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No album really changed my life, but some have had a major influence on my music listening experience. Starting, maybe, with the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack when I was still a kid.

Then, in some way, 90125 by Yes. Not so much for the album itself (although I still like it very much), but it made me dive into their back catalogue from which CTTE and Relayer had that famous "Whoah"-effect on me...

In other territories I should mention Éclat by Pierre Boulez, which let me to explore a lot of contemporary and later also electronic music.

I start from my childhood.

The first album that changed my life was.... 

Every sunday morning my father listened to this opera. It entered my ears.

I give you an example:

Only one album ...actually three at the time ... an opera.

Renata Tebaldi, Birgit Nilsson, Mario Del Monaco directed by Erick Leinsdorf -- TURANDOT ... still one of the best vocal things I have ever heard. The intensity is impeccable.

The other special thing is not a whole opera, but one aria done from TOSCA by Beniamino Gigli ... it is by far one of the best renditions of it all that makes you cry as it should!

Rock music since the mid 70's has become way too fake and plastic for my tastes. The "truth" of it all was lost in smoke, and stage crap to make the music more important to your experience ... and that is what teenagers remember ... how impressed they were.

Best example of this? A few years back, I saw RTF and ZPZ ... and the saddest thing was that RTF made ZPZ look and sound like just a cheap garage band ... and you know that FZ would not have been happy with that! Not to mention that Dweezil did not even know (or acknowledge properly!) that the violin player had been in several albums with Frank. It was sad ... and just showed the lack of class that Dweezil lacks compared to his late father!

This one (which by far isn't the most popular or even best Comsat Angels album) was the first one to demonstrate the power of music to lead me through a personal crisis. Not sure whether any music ever got me from so negative to so positive.

Great story, Lorenzo. Did you actually show any interest in Opera to your father at the time, or passively absorb it? We're of similar ages but I'm afraid, I grew up in a household where the spoken word was king; my father listened to BBC Radio 4 and the World Service... I could have told you about Vietnamese boat people or Idi Armin, but very little music was played and opera has only been a discovery in the past 10-12 years.

I was just thinking, while La Trav is magical, if you'd shown some interest, what a great journey he could have given you with the story lines to Rigoletto, Tosca or I Pagliacci, which could have fired your imagination!

certainly the albums Friede and I made as the band Bald Angels (with the help of some guest musicians), "The Goat and the Donkey" and "It's a Dog's Life". only 500 copies were made of each album; we sold them at our restaurant.

here the covers of the albums:

In terms of prog, the most important album for me was definitely King Crimson's Discipline. It was the first real prog album that I heard (I had a best of Yes collection that I don't count) and one that made me want to explore prog and 'serious' music in more detail. For important albums under the prog umbrella I would also list Gentle Giant's Interview, Henry Cow's Legend, Zappa's One Size Fits All, Spock's Beard's The Kindness Of Strangers, and National Health's Compete. 

After this, I did start explore more styles of music, but in terms of impact and 'life changing-ness" of albums, these ones would certainly be at the top of the list. 

In the beginning, being a child, I absorbed La Traviata without any comprehension. I'm talking about the seventies and early eighties. At that time, Italy had lost the great female opera performers (Tebaldi and Callas). As a teenager I started listening to classical music disks that my father had at home (but he never played them). La Traviata became a kind of childhood memory, of which I knew certain musical "arias" by heart - listen to it became a strange pleasure. My father occasionally also played Rigoletto and I Trovatori, which together with Traviata make up Verdi's greatest trilogy. He had all of Verdi's operas and perhaps also Tosca and Turandot. Then came Pavarotti, who made famous certain arias by Verdi and Puccini and other musicians. He fascinated everyone with Rigoletto's Volta the Giubba and Turandot's Nessun dorma.

But Italian music critics, opera experts, often criticized Pavarotti, many did not consider him an excellent singer - and even more criticized Carreras and Domingo. Personally, I think Pavarotti had a more beautiful voice than the two colleagues.

It may be, dear Christian, that you are right. In any case, my father's passion for Verdi should not be considered the norm of Italian parents. And Italian teenagers who listen to classical music are also a minority. You can find them especially among people with artistic inspirations (not just musicians but aspiring writers, cinema or theater enthusiasts). Almost all the writers I know, as teenagers or in college, were - like me - already quite versed in classical music (fewer were experts in opera) and cinema, as well as in literature and rock of the sixties and seventies. 

Certainly in Italy there is a strong aptitude for melody, both at a popular and cultured level. In southern Italy almost all women love melodic music, few females love rock. After all, Italian melodic music derives from the arias of operas. Italian criticism, on the other hand, is often very far from the tastes of the public, because it is very attentive to formal values ​​and very self-critical - almost all Italian artists who are successful in the world, especially in America, in Italy are snubbed by critics. 

I try to be flexible, but on the whole I recognize a certain value in this type of criticism, which derives mainly from Marxist culture (Italy, the Catholic country par excellence, has developed, in compensation, a very strong left culture, which until 2-3 decades ago it was hegemon, while liberal and Catholic culture was a minority - I come from a very Catholic family, so I absorbed Catholic education, but growing up I found myself in many ways in left-wing culture, albeit always in a very autonomous way, without ever following belonging).

Well my love of hard-bop/modal style jazz did not start at a young age for me. But I can see how an album like KoB and A Love Supreme could have affected a young person in the early to mid 60's.

My life has never been the same since

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQqK1CjE9bA&t=925s" rel="nofollow - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQqK1CjE9bA&t=925s

I suppose I should start by mentioning Pink Floyd - The Wall - although it was in my parents collection. It was the first album that made me aware music could be more than one song after the other.

Metallica - Master of Puppets was really the first I found on my own and obsessed with (while my parents hated it). Before that I was mostly buying the music of my parents generation, that they were never cool enough to have in their collection. My 20 years too late to the party-tastes were even less cool, I suppose). We also had a handful of seemingly random collections of classical music. But as a child I played those Grieg, Mozart, Beethoven etc. snippets over and over. Although it was typically "classical hits"-compilations, I'm glad they were there for me to discover. As a young adult, maybe this has had the biggest impact on me. It changed the rules, turned them upside down and inside out - and in a disturbingly fun way:). Beginning in this end or approach to "progressive rock" is probably why it took me so long to fully embrace Camel:)