It�s the beginning of a new month, so I�ve decided to finally haul out the project I�ve been working on for the last several months: the 50 Big Albums of my life so far. Because I majored in English and spent most of college taking essay exams that exhorted me to explain myself using sound reasoning and examples from the text, I have included with this list a shortish reflection about each album. In each one I usually touch on the music and the band's cultural context, but try to focus on my often embarrassingly personal experience with that music, as well as the effect that music had on me and those around me.

I�m not even sure these would all be on my 50 Greatest Albums Of All Time list; I believe there is a difference, though I can�t really articulate what it might be. Perhaps Dino said it best when he undertook this same project recently: �This list is not a �greatest albums of all time� list, or a �greatest albums of my time� list. It is simply a list that tracks, chronologically, the 50 albums that influenced my life to a great degree. For better or for worse, the albums on this list reflect a relative importance to me and my love for music.�

So, if you stick it out and slog through fifty rather meandering, effusive, and hopefully not too bathetic musings about music in which you may very well have zero interest, you�ll be subjected to a lot of nostalgia, some obscure references to places and people you�ve never heard of (nor would you want to), and overwrought, florid attempts to describe a creative form that�s impossible to describe in words. (There�s that old line, attributed to Thelonius Monk or Laurie Anderson or Elvis Costello, depending on your source: �Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.�) But you might also get a better sense for the music I'm passionate about, and maybe next time you get drunk with me and I put one of these albums on at high volume at three in the morning and force you to listen to it, you�ll have a little more sympathy (i.e. pity) for me.

I just re-read that caveat and it doesn�t really make this whole thing sound too enticing. Oh well; I�ve never been good at PR.

Let�s start with an easy one, then.

Tears For Fears, Songs From The Big Chair

The summer of 1985. Possibly the greatest summer of my young life. Born In The USA was at the top of the charts, MTV still showed videos, Live Aid happened, and we spent the summer visiting relatives in DC, which meant watching cable television at my grandmother�s and accompanying my father and my uncles to Orioles games (they lost every time I went along with him; my dad eventually decided I was bad luck). And �Shout� was the ubiquitous hit single. No mean feat, for a band that specialized in dark, New Romantic laments dressed up in brilliant pop melodies, and whose breakthrough hit was a six-and-a-half-minute song about primal scream therapy. None of this mattered to me or the rest of the world, because the song positively rocked. That summer, I took tennis lessons, and when I wasn�t busy sucking out there in the blistering Maryland heat, I was using the racket as a prop guitar while I stood in front of my grandma�s TV and rocked out.

Back then, I didn�t have the awareness to fully appreciate the moment after the middle section when the real drums come crashing in, or Roland Orzabal�s soaring guitar solo at the end of the song (in the video, played defiantly while he stood atop of an outcropping in the middle of the desert with his wool overcoat and his Jerry Seinfeld hair, because that sort of thing actually looked cool at the time). But it still gave me chills. I hounded my parents relentlessly until they finally bought me Songs From The Big Chair on cassette at Sam Goody (�Eleven dollars?� my mother exclaimed indignantly. �For a tape?�) and I wore that motherfucker down. It was my first real purchased album of my own (after Thriller, which I got a couple years prior and then lost). I didn�t even have a WalkMan at the time; I just played it on the little mono tape recorder my dad used for dictation. And it still kicked my ass. My mother's sisters would try to get my four-year-old brother to sing �Shout� and he would simply bellow �Doubt! Bout! Bet it all doubt!�

But that�s just the beginning. For me, the sax figures that open �The Working Hour� will always be synonymous with long summer car trips in our Dodge Aires station wagon. Then comes �Everybody Wants To Rule The World�, a buoyant pop song that also ruled the airwaves, but the subject matter is still the group's patented themes of greed and loss of faith. See? I can�t think of another band who so made the marriage of shiny pop music with these themes seem so effortless. Then there�s the added bonus of not just one brilliant guitar solo on this song, but another one at the end. And what the hell was happening at the end of �Mother�s Talk�? Things like that only served to solidify my belief that I was meant to be a drummer, preferably one who created loud, scary music. �Broken� is a brief punishing salvo about the loss of innocence: One little boy, anger, one little man ... funny how time flies. And �Head Over Heels�! Music historians of the future should point to this song as a perfect pop song; who would dare argue with them? The flanged drum fill alone spawned a generation of imitators. The second side of this album also introduced me to the idea of recurring musical themes, as I struggled to get my head around the way Orzabal & Co. inserted the famous piano figure from "Head Over Heels" into the middle of �Broken�, and how the end of �Head Over Heels� segued back into a live version of �Broken�. What the hell were they doing? Could a band really do that? There was so much I had yet to learn about music! �Listen� runs the risk of lapsing into new-age bullshit, and probably would on any other 80s album, but here it works, and it works beautifully.

Tears For Fears proved that pop music could be epic and transcendent without being pretentious or ponderous. This wasn�t easy to pull off, but they succeeded in spades with this album, and to a somewhat lesser extent on The Seeds Of Love. In the summer of 1985 and in the twenty years since, The Big Chair has been my go-to pop album. Now, I listen to �The Working Hour� at work, of all places, and the obvious juxtaposition between my adult life as a wage slave and the carefree summers of my childhood, both with this song as a backdrop, is not lost on me. This fear is such a vicious thing / it wraps me up in chains. What awed me then, I now understand.

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