was something haunting in it, like it was narrating feelings we hadn’t quite learned to articulate yet: the ache, the tenderness, the fragility of figuring out life together before we really knew what life was.
I remember seeing Keane with Shelley at the now-departed Gypsy Ballroom in Dallas, an intimate venue built for nights just like this. Chaplin stepped to the mic, opened his mouth, and for the next ninety minutes the laws of physics changed. His voice didn’t just fill the room—it lifted us out of it, into some otherworld where bills and worries and our tiny bank balance didn’t matter. For those songs, the world was wide and shimmering, and we were at the very center of it.
Hopes and Fears will always be that portal for me. A doorway back to the start, to payday waiting games and mac and cheese dinners on repeat, to the tender hope that love would be enough—and the deeper truth that sometimes, with the right soundtrack, it really was.
The Killers, Sam’s Town
Sam’s Town came at the end of the era when I still had a “favorite band.” I’d been raised in the era of albums—front to back, devoured whole—and The Killers were the last group I loved in that way. Before life got busier. Before playlists replaced CDs. Before streaming made it easy to spread your love across a hundred songs instead of one band.
Hot Fuss had been Shelley’s find back in 2004. She pressed play and suddenly my world had these neon edges: soaring guitars tangled up with synths and dance beats. It sounded familiar and strange all at once, like rock music had just discovered electricity.
But it wasn’t until 2006—until Sam’s Town—that The Killers became my band. Not with the big lead singles, not with the flashy hooks, but with the third one: Read My Mind. That was the song that stopped me cold.
It was the kind of song that felt nostalgic the very first time I heard it, like it had already been waiting for me somewhere in memory. The opening notes carried this strange warmth, the way sunlight can feel familiar even on a street you’ve never walked before. It wasn’t just catchy, it was comforting, as if the song had always belonged to some corner of my life, and hearing it was simply remembering.
I first caught the video on TV—one of those late-night, half-accidental viewings. And then the music itself followed me around, sweet and insistent, like it had signed a lease in my head. The first time I heard it properly, I knew: this album was going to matter.
I remember one night in particular, working against a deadline, pulling an all-nighter at my desk. Sam’s Town on repeat. One track bleeding into the next until I lost count. The songs became a kind of companion—anthemic, aching, stubbornly hopeful. By the time the sun broke through the blinds, I’d listened to the album straight through more times than I could say. And instead of feeling wrung out, I felt wired, alive, like I’d been carried through the night by something bigger than myself.
That’s what Sam’s Town is to me. Not just a record, but a companion—the last album that stayed awake with me until the sun came up.
Neil Diamond, 12 Greatest Hits Vol II
If my musical taste has any kind of origin story, it probably starts here—with Neil Diamond spinning on vinyl. 12 Greatest Hits Vol. II wasn’t so much an album as a crash course in how many shades of emotion one man could wring out of a melody.
Neil has a song for almost everything: heartbreak, swagger, longing, joy. And if you need a tent revival with a side of sequins, he’s got that covered too. He’s a jukebox for the human condition. A musical love language everyone seems to understand, even if they didn’t know they spoke it.
“Love on the Rocks” was the one that got me. That opening piano riff, the way his voice comes in—low, world-weary, but still defiant. I was hooked. Jerry and I had this ritual at Gio’s Pizzeria: we’d feed the jukebox, cue up Joel’s “Piano Man,” and without fail, follow it with Diamond’s “Love on the Rocks.” A double-shot of sing-along melancholy, with mozzarella grease still on our fingers. Billy and Neil, side by side, keeping us company at the corner booth.
It’s funny how those pairings stitch themselves into your memory. To this day, whenever I hear Piano Man, I half-expect Love on the Rocks to come lumbering in behind it, like a well-timed punchline. One song pours the drinks, the other reminds you why you’re drinking.
That’s the magic of Neil Diamond for me. He wasn’t just background music—he was part of the ritual, part of the friendship, part of the way I learned music could carry you through moods and moments like a friend who always knew what to say.
Paul Simon, Graceland
The summer I think of when I hear Graceland wasn’t really summer at all. In Chile, the seasons run in reverse, so what I remember is winter air sneaking through car windows, the Andes standing guard in the distance, and one cassette tape rattling around like treasure in my mom’s bag. She’d brought Graceland with her, and before long it belonged to all of us.
My Tío Hermes was the first to claim it. He fell for Graceland almost immediately, like he’d been waiting his whole life for Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo to meet. And once Tío Hermes loved something, the rest of us were along for the ride.
That year the ride was literal—a ten-hour drive south in a car that might have been a Toyota Corolla, or something Corolla-adjacent. I was wedged in the backseat with my cousins Javier, Pablo, and Jano. Limbs overlapping, elbows digging, the kind of closeness only family can (forcibly) survive. Out the window: mountains and farmland, landscapes that felt endless. Inside the car: Graceland, on repeat. The. Entire. Way.
There are only two possible outcomes for an experience like that: a lifelong grudge against an album, or an unshakable devotion. You can guess which one stuck with me.
Those harmonies and rhythms wove themselves into that trip, into that season, into that family memory. Every listen since then has carried a trace of that road: Tío Hermes at the wheel, my cousins half-asleep on each other’s shoulders, the cassette clicking and starting again as if the journey might never end.
Graceland isn’t just music to me. It’s a postcard. A time capsule. Proof that sometimes the right album can hold together a carful of kids, a season, even a family.
Roxette, Look Sharp!
I first met Roxette by way of Jerry’s prized cassingle of “The Look.” It was rock. It was pop. It was endlessly catchy. And, for an 11-year-old boy, it was also Marie Fredriksson on the cover in what was basically a bra. It was… a lot to process.
But Jerry and I were hooked.
I remember us outside his house, belting out the “na na na na na na” hook into the neighborhood air, convinced we were rock stars. We weren’t, but that didn’t stop us from announcing a band on the spot. The name came courtesy of my generic T-shirt, one of many my mom bought from Weiner’s—the discount emporium where the name alone broke more rules than the students. For reasons no one has ever explained, it said “Exploits.” And just like that, our imaginary band was official.
But Roxette was more than just a passing crush. Look Sharp! became the very first album I ever bought with my own money. Musicland. Sunrise Mall. I can still remember standing at the counter, clutching it like contraband. For a kid whose dad had pretty strict views on what counted as “acceptable music,” buying Roxette felt like a (very safe) declaration of independence.
Still, this album wasn’t just about me—it was a chapter in friendship. Jerry, Teno, and I were inseparable growing up. The three of us spent entire summers in backyards and living rooms crowded with cassette cases and Nintendo games. If one of us found a new band, it instantly became part of the collective.
And in the fall of 1988, Look Sharp! claimed the spotlight.
While most kids were screaming for New Kids on the Block, we were off in our own corner, mainlining Swedish pop. It felt like a secret language we shared—three boys staking a tiny claim on the musical map. We had our own taste, our own band, our own thing.
And somehow, that bond has lasted. Decades later, the three of us are still close—still the same trio at heart. Life has shifted, careers have unfolded, families have grown, but when we’re together, we slip back into the same rhythm we had as kids.
Look Sharp! still finds its way back into the conversation. Sometimes it’s a laugh about the gloriously nonsensical lyrics, sometimes it’s an argument over which track deserves more credit. But always, it’s a reminder.
The band was a phase, but the friendship never was. And this album is a touchstone we find ourselves returning to, again and again.
Semisonic, Feeling Strangely Fine
If I had to pick one “desert island” album, it might be Feeling Strangely Fine.
I don’t have a single dramatic story for this one—no fake band, no road trip, no jukebox ritual. What I do have is an album that, song for song, never misses. I love every track.
It came out in the spring of 1998, technically my college years, but in my head it belongs to the entire ’90s. I can’t explain why. Somehow, whenever I put it on, it takes me back to high school—like it rewired my memory, retrofitting itself into years it never actually lived in.
The ’90s were my wonder years. High school. College. Meeting Shelley. The golden age of my friendship with Jerry and Teno. We had a million little rituals—inside jokes, late-night drives, entire summers that felt endless. And somehow, Feeling Strangely Fine became my shorthand for all of it.
Teno and I especially loved this album. We’d swap notes on which tracks hit hardest, argue about deep cuts, blast “Closing Time” even though it was the obvious one. But for me, “Made to Last” has always been the crown jewel—maybe my favorite rock song of all time.
On a list of favorite albums, this might be the only one I still revisit as an album. Not a playlist of singles, not a shuffle of nostalgia, but the whole thing, front to back, like the way I first experienced it.
For me, Feeling Strangely Fine isn’t just an album. It’s a time machine. Every time I press play, I’m not just back in the ’90s—I’m back with the people who made those years what they were.
Strunz & Farah, Américas
Some albums just kind of appear in your life. Américas by Strunz & Farah was one of those. One day, a cassette showed up in our house. No one really explained it. I think my mom bought it, but it was my dad and I who fell for it. Jerry too, eventually.
I was a young guitar player, so hearing it for the first time was like watching aliens land. They played so fast it didn’t seem human. My dad, who loved the music but was also a practical man, decided there was only one logical explanation: they’d sped it up in the studio. He said it like it was a known fact. “There’s no way people can play like that.” He fully convinced himself this was a conspiracy. Like, he was ready to get Congress involved.
And then, somehow, Strunz & Farah came to Brownsville, Texas. Which made no sense. Brownsville was not exactly on the world-tour circuit. We had flea markets, Whataburger, and you get the idea. But here they were, headlining a cultural event.
But here’s the plot twist.
The opening act? Jerry’s older brother, Rudy. And Rudy deserves an introduction. Rudy had gone to Harvard for undergrad and grad school. He came back with degrees that probably said things like “Economics” or “Political Science.” But instead of doing any of that, he decided to start a band. He called it Eye of the Artist. And the best way I can describe their sound is: imagine if Yanni and Kenny G had a baby…and that baby also went to Harvard.
And here’s the kicker: Rudy recruited Jerry to play bass and me to run lights. Neither of us had any business being there. Jerry could play bass well enough, but me? I was the lighting guy strictly because Rudy asked, and I said yes. That was the whole job interview. Which meant every show was just me flipping switches at random.
“Well… guess this is a blue song now.”
So when Strunz & Farah came out for soundcheck, I was side stage, pretending to know what I was doing with the lights. And right away, they destroyed my dad’s conspiracy theory. No speeding up. No studio tricks. Just casually brilliant. Fingers flying, in perfect sync, making music that sounded like it came from five continents at once.
My dad looked like he’d just seen Bigfoot.
The concert itself was dazzling. But the real punchline? Because we were “with the band,” Jerry and I got invited to the after-party. Two kids from Brownsville, suddenly in the room with Jorge Strunz and Ardeshir Farah.
And here’s the thing: we weren’t just lurking in the corner, holding Cokes, trying not to be noticed. They actually talked to us. They laughed, they asked questions, they were warm and funny. It wasn’t just “we met them”—it was “they welcomed us in.” For one surreal night, we weren’t outsiders. We were part of the circle.
And that’s rare. Usually, when you meet your heroes, you walk away thinking, “Well, I’ll never listen to that album the same way again.” But Strunz & Farah? They were exactly who you wanted them to be. Maybe even better.
So that mysterious cassette my mom bought? It came to life. And my dad finally had proof. No conspiracies. No studio tricks. Just two guys, playing so fast my dad finally dropped the investigation. Congress was off the hook.
Tom Petty, Wildflowers
If Feeling Strangely Fine is my desert island album, then Wildflowers is the mountaintop. The king of kings. The one you carve into stone tablets and carry down to the people. I love Tom Petty’s whole catalog—probably my favorite of any artist—but Wildflowers is the one that left its mark.
It came out my junior year of high school, right at the age when you first start looking both ways—thinking about your future and your past at the same time. And somehow Petty had the soundtrack for that exact moment.
The album just delivers. Wildflowers itself. Time to Move On. To Find a Friend. Crawling Back to You. Not to mention the big singles. Every track is either a toe-tapper or a late-night companion. It was the record you could blast on the way to school and then lean on when you drove home in the dark, feeling feelings you didn’t even know how to name.
Jerry and I latched onto it together. That was part of the magic. It had enough pop to hook you, but enough melancholy to feel your feelings. And if there was one thing Jerry and I specialized in as moody teenagers, it was feeling our feelings. We treated melancholy like it was an extracurricular activity.
But the music still holds up. There’s a line in Crawling Back to You that I still hum to myself when the stress of day-to-day piles up: “Most things I worry about… never happen anyway.” That’s Petty in a nutshell—wisdom, simplicity, and melody, all rolled into one line that somehow still shows up for me decades later.
Leave it to Tom Petty to write the world’s greatest stress management program in one line. Therapy, but with a harmonica.
Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman
Like everybody else, I knew Fast Car. You couldn’t escape it. It was on the radio, it was in the grocery store, it was probably playing faintly behind you while you were pumping gas. But outside of that, I hadn’t really gone deeper into Tracy Chapman.
Then I went to college and met Shelley. Which, right there, is the best thing that ever happened to me, but also the beginning of this story. Because Shelley had a CD collection. And tucked into her binder of sleeves—you remember those binders, where you’d flip through like you were auditioning jurors—was Tracy Chapman’s debut album.
I should’ve known from Fast Car alone that Tracy was going to bring the lyrical heat. But this album? These songs made you think. Made you feel. Made a guy like me stop and see the world in new ways. Talkin’ ’Bout a Revolution, Across the Lines, Baby Can I Hold You. Each one could knock the wind out of you.
But here’s the thing. The song that stuck with me most wasn’t profound for the usual reasons. Baby Can I Hold You is a heartbreak masterpiece, sure. But for me, it became… comedy.
Freshman year. Shelley and I were a newly minted couple. And like any couple, sometimes you argue. Neither of us remembers what this particular one was about. Whatever it was, it wasn’t earth-shattering. It was probably me being annoying, because statistically speaking, that’s usually the cause.
So we’re in her dorm room. She’s face down on the bed, silent treatment in full effect. And Shelley was good at the silent treatment. She didn’t major in drama, but it was definitely an elective. Meanwhile, I’m sitting at her desk, trying to figure out how to dig my way out. Apologizing would’ve been too easy. And honestly, I didn’t even know what I’d be apologizing for.
On her desk: a boombox and her CD binder. And that’s when inspiration struck. I slide in Tracy Chapman, flip to track five. And as soon as Tracy sang that first word—“Sorry…”—Shelley cracked. She turned around, laughed, and just like that, the fight was over.
We didn’t even make it to the chorus. I didn’t need it. All it took was one word from Tracy Chapman to do what I couldn’t. She forgave me. And I’ve been cashing in on Tracy Chapman’s credibility ever since.
So yes, Tracy Chapman is an incredible album. It’s thoughtful, it’s profound, it’s full of timeless songs. But for me, it’s also the memory of that dorm room. Turns out, the secret to our relationship wasn’t flowers or chocolates.
It was Tracy Chapman, track five.
The Wallflowers, Bringing Down the Horse
If my life had a movie soundtrack, Bringing Down the Horse would be in the opening credits.
“6th Avenue Heartache” hit right as I was graduating high school. “One Headlight” rolled in just as I was stumbling my way through college. Those two singles alone felt like revelation. I remember hearing them and thinking, This is it. This is the music I’ve been trying to write in my head. Except Jakob Dylan had already written it. And better. And he had great hair. It was unfair, really.
The album was everything I wanted—clever lyrics, big hooks, the kind of songs you could sing at the top of your lungs or let break your heart at 2 a.m. It was joy and melancholy in equal measure. The whole thing felt like it was written just for me, and maybe that’s the trick of great albums: they make you believe you’re the only one who really gets them.
But here’s the thing. If you’ve been following along this whole list, you’ve probably noticed my personal “age of albums” always ties back to the time of life they belonged to. That’s what Bringing Down the Horse is for me. It’s not just eleven tracks. It’s a picture inside a picture inside a picture. It’s high school graduation parties. It’s college dorm nights. It’s driving with the windows down, music too loud, friends you thought you’d have forever.
And when I put it on today, all of it comes rushing back. The music, the memories, the people I mentioned here and the ones I didn’t. It’s like a time capsule that still plays.
So yeah, it’s a ’90s masterpiece. But to me, it’s more than that. It’s the sound of a kid figuring out who he was—one hook, one heartbreak, one headlight at a time.
The Bonus Track
Once in a while, an album used to have that hidden moment. You’d think it was over, but if you let the CD spin long enough, a secret song would fade in—a little reward for those who didn’t hit eject too soon.
That’s this section. The bonus track. Not part of the top twenty, but part of the story. These are the albums that filled in the edges: the road trips, the heartbreaks, the late nights that felt like they might never end.
I don’t really listen to albums the same way anymore. The last fifteen years brought new artists I love, but that era of jewel cases and liner notes still has its own kind of magic. Back then you let the music play from start to finish—partly because skipping meant getting up, but mostly because you didn’t want to miss whatever came next.
Here are the (many, many) albums that lived in that world. I’ve probably forgotten dozens, but these are the ones that stuck.
- America, History: America’s Greatest Hits
- The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
- Bee Gees, Greatest
- Better Than Ezra, Friction, Baby
- Billy Joel, The Stranger
- Blue October, History for Sale
- Blues Traveller, Four
- Bob Marley, Legend
- Boston, Third Stage
- Cademon’s Call, Long Line of Leavers
- Coldplay, X&Y
- Collective Soul, Hints, Allegations, and Things Left Unsaid
- Collective Soul, Precious Declaration
- Commodores, All The Great Hits
- Creedence Clearwater Revival, Chronicle: The 20 Greatest Hits
- Dave Matthews Band, Crash
- Death Cab for Cutie, Plans
- Dishwalla, Opaline
- Don Henley, The End of the Innocence
- Duncan Sheik, Daylight
- Eagles, Greatest Hits, Vol. 2
- Eric Clapton, Unplugged
- Gavin DeGraw, Chariot
- George Michael, Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1
- Hanson, This Time Around
- Hootie and the Blowfish, Cracked Rear View
- James Taylor, Greatest Hits
- Jars of Clay, Much Afraid
- John Mayer, Continuum
- Journey, Greatest Hits
- Juanes, Un Día Normal
- Led Zepplin, IV
- Lionel Richie, Can’t Slow Down
- Lyle Lovett, Anthology Vol. 1, Cowboy Man
- Maná, Sueños Líquidos
- Mat Kearney, Young Love
- Matchbox Twenty, Yourself or Someone Like You
- Matthew Sweet, 100% Fun
- Neil Diamond, The Jazz Singer
- Oasis, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory
- Oasis, Be Here Now
- Oasis, Definitely Maybe
- Once, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
- Phil Collins, …But Seriously
- Radiohead, OK Computer
- Radiohead, The Bends
- Squirrel Nut Zippers, Hot
- Thad Cockrell, To Be Loved
- Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Greatest Hits
- Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, She’s the One
- U2, Achtung Baby
- U2, All That You Can’t Leave Behind
- U2, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
- U2, The Joshua Tree
- Víctor Heredia, Coraje
- The Waiting, Unfazed
