The Albums that Shaped Me

An offhand request from my daughter when I was dropping her off to school this morning, “Can you play some old guitar music?”, brought to mind an old favorite album, which I played.

As I drove back after dropping her off at school, I started to think of the albums that shaped me: like many others who grew up in the ‘80’s, I am till today much more an album guy than a singles guy, I love listening to albums end to end. While my musical tastes are now quite varied, there were few albums that I heard again and again on repeat in my formative years: they are the bedrock of my musical taste.

1. The Red Album, The Beatles: Probably the first English album that I heard, maybe when I was 5 or 6 years old. My father had this record in his collection, along with records by Abba, Boney M and Grover Washington Jr., but this was the one I took to. For some reason, I preferred and listened to “Disc 2” many more times than “Disc 1”, and Help - You’ve got to hide your love away - We can work it out - Day tripper - Drive my car - Norwegian Wood - Nowhere Man - Michelle: I remember this sequence to this day!

   

2. Bad, Michael Jackson: The first album I bought, in 5th standard in a crummy shop in Lajpat Nagar in New Delhi. I had heard of Michael Jackson, and watched the amazing Thriller video on a VCR player at my best friend Peter Kim Rufus’ house, and had been blown away by it… I bought “Bad” and used to sing “The Way You Make Me Feel” and “Man in the Mirror” all the time! By the way, the second album I bought was “Everything” by The Bangles, an album I bought after wathching the “Walk Like an Egyptian” video; I didn’t listen to that album much, except for Bell Jar and Eternal Flame!

3. Brothers in Arms, Dire Straits: The gateway album to all of Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler. My father had got this album for me from Singapore if I’m not mistaken, and it was an album which I must have heard a hundred times, of which I read the lyrics in the inside cover, and an album I shared with my best friend.

4. The Concert in Central Park, Simon & Garfunkel: This has to be my most heard album! I used to play this almost everyday in 11th and 12th standard while preparing for my board exams, it was either this or the FM Radio playing when I studied. I love all the songs on this album, and the lyrics are burnt into my neural pathways…

5. Heavy Horses, Jethro Tull: While I owned & liked many other albums by Tull, Heavy Horses will remain special: it was the first album that I shared with a girl, someone who I discovered was also a fan of Jethro Tull. My, and her, favorite song on the album was “Moths”: it is a great song, one that brings back bittersweet memories.

6. Skeletons from the Closet, Grateful Dead: A best-of album by the Grateful Dead, this was a prized possession of mine in college, along with “Bear’s Choice”. I loved — and still love — Casey Jones, Truckin’, Uncle John’s Band, Mexicali Blues, and other songs from this album. If I’m not mistaken my brother & I had bought this casette in a small, dark shop in Chennai which had an amazing collection of rock music casette tapes: on the same trip, we also picked up the Infidels and Desire casettes by Bob Dylan, the Traveling Wilbury’s tapes, and a yellow-colored two casette album by The Band!

7. However, the album I played for my daughter was none of these, it was another special album.

   Growing up, most of my musical tastes were influenced by my brother; he was 5 years older to me, and went to college when I was in 8th grade. So, through high school I heard Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Grateful Dead, CSNY, CCR, ELP and other music that he was picking up at IIT-Bombay. Later, I got into U2, The Police, Eagles, Def Leppard, Bryan Adams, and other popular music of my time, when I was in college. However, Jethro Tull (who I had first heard at a cousin’s place) and Dire Straits (who I had picked up an album of in Flora Fountain, by chance, when looking for Def Leppard!) remained outside of this universe of influence from my big brother.

   As I had continued to explore Dire Straits and then Mark Knopler, I happened upon an album that I bought on my own, by chance, and that I grew to love: Neck & Neck by Chet Atkins and Mark Knopfler. This was a special album because it was my first music discovery, not influenced by older siblings, friends, videos on MTV: it was mine in some strange way. This was the album that I played for my daughter on the way to school: it’s got great finger-picking guitar, a folksy conversational style, and just two great guitar players having fun.

Though I owned, listened to, and loved many more albums than this, I would pick these as the seven albums that have shaped my musical tastes the most.

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I used to make cartoons early on in my product management career which used to poke fun at my management: I guess you’d call them memes today! Anyway, I made two (not very good) memes on meditation yesterday using ChatGPT.

• Prompt: Create a anime-style meme on meditation, with the tagline "Breath taking is simply breath-taking", with a Zen-master telling a student this. Keep a speech bubble for the text.

• Prompt: Create a Newyorker style meme on meditation, with the tagline "Meditation - They hid the secret right under our noses!"

However, getting these memes right took some time and working with ChatGPT. Two issues I observed — first, ChatGPT (and other image generation AI tools) are terrible with generating text

Second, ChatGPT had this funny blue dot going on in many of the images it generated for the Zen master who was meditating, and it took several efforts to get it to stop generating that blue dot!

I don’t know why ChatGPT struggles with text in images, or why it does these “hallucinations” like adding the blue dot… it’d be great to know more!

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I saw the trailer for “A Complete Unknown”, with Timothee Chalamet playing Bob Dylan. I can’t wait for the movie — I hope it’ll be good!

This Olympics, from the opening ceremony till the end of week 1, seems to have been marred with more controversies and memes than new world records! But there were two highlights yesterday, which I’ll just leave here as images for memory:

I recently discovered that I have a condition that’s called aphantasia; my sister-in-law was telling us that my brother had this condition, and we started to chat about it, only for me to also find out that I shared this with him (he said, “Can you see pictures in your mind’s eye”, to which I replied “But that’s just a metaphor” — and then I found out that for everyone else this isn’t a metaphor, but they can literally see images in their minds eye!).

My brother shared a good article about this recently with me; over the next few weeks I plan to dig in and understand this more.

Keep reading & keep enjoying your music, till next week!