The Album That Changed Everything (Summer 2018)

The Albums That Changed Everything in Songwriting Magazine Summer 2018 edition

A choice selection of our recent interviewees reveal the seminal albums that have inspired them the most over the years

JOSH T. PEARSON

My Bloody Valentine
Loveless (Creation, 1991)
“From a guitar aesthetic and what could be done musically, Loveless would be the one. When I heard that record it changed the landscape and opened up what could be done sonically, as far as creating a whole world compositionally – just bending the notes where it unsettled you and took your head to a different space. And then I thought to myself, ‘This is interesting what if you could do this and combine a lyrical narrative with an operatic-type setting?’ So that’s exactly what I then did with The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads.”

GRETCHEN PETERS

Joni Mitchell
Blue (Reprise, 1971)
“I was 13 years old when I heard Blue. The perfect age to envelope myself in the romantic drama of it; but enough of a writer and an artist to recognize the brilliance in it, too. That brilliance is what has lasted and deepened for me, over decades of trying to understand how to write great songs. I learned every song on Blue, teaching myself how to play the piano and recreating the dulcimer parts on my guitar. Looking back, I was internalizing not just those songs but the very DNA of songs. Joni was my first teacher, and my best.”

CHAS & DAVE’S CHAS HODGES

Jerry Lee Lewis
Jerry Lee Lewis (Sun, 1958)
“The obvious one for me is Jerry Lee Lewis’ first album. It was just everything I hoped it would be, the way he played the piano. I didn’t analyse it back then, I just loved it. It didn’t sound like any other player I had ever heard. As time went on I could see that he lumped together boogie-woogie things that he’d heard. I know he liked a piano player called Moon Mullican and I can even see that he has some of Liberace’s flamboyancy. You don’t copy anybody but you take the most attractive parts from people and then you add you our own bit.”

THIS IS THE KIT’S KATE STABLES

Paul Simon
Graceland (Warner Bros, 1986)
“It’s an album I remember my aunt and uncle listening to in the car on summer holidays camping in the south of France. It’s been kind of a constant in my life and as I’ve grown up so has my relationship with the record and my interpretation of it all. How I hear the lyrics now and the arrangements is so different. And the funniest thing about it all is that all the production all over the album is pretty much everything I find difficult about 80s music. But on this album it is not only acceptable but actually perfect and beautiful. What a corker.”

Read the rest of The Album That Changed Everything feature, along with more artist interviews, news, tips, reviews and gear in Songwriting Magazine‘s Summer 2018 > >

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