Some of My Core Albums

For the 1 year anniversary of my blog, I planned to write an article re-ranking Quadeca’s album, “From Me to You,” as that was my first ever post and I thought it could be a fun way to kick off my anniversary week. Instead, I found that I could not quantify my love for the songs that I have lived with for a year and a half. This discovery has brought me to my knees in a wave of relief as I let the ability to number my favorites drift out of my hands as partiality takes root within me once and for all. I’ve known and loved this album for too long to be able to mold it numerically, and for this epiphany, I would like to change the nature of this article. 

Instead, I will be explaining my love for the hodgepodge collection of albums that I have gleaned the life out of after infinite listens and replays. These albums represent a timeline that has led me through learning to swim, learning to race, morning practices, stories unshared, classes taken, wages earned, weight gained, muscles lost, haircuts, driver’s license tests (only 2), fires, floods– through it all, they remain, my albums of soul, my collections of atoms replayed as each year passes and my identity morphs to adhere to the passage of time. Here, they remain. Just a few of the albums I know forever, no matter how long I’ve known them. A few of my core albums, as silly or random as they may seem. My albums.

• Dream Your Life Away– Vance Joy

This was the first album I ever purchased on iTunes with a $10 gift card that my older cousin had given me after I’d said I liked “Riptide” when she’d played it in the car on our way to IHOP on Thanksgiving morning. I spent the entire next day listening to “Riptide” over and over before slowly branching out to the rest of the album and falling in love. I was nine! So tiny! 

It was the first time I’d ever liked an album that my sisters hadn’t played or I’d heard on the radio. I felt so grown up, like my older sisters and their friends that went to concerts and had posters in their rooms. In fact, my second concert ever was a GA balcony view of Vance Joy’s first world tour, and by then I was 10. I could barely see the stage so my mom stole a chair from a closet we passed and I stood on it to see. 

Those songs played through my first pair of headphones, they played in the car every single time I had to go anywhere, they would pass through my lips in the endless situations when I had to sing to myself so I wouldn’t panic. They were wholly mine, my secret prayers. I think I ranked them once here, but it’s all arbitrary in the end, because with every nostalgic mood, every need for comfort, there is a song to sing me to sleep.

• Taylor Swift’s entire discography

It may be basic, and yet her music means so much to me. For two years, from ages 7 to 9, her debut album played through our old giant car on a CD from a thrift store (original “Picture to Burn” lyrics included). “Mary’s Song” was my favorite, admittedly. I always substituted whoever my crush was at the time in the little daydream I’d made up for the song, a habit I don’t think I’ll ever kick.

This was then replaced by “Fearless,” which I had downloaded onto my hand-me-down completely broken Mac laptop that had a CD slot and weighed 25 pounds. I used it to write stories (since it couldn’t connect to the internet) thinking I could sell them for a ton of money when I was older and hopefully famous, but only one of those things has happened so far. I listened for hours and hours, dreaming of the day I’d be 15 and I’d believe someone when they told me they loved me. I couldn’t even think of what high school would be like, just that I’d be competing for a boy’s love against some girl that was the cheer captain. 

Skip ahead and “1989” changed me forever. I felt I knew what music should be. I felt so indie for my favorite songs being the two deluxe tracks, “You Are In Love” and “New Romantics.” “You Are In Love” was a hymn to me, something that I believed had to be the pinnacle of love and romance. I’ve been yet to be proven wrong, but my love life has also been extremely limited. It’s the album that laid the foundations of my tween taste in music, my love for synths and drama. I wore a fedora when I saw her in concert for the 1989 tour. I was stupid and I was young, but I knew I loved this album and for that I was genius and prodigious. 

I had a dry spell for a bit until I was 16 and unmedicated. She’d announced the re-records and I’d been dabbling in my own personal classics when I caved and listened to “folklore” (and I mean really listened). I was reborn in the image of Taylor’s newfound world. I was religious in my devotion. I relished “mirrorball” and “this is me trying” like someone had finally listened to me. “Evermore” was not too far behind as “champagne problems” and “ivy” and “evermore” and “tis the damn season” and “dorothea” and “marjorie” and “right where you left me” tore me apart and put me back together. It accompanied me on my first time going into Trader Joe’s, which may not seem that important, but it marked a shift of Better in my life when I could possibly, maybe just fend for myself.

“Reputation” started the path to being okay. Every song had its moment in the spotlight, especially since I was comfortable driving by then. To this day, every time I am home sick from school, the first thing I watch is the “Reputation Stadium Tour” special on Netflix. It makes me feel ALIVE.

Next was “Lover.” “The Archer” is still probably my favorite Taylor song of all time, though that may be slightly controversial. Its era was cut way too short when crowd pleasers like “Lover,” “Cruel Summer,” “False God,” and “I Think He Knows.” It’s so romantic it makes me want to vomit. I rode the “Lover” wave into junior year and I got medicated soon after, leaving me all stable and able to process my emotions or whatever.

“Red” re-release dropped and I finally entered my first ever real “Red” era. It’s my favorite CD for my car now since I never have to skip any songs, and it just reminds me of the panic all of my friends and I went through on the day it came out, trying to listen to all of it before school and screaming when we heard the 10-minute-version for the first time. I wore a red tutu, a red cape, and a crown to school in order to celebrate. I wasn’t dress coded. 

I now wait for the “Speak Now” re-release in order to fully appreciate it. I know many of the songs well and love them dearly, but I know them disjointedly, through the radio. I hope that it will guide me through my senior year, though I don’t think it’s the next one to be released. Maybe when I’m in college?

