Influences
Below is a list of music that I’ve listened to and has influenced the music I make. The list is broken into sections which represent different chapters in my life.
Late Elementary / Middle School (1995 - 1999)
Bush - Sixteen Stone
The main style of music that I started to like as I formed my own taste in music towards the end of elementary school was rock. I had many albums on CD and tape like Throwing Copper by Live and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by Smashing Pumpkins. However if I had to pick the most influential album of that style from that era I’d pick Sixteen Stone by Bush. Sixteen Stone definitely was one of the factors that drove me toward guitar in the 5th grade, which was really the start of my journey as a musician. I can remember learning the power chords to play their songs like Machinehead with my guitar teacher John.
Beyond the music, I can also remember idolizing Gavin Rossdale. I remember walking into a barbershop with my Mom with a ripped out magazine photo of him and showing it to the barber and asking him to give me the same hair style (for whatever reason the barber told me he couldn’t do it).
Rancid - …And Out Come the Wolves
As I got into 7th grade my taste started to shift towards punk music, with Rancid becoming my next idols.
I’m not sure of my exact age at the time, but snagged the username rancidboy on AIM (I can’t remember if I had that exact spelling). This was around the same time that I started skateboarding and smoked my first cigarette.
High School (1999 - 2003)
Converge - Jane Doe
As I got into high school my taste shifted to more heavy music. Metal was fairly popular at the time with bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit being pretty mainstream, but my group of friends preferred something more edgey with hardcore bands like Converge and Dillinger Escape Plan.
I only wanted to pick one hardcore album from this era and Dillinger Escape Plan’s “Calculating Infinity” is a very close second place (also Refused’s “The Shape of Punk to Come”), but ultimately I think Jane Doe best captures the overall sound of what I was listening to.
Built to Spill - Perfect From Now On
At the same time as I was getting into heavier music I also went in the opposite direction and got into more spacey music with bands like Spiritualized, Sigur Ros and Built to Spill. There was definitely a point in time where I came to the conclusion that Perfect from Now On was the best album ever created. In fact, the name that I started associating with my music “bed eternity” actually originates from the first track of this album, “Randy Described Eternity”.
Radiohead - Kid A
While I wouldn’t directly attribute Radiohead to my interest in electronic music which formed in high school, I think one of the reasons that I love(d) Kid A so much is that it straddles my roots in rock music and the electronic direction my tastes were beginning to take. I was a huge Radiohead fan in general and loved OK Computer, Amnesiac and The Bends, but like many fans Kid A is the album of theirs that became my favorite.
DNTEL - Life is Full Of Possibilities
Distilling the electronic music I listened to at this time to a single choice is extremely difficult. I was very close to putting Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James album in this spot, but ultimately landed on Life is Full Of Possiblities by DNTEL. I had a bunch of friends that liked electronic music and this was an album that no one else seemed to really know or listen to as much as me. I was floored by the beauty of it though. Other honorable mentions for the list are Boards of Canada (hard to pick which album) and “Yesterday Was Dramatic - Today Is OK” by Múm.
Weezer - The Blue Album
More straight forward rock was not by any means dead to me at the time. There was all kind of rock I was listening to like At The Drive In and also some emo like Jimmy Eat World. It was an older album but I started to really appreciate Weezer’s The Blue Album at this point in my life.
College (2003 - 2008)
Nas - Illmatic
It wasn’t until college that I truly started to appreciate hip hop. The credit for this was mainly due to a friend I made in my first semester named Pat who put really put me on to it. Before that my friends and I never really took rap seriously as we had only really heard mainstream stuff which we sometimes laughed at like “Back That Azz Up” by Juvenile or “In da Club” by 50 Cent (although, spoiler alert, when I later listened to Get Rich or Die Tryin’ in it’s entirety I realized that 50 was definitely to be taken seriously).
I can’t remember exactly what Pat was playing that shifted my mindset, Nas was definitely in the mix when hanging out along with other classics like Jay-Z’s “Reasonable Doubt” or Mobb Deep’s “The Infamous”. I started listening to rap by myself and quickly realized how much a masterpiece Nas had created with Illmatic.
The New Deal - Gone Gone Gone
College was also when I started to get into actually dancing to music. The New Deal were one of my favorite bands to go out and see live and dance to. They were a band I much preferred to listen to live rather than their albums, but I did want to capture them here as this was an important part of my musical journey and this album has many of their classic songs like VL Tone.
Shpongle - Tales of the Inexpressible
I also got an appreciating for psychedelic trance around this time in my life. It’s not a genre I listen to much in the present day, but I was a big fan of Shpongle, Hallucinogenic, Infected Mushroom and other similar acts at the time.
Japan (2008 - 2011) / New York City (2011 - 2013)
Hot Chip - The Warning
After I graduated college I moved to Japan. My music tastes didn’t change much in this period of my life. I continued to enjoy dance-y electronic music and became a fan of Hot Chip when I learned about them from the line up of the Fuji Rock Music Festival which I attended twice while staying in Japan. I had borrowed a copy of The Warning from a CD rental store (which was one of the ways I getting new music at this time) and quickly decided that they were one of the bands I was most looking forward to seeing at the festival.
James Blake - James Blake
Not long after moving back from Japan and into New York City, James Blake’s self titled album came out. It was exactly up my alley right from the first time I heard it, which should be evident from the influences I’ve listed leading up to 2011 when his self-titled album was released. I was living in an apartment in New York City at the time and can remember blasting this out on the Sonos 3 system we had hooked up. His music production continued to re-inforce the glitchy, electronic-y sound that I’d fallen in love with with acts like DNTEL in high school. I also loved his soft, falsetto vocals, a style I started listening to at this point in my life with other acts like Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens.
Drake - Take Care
At this period in life I started to open up to more mainstream hip hop and more R&B / pop style stuff. Drake’s “Take Care” was a frequent listen, for both the R&B songs like “Crew Love” and the more standard main stream hip hop like “Lord Knows”.
Parenthood #1 (2013 - 2016)
Lana Del Rey - Ultraviolence
My intro to Lana Del Rey was hearing the song “West Coast” on the radio in the car. I did a double-take the first time I heard it, like “wait that was really good, I don’t usually hear anything I like that much on the radio”. After hearing the song I streamed the whole album on Spotify was a fan in short order. I have gone through many Lana Del Rey phases since then and still as of the time of writing there are some albums I haven’t listened to at all like Honeymoon, but she’s been a huge part of my musical life since first hearing her.
Anderson .Paak - Malibu
My introduction to Anderson .Paak was actually through the artist Tokimonsta, whose music he’s been featured on a few times. This lead me to his album Malibu, which has continued to open me up to more soulful R&B. I remember my brother having his med-school graduation party around this time and sending him “Am I Wrong” to put on the playlist.
Parenthood #2 (2016 - Present)
Freddie Gibbs and Madlib - Piñata
My introduction to Freddie Gibbs was through the Danny Brown song “The Return”. When I heard Piñata I was so happy that there was still hip hop coming out that sounded the way that album does. I had been a Madlib fan since college, but the combination of the Madlib beats plus Freddie’s bars really restored my faith in hip hop.
Benny The Butcher - The Plugs I Met
Freddie Gibbs was actually in a way my link to Griselda, who really solidified that real hip hop was still alive. Spotify shuffle randomly took me to the Westside Gunn song “Brains Flew By (1964 Version)” which caught my attention because the beat uses the same sample as Freddie Gibbs’s “Thuggin”. From there I began exploring the Griselda catalog. While The Plugs I Met is only a short 5 song EP everything about it is perfect. Benny is going bar for bar with legends like Jadakiss and Black Thought and they are all shining.
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