10 Albums that lead you the way to Prog

There's a theory that the music you listen to in your teens is the most influential, though not necessarily what you will listen to long-term; and that the music you listen to in your mid-twenties is likely to be what you listen to for the rest of your life. I've compressed the theory somewhat, but google will help you if you want to read more.

Every couple of years social this theory gets passed around in the form of lists of the ten most influential albums from one's teenage years. I definitely think the influences from pre-teen experiences are just as important, and possibly even more so. While I can identify how my music tastes changed in my teens, what I was exposed to in my pre-teens remains very much present in my current tastes.

Strangely, I found this lost harder to compile than that for me pre-teens, which again makes me wonder if the influences of teenage influences are perhaps overstated, and those of the pre-teens overlooked unduly. The first thing I had to think about, though, was how to work out what my teen years were, so long ago they were! 😱

Technically they are from the end of 1988 to the end of 1995, but it made more sense to me to look at the period from 1 Jan 1989 to 31 Dec 1995, rather than from 5 Sep 1988 to 4 Sep 1995, as educational years run from Jan-Dec in New Zealand. Thus, 1989 was my first year of high school, and due to not going to university immediately after high school, 1995 was my first year of university.

When I started thinking about this period, a lot of albums immediately came to mind - and I mean, a lot! It took quite a bit of thinking to whittle them down. But I think the following are quite representative of the….

By now I was already listening to bands and artists like Genesis, Rush, Queen, Roxy Music, and David Bowie (to name just a few) that were within the greater prog universe, before my teen years, and they actually became less significant in my teen years. Mainly, because my teen years were (for the most part, and with the odd exception) thoroughly miserable.

These two soundtracks spoke to the miserable teenager that I was, and introduced me to so much music I was, and would have likely remained, unaware of. I might have heard of some of the bands, but had never bothered to investigate. I bought several albums from bands featured on these soundtracks, without listening to them (because that was what we did in those days), just because I loved so many of the tracks on the soundtracks. The bands from The Crow, especially, started to broaden my musical horizons considerably.

I had heard of Alice in Chains, but not heard anything from them until I bought the Singles soundtrack. I bought Dirt, and I was blown away. If anything could speak for teenage misery, this could. This may well have been the most-played album of my teenage years. It also spurned a somewhat addictive phase of buying many bands from the Seattle or Pacific Northwest area. And given that, despite a media-given label, most of these bands sounded nothing like each other, again my musical horizons were broadened.

I hadn't really listened to either Queen or Bowie for years, despite both being some of my first musical purchases. But after Freddy's death, I (along with many others, I'm sure) went out and purchased Greatest Hits II on cd, and then started buying my way back through their catalogue. (I already had Greatest Hits, Queen, Queen II and Sheer Heart Attack on cassette, which were some of my earliest musical purchases, but in my Queen spree, I upgraded these albums to cds) I think my mum was quite glad of this slightly addicted musical phase I went through, as it was some of the only music I listened to that wasn't black and dark and depressing!

In terms of Bowie, I had liked him for ages, but the last thing I had bought from him was (again, on cassette) Never Let Me Down. I sort of lost interest in him, probably because the NZ media had lost interest in him too. I don't recall ever hearing any Tin Machine on the radio, and the only song I ever heard from Black Noise was Jump. Outside was the album that brought me back into Bowie, and remains one of my favourite of his albums (second only to Blackstar). Technically, it was released outside my teen years (albeit only by a couple of weeks), but there's no doubting the influence of this album, in my future musical life.

I never disliked Neil Young, but I wasn't really familiar at all with a lot of his discography. Until Sleeps with Angels, I associated Neil Young with the songs like Heart of Gold that were played on the radio, and assumed that's what he always sounded like. This album blew me away, and I ended up buying quite a bit of Neil Young. When his next album was released with Pearl Jam as his backing band, a couple of my musical worlds briefly collided.

In my pre-teens, and probably the first couple of years of my teens, listening to longer songs was not unusual, because of the bands I listened to. But as I became older, shorter songs became the norm. I think teenage years are often those when angry young folk turn to punk or metal, etc. Because "grunge" hit during my teenage years, then those bands were my punk/metal.

Regardless, even though I knew, owned, and enjoyed longer songs, it wasn't until Extreme and Neil Young (above) that I started listening to longer songs again. Extreme was also influential for me, in that they were not really a socially acceptable band to like. (Not that I was a socially accepted teen anyway, but generally speaking a lot of what I listened to, was what a lot of other people listened to also.)

And a realisation, I guess, that I didn't really care what other people thought of what I listened to. That's a pretty important realisation to come to, and one I think a lot of people never do. After all, how often do you hear someone ask about or talk about a "guilty musical pleasure". I have no guilty pleasure. Why should I feel guilty about listening to something I like?

Like nothing else I owned or listened to. Although I enjoyed quite a bit of the hip hop I heard - and particularly the New Zealand hip hop which sounded noticeably different to my ears than the US hip hop, it would be a few more years yet before I bought any hip hop (and yes, I do have a lot of hip hop albums in my collection), I have a feeling Rage Against the Machine was really my gateway into hip hop, even if it is not really a hip hop album per se.  I don’t think I would likely ever have made the effort, despite enjoying what I heard, had I not bought RATM.

Like Korn (below), this album is influential in how much it forced me (or, I guess, I forced myself) to expand my musical horizons. I think after RATM, I never dismissed an album without listening to it again, nor a genre.

This is a weird one, and it's only influential in retrospect. I certainly never realised at the time, what this album purchase would do for me. It's also an album, that shows me just how different an influential album list can be from a favourite album list. This would never be on a favourite albums of my teenage years, but I can't deny it a place on a list of the most influential albums of my teenage years.

I'm pretty sure I didn't even like this when I bought it. I think I bought it as a protest or a statement, or some equally silly miserably teenage idea. It was the heaviest, angriest thing I'd ever bought, and the vocals were the harshest I'd ever bought. I'm pretty sure if I hadn't managed to get used to the vocals in Korn, I'd never have managed to listen to Opeth, who were my gateway drug into a world of extreme metal. In more general terms, listening to Korn, generated an interest in heavier music in general. Up until Korn, the heaviest you'd hear in my music would be Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, or some of the heavier Seattle bands.

This is the luckiest album on the list, as I didn't purchase it. A friend brought it back from Japan. He'd bought it over there, and found it not to his taste, so gave it to me because he thought I would enjoy it - which I did. (He's changed his mind subsequently, and I think he did end up buying the album again, for himself.) Again, this was released outside my teenage years by a couple of weeks, and it was another couple of weeks or so before it was mine - but I still stand by my reasoning that sticking to the educational years in which my teenage years existed makes more sense than when I actually turned 13 or 20. As aforementioned, I already liked Rush, so this wasn't completely unfamiliar to me - but it was like Rush on steroids. Dream Theater were not easily available in NZ at the time (and I have no idea if they are now, since I now live in the UK), so one of the first albums I bought while visiting the US in Dec 95 was Awake.

A couple of honourable mentions, now. Unlike my preteen list, I decided to ignore any albums which I listened to, that were not released in the period I have ascribed to my teenage years - no matter how influential they might have been. One of those was a compilation released in early 1995 (and therefore in my teenage years), but as it was of music released before my teens, I ignored that. Other influential, but out of time, albums I first listened to in my teens, that led to further discoveries of those groups and similar sounds:

Other albums which were contemporary, but didn't quite make the list: