The 30 Albums Project: Introduction/Liner Notes

With my 30^th birthday a year away, two things started racing through my mind. The first is what movies have become my favorite and how some of them still hold up over time and the second thing is one thing that I think about on a regular basis and that thing is what albums have had an influence over the past 30 years. Granted, most people will think about songs when this idea comes to mind, but when the average listens to roughly 100,000 songs in a life time (I personally think it’s more, but all of the things that I’ve read over the past few weeks points to roughly the same number over and over), but for someone like me who has a collection so large that he doesn’t hear the same again for at least six months, I started to think about albums and what influence they’ve had over the past 16 years or so (I’m going to start with the years 2001, mainly because of this was the year that I started high school and also the year that I started to listen to music that I really liked and also paid attention to the musical trends that were out there) and what albums had an influence on me. However, that was going to be the hard part.

While for some, this might be an easy task, but for someone like me, it was one of the hardest things that I’ve had to do in a long time. With over 6,000 songs on my iPod and almost 400 complete albums, it gets kind of hard to pick out what albums had a major influence on me. However, somehow I managed to narrow it down to 30 (Which was a feat in itself).

The albums themselves range from the 1970s (Which is mostly what I call my “Parents music”) to today. While I tried to not have any repeats from the same artist, somehow I managed to fail in that department. I managed to give two artists two different albums on the list. The answer to this I don’t have because of the fact that it’s the same reason why I have three different soundtracks from three different movies on my list also (I will not tell what they are until the each one comes up on the list).

Each album has a unique reason why it has made me into who I am. Some might have convinced me that I should have been born in a different time period or that a certain period is pretty awesome, some might have been a gateway into certain music styles, or even taught me that that going past a certain CD of a certain artist might not be the best idea. While what you just read might seem confusing, but after I start posting the actual posts and the in between items (Which will be short lists of pointless stuff or lists that are somewhat serious and fun), it will all make sense in the end.

The first post will be up on the 13^th of January, which will kick off the yearlong project.