There’s something very unique about great music that you won’t find in any other art form. Novels, movies, theater, poetry, paintings -- no other art form can you enjoy as completely and on as many levels as you can recorded music. Can you read a novel while driving down the road? Can you get anything out of a painting while you are concentrating coding a computer program? Can you put a movie on as background noise while you’re cleaning up the apartment?

Yes, music is by far the most ubiquitous art form. In my current lifestyle, I could listen to music for 24 hours in any given day.

And so it is that in by examining a person’s music (provided that person is a music lover) you can gain great insight into that one’s persona.

I feel that the best way to share myself with the world is to create a snapshot of the music I listen to. For that reason I present this list.

I remember being familiar with albums from the get-go. There’s a great picture of me at about age 6 with huge headphones on, oblivious to the outside world, asleep but still absorbing. I don’t know what I was listening to, but I was listening. And I’m not talking little kids records either – I would listen to real albums. My dad had a fair collection of records – I’d be hard pressed to name a single one now, but I remember listening to them.

My cousin Wendy had a great collection, and when she moved out she left all of her old albums at my aunt’s house. I never minded going out in the country to visit them – you could always find me listening to the Jackson Five, The Beatles, and I think I was actually introduced to Alice Cooper when I was about eleven. I still remember being blown away by the cool album cover to their Greatest Hits album and listening to "School’s Out" about a thousand times – what a great song for an eleven year old. I thought I was the coolest kid on earth listening to Saturday Night Fever; to this day I have still yet to see the movie, but the music put me there.

But Uncle Ross was where it was at. Not only did he have great music, but he had a great stereo. I remember staying up all night listening to The Wall and playing Risk. He didn’t just have the popular music, he had the Cool music – Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of the War of the Worlds, Cheech and Chong albums, the Moody Blues. All there, all waiting for me to discover.

I can still remember the first record I ever owned. I bought the Grease soundtrack with my own money (where does an eight-year old get that kind of cash?). I can vividly remember sitting on album 2 (luckily the less enjoyable one of the double set) and breaking it. Wasn’t too happy. First tape? Huey Lewis and the News’s Sports proudly purchased on the same day as my first boom box. First CD? Easy – U2’s Rattle and Hum.

Thanks to my sister, I discovered record clubs. She didn’t like it too well, but I swiped a number of her tapes from her after she tripled her collection with a shipment from Columbia House. Yes she would never seem to mind me borrowing her music, even losing it, but I still remember how crushed I was when she lost my Asia tape.

For some reason I have a great memory when it comes to my music collection. I can name the month and year of each purchase, along with the circumstances behind that purchase. Is this sick? Probably. Maybe I’m afraid of silence. Maybe I think that there is some message that is going to save the world hidden in song. Whatever the case may be, music is me.

I’m not a huge person when it comes to material possessions. I have a number of friends that put a lot of money into clothes, nice cars, houses. I have friends that own over 100 movies on laser disc. My material possession? Music. I have boxes and boxes of tapes and hundreds of CD’s. If you look at the budget for my paycheck, you’d see that my monthly music bill often edges out my grocery bill. Yes, my life is wrapped up in my music. Three times in my life I have had music stolen from me. I’ve had a number of things lost and stolen in my lifetime, but never was I more crushed about them than on these three occasions. If you want to get back at me for something, you know where to go.

A lot of people ask me just makes an album great enough to crack Sped’s Top Ten List? I’ve been accused by a number of friends that I favor lyrics over music. While I can agree that all of these albums are great in a lyrical sense, not one of them captured my interest because of that. I can honestly say that I listened each and every album on this list numerous times before consciously noticing a single lyric. I have listened to many lyrically strong albums that would never have a chance at making this list. 

Here is the basic order of achieving greatness:

• I must enjoy the music in and of itself. The music should be catchy enough to make me want to listen again, but not too clever such that the gimmick wears off.
• I must ‘catch’ a few of the lyrics in the back of my mind. Enough to make me want to listen to the album just to catch more moments.
• I must find the lyrics interesting enough to want to sit down and read the entire album’s lyrics.
• I start to realize that the lyrics and the music fit together as a cohesive unit.
• This is important – there should be points in the music that I can relate to. At this point the album ceases to be the artist’s and begins to be mine. I set the music to my own life. A great album is not truly autobiographical but rather all-biographical.

A great album must have some basic qualities. There should be no overt attempts on the part of the artist to create songs as hits, but rather songs as threads to a greater fabric. All songs on the album should have a purpose on the album. The lyrics must be strong, but not necessarily strong enough to be able to exist without the music – song lyrics are not poetry. If the lyrics are strong enough to stand on their own they should never have been ruined by setting them to music.

Greatness must be defined by the listener. It’s not possible to make another think the same way you do about greatness.

Each entry on this list has a number of points about the album that I think will be of interest to the listener. There is a listing of songs on the album, the name of the producer, the release date of the album, and the date that I first listened to the album. Sometimes I assume that the listener is at least slightly familiar with the album, but it is not necessary to know the album to read my thoughts. Besides some thoughts on the particular album (which may or may not include a review of the album), I offer some thoughts on other works by the same artist as well as what I think about their performance as a live musician, something I find critical in the music I listen to.

I’m not making this list to try to make a critical statement. In no way am I trying to convince anyone that the albums that mean the most to me should be considered the most important pieces of art. These are simply pieces of music that have helped shape me as a person. While I’ve seen many great paintings, read many great books, seen many great movies, nothing has ever moved me to tears or given me anything close to a "spiritual experience" the way music has.

Please feel free to peruse this list and see what kind of a person I am.