Perfect Music

What's Yours?

Here’s a section of my vinyl set up!

Last week, I posed a question to my Facebook following that I figured would get maybe a couple dozens responses. And I thought only my musically inclined friends would even be interested in the question.

Boy, did I get it wrong.

Here’s the question, exactly as I asked it.

‘Give me your perfect album, start to finish. No notes. No missteps. Not 99.9 percent. Any genre, any time period. Perfection start to finish. Go!’

I received a ridiculous 123 responses. The vast majority of those responses offered me more than one choice, sometimes five or six choices. In all, I’m looking at about 350 selections of the perfect album.

To be fair, many are repeats. Aja. Dark Side of the Moon. 5150. Crime of the Century. All those are mentioned several times.

My initial thought in doing this was to create a simple short list of great albums, but the question seemed to tap into something much different than what I had expected. But I SHOULD have expected it.

That is, how do I put this diplomatically, by any objective measure, some of the albums listed aren’t that great. But listeners don’t care about that, not really, and I should have seen that coming.

Music - all music no matter the genre - is wildly, unpredictably, entirely, personal.

Friends weren’t listing ‘good’ albums, not really. They were listing albums that meant something to them and to their lives. That breathed life into their day to day. That helped them survive. That burrowed into their soul during a certain period in their lives.

So, as it turns out, this is going to take me a little longer to catalog and do a count. After so many replies, I’m really curious about a bunch of things - top ten, how many women vs men replied, what is the oldest and newest albums listed, which genre was most popular. It’s going to take me a while, but I’ll write a story about it, I promise.

In the meantime, in case you didn’t see the questions over there, give me your perfect album!