12 albums that marked my 20s

You’re in for a treat! Last year I turned 30, and among other things to mark the round number, like running a triathlon, I also decided to ask Spotify for all my streaming data between 2013-2024 — nearly all of my music listening in my twenties captured! I had some fun plotting trends and seeing how my tastes evolved and are captured by the data. In this blog I want to tell you about 12 of my favorite albums of all time! While the top albums are those that I have listened to the most as well, some albums were picked to represent the breadth of genres and styles that was listening in the past decade (nobody wants to see 3 Fiona Apple albums in my top 10, let’s be real!). Along with each album, I will also plot the monthly trends of total hours listened to that album, spanning from 2014 to 2024, and jot down some feelings I feel about that album.

12. Ctrl

SZA (2017)

An epitome of my 2017-2019 alt R&B listening era. This album takes me back to the summer of 2017, when I had just moved to Philly from Providence, with all the hot humid hedonism I was getting myself into. Few of my favorite tracks on the album are Drew Barrymore and The Weekend. In some way, this album could’ve been easily replaced by The Internet’s Ego Death or Rex Orange County’s Apricot Princess. Albums like these really soundtracked my life in Philly and hold a special power to evoke nostalgia with all the little memories attached to the songs.

11. Paralellograms

Linda Perhacs (1970)

If Ctrl evokes Philly summers, Parallelograms evokes Chicago winters. I remember it vividly: I was on the Blue Line train to O’Hare Airport, about to go to Macedonia, watching the snow pile from the windows of the train, when I decided to listen to this record back to back for the first time. I felt like the music smacked me out of nowhere, with all its trippy ascending harmonies pushing me into a half-delirious acid trip. For some months before, I had been getting into this genre of 1970s acid folk, minimalist instruments with maximalist harmonies, somehow both soothing and deranged. Vashty Bunyan and Tia Blake were also on repeat during the long Chicago winters and deserve mentions, but listening to this album felt like a religious revelation.

10. Bad Girls

Donna Summer (1979)

Deep into the covid closures, my music tastes cuntified, and a disco/dance era had emerged with lots of music by the likes of Chaka Khan, Sylvester, Crystal Waters… you know, all the lip sync for your life songs. Bad Girls was not on the heavy rotation until the summer of 2024, but it stands out as a masterpiece! The way the songs flow seamlessly into each other makes the album feel like one big uninterrupted party. Just get up and fucking dance! That transition from Love Will Always Find You to Walk Away will find the smallest walnut hiding inside of you and smash it open to release your innermost Divine Feminine. What else do you expect when a Black American Diva meets a South European King?

9. OK Computer

Radiohead (1997)

We’re going further back into the past now, the rock&roll and Radiohead era of high school and early college years. This seems very far from the current music tastes, but I will ride and die for Radiohead, and this album is not only a masterclass in rock music, but also full of bops start to finish: Paranoid Android is an epic of a song in the ranks of Bohemian Rhapsody, with its ecstatic highs and delirious lows; Subterranean Homesick Alien is the perfect ride-into-the-night song; and No Surprises is the perfect background if you want to commit suicide — there’s something for everybody!

8. Blood

Kelsey Lu (2019)

Miss Lu is an ethereal Shamaness that begets spring and summer with her magical hymns. With every bow on the cello and every bird’s chirp, there is a warmth that envelops your heart. This record is not just music, it is nature, it is philosophy, it is Truth and Beauty. It succeeds spectacularly in creating a unique sonic aesthetic that is a universe that expands into itself. And within this through-line across the songs, Kelsey Lu manages to give great breadth of the songs too: Due West is a closeted turbo-folk song, dressed up as a hippie anthem in its yearning for California, Foreign Car is a cunty Fast and Furious tune that has you ready to drive and shoot, Poor Fake calls for authenticity, with a base line that makes your ass shake itself, and Blood calls for world peace with heavenly scat signing.

7. The Kick Inside

Kate Bush (1978)

I don’t understand this album. Hell, who even knows what she’s singing about?! No, no, you have to feel this album. This is the theater kid album, with all its unhinged instrumentals and all of Kate’s screams, that will occasionally and unexpectedly go up or down an octave. It does not make any sense, but the vibes are vibing. Art made straight from the purest Dionysian chaos. Only then can an artist create something truly unique — and Kate is nothing if not unique!

6. Dance Fever

Florence & the Machine (2022)

Florence was necessarily going to be featured on this list — this is an artist I have followed since high school and from her first album Lungs. I love most of her albums, but only in the last album is Florence finally embracing the powerful Witch Priestess she is — “like if Jesus came back, but in a beautiful dress”. The Good Witch and the Bad Witch. Choreomania sounds like a song a Shamaness would use to lead the tribe into an ecstasy around the campfire full of discoveries; in Dream Girl Evil, a very Fleetwood Mac-esque song, she is the villainized shimmering Mother; in Heaven is Here her taste is “more catholic than the Devil’s“, and she’s doing to Hell, but only if it glimmers. Don’t let the Church fool you — nothing is Evil if it is Pretty!

5. When the Pawn…

Fiona Apple (1999)

I love all of Fiona’s work, and she is one of my most listened-to artists in the past decade. While her witty songwriting and rhythmic songs are always a standout, this album was selected for its “Fuck you bitch, I’ll do what the fuck I want!“ energy. The only album Fiona had released before this one, Tidal, catapulted her into fame, but also boxed her as a fragile little flower of a girl, marketed to angsty teenagers. And Fiona was not going to have this! As critics and the public pushed her into a specific trope, she did not sacrifice her own voice for fame, and released this defiant album. A “Fuck you!“ to the critics as much as to her lovers. Then she disappeared for years before her next album, on her own accord. With this context we can interpret Fiona’s nods to rap music, from the braggadociously defiant lyrics to the playfulness of the flow and rhythm, it feels like Fiona is rapping half the time. The other half, we get the typical emotionality of jazz singing that is typical of Fiona. The rich lyrical landscape is matched with the most excessive and baroque production, including a drum solo on Limp and space gun sounds on On the Bound. Extra extra extra!

4. Alas I Cannot Swim

Laura Marling (2008)

As you can see in the trends, this album has been with me for years. Musically, it has this wholesome and soft folk vibe, perfect for the Sunday morning coffee as you read something, tune in to sing along for a bit, then tune out to continue reading. Lyrically, it is wise in love and wise in life, which is especially impressive given that Laura Marling was a teenager when she wrote this! There are songs on this album that to this day, years later, whenever I pick my guitar I will play and sing them. My favorite is the second part of Your Only Doll (Dora), the Alas I Cannot Swim portion of the 7+ minute track that follows the birds chirping interlude. In the song, the protagonist rejects a life she could have lived, in a house with a garden whose flowers seem to grin, with a boy with a short, black curly hair — a life meant for her! But all of that is across the river, and the protagonist cannot swim. Not unable, but unwilling — she would rather be dry than held up by a golden gun, pleasing those who would never be pleased. Gold is fleeting, gold is fickle, gold is fun… 

3. Norman