• Handwritten– Shawn Mendes

My older sister bought me this CD for Easter one time and I’d had my iPod taken away so I was using an old school plastic boombox with janky Target headphones to enjoy music. Considering this was one of my only CDs at the time, it got its fair share of loops. At this point I think I was 11 and had been following Shawn Mendes since NBT on Disney Channel, but boy oh boy did this album ruin me. I think this made me a misogynist for a second because I almost started listening to the Magcon boys and considered shaving my arm hair if Shawn ever needed 11-year-old me to be his rock when grappling with childhood fame. I just wanted to be woman enough for him.

All jokes aside, I do truly love this album. It’s peak singer-songwriter bedroom pop angsty teen boy music. Think the Vamps or Cody Simpson but just guitar. It’s all handwritten, acoustic to the max!

• Dopamine– BORNS

Another alum from the CD slot in our old family car, this album is one of the main adhesives to bond my sisters and I for a brief moment of agreement on what to play when we’re all in the car together. If I was ever in a situation where I had to recite an entire album from memory, it would easily be this one. I believe that several of my intuitions regarding language when facing imagery or poetry stem somewhat indirectly from the lyrics in these songs as the prose is unique and stylized to fit exactly the atmosphere set by BORNS. It deifies femininity often and shrouds life itself in a vintage filter that mirrors that of a faded ‘70s edition of Vogue. To this day, I only listen to this album when I put the same CD I used when we were younger into my own car radio, as it only exists to me in the iridescent layers of plastic shaped like something sweet and doughy. 

• Newsies– Original Broadway Cast Recording

I don’t have a single explanation for this. There was a period of my life from grades 6 to 7 minimum that I watched “Newsies: Live” on Netflix every day. I wish I was exaggerating, but here is a quote from my older sister about this time in my life, considering the only TV I had access to was the one in our living room and this meant some frustration for my older sisters:

“Morning or night, every time I came downstairs into the living room, “Newsies: Live” was playing. Whether it was 11 AM or PM, I knew my TV privileges were overruled.”

I will know all of these songs forever and I wholeheartedly proclaim Jeremy Jordan to be the Supreme Jack Kelly since Christian Bale just doesn’t do it for me in the original movie.

• From Me To You (Deluxe)– Quadeca 

Other than some of Taylor Swift’s new stuff, I’d consider this the most recent edition to the albums that I consider a tenet in my life so far. I first loved this album for its larger than life production that made me feel like I was experiencing some kind of epic tale. It was easy to get lost in and convince myself I had more confidence than I actually did just by looping it over and over again (which is what I did since Quadeca was my number one Spotify artist last year). As I get older, its meaning to me changes with me. The songs I hadn’t loved before just became a part of the story I loved to get lost in, irremovable from the compilation I considered to be (for better or for worse) a solace or a mirror from my emotions. I just couldn’t bear to rank it since each song’s place is subject to whatever I’m feeling or how much nostalgia I’d like to experience at the moment. This album got me through a really tough time in my life which lends it partiality, but bias aside, I think its extremes and intermediates represent a gradient of explosive production and vulnerable lyrics that mark it as a one-in-a-million narrative of emotion and passion for music.

• 25– Adele

This was the first Adele album I was sentient enough to remember coming out and I wrung this album dry. I listened to every song, jaded by the unreliability of my love life and yet hopeful for the fleeting relationships I could take comfort in. I was 11.

You all have this album to blame for my drama. Life has taught me to subject myself to the grandiosity with which Adele constructed her third album, to feel the pull of her voice and the tides of the sheer scale this album presents. I am who I am because of all of the Vines about the “Hello” music video, and yet I am made up of nothing else.

• Title– Meghan Trainor

Yet another family car vet, this album is yet again one that unites my sisters and me in our quest to delegate AUX with no bloodshed. This album is WAY too underrated in terms of iconic pop of the 2010s. When I’m ancient (like 40) and there’s a chance I have some children and they ask in their little annoying voices “Mom, what music did you listen to when you were my age?” and I just need them to stop talking for half a second, I’ll throw this on and hope for peace. I consider this album to be an epoch of the 2010s. It changed lives. It healed disease. It reset the calendar. It reset the evolution of homo sapiens to homo neanderthalis. As a society, we were reborn, if for but a brief moment, in the eyes of Meghan Trainor’s turquoise oasis of funky lil tunes. I would like to start the movement to replace our boring national anthem with “Lips Are Movin” because it would be way more fun to sing at random sports games for all ages. 

• One Direction’s entire discography

This was the first music I almost ever remember actively listening to for fun. “Take Me Home” has a special place in my heart, but “Made In the AM” is my current fave because I like being controversial. I remember blushing whenever Harry Styles, Niall Horan, or Zayn Malik made eye contact with the camera in any music videos and then being ashamed immediately after because I knew I shouldn’t give them that much power over me. My favorite was the “Kiss You” video, but then the “Best Song Ever” one came out and the world shook. They made up my entire childhood. They were my first concert at age 8 when 5sos opened. It was pearls before swine since I was barely a functioning human being. I couldn’t appreciate the enormity of what I was experiencing, and yet it lives within my DNA, by ancestral memories powered by the melange that my children will experience. I was nearly in the utter back of the stadium, but I was there. And in that moment, I felt the swift tendrils of obsession take root in my young beating heart as I sold my soul to Harry Styles for the price of one moment of eye contact all those many yards away.

***

There are probably more that eluded my memory as I laid out the few I could snatch from the cobwebs up there and I suppose I could do another part one day. I think this ordeal has been a lot for you, though, so I’ll give you some time. No one chooses their foundations and yet if I had to, I’d choose them all again. They are me, and we are indivisible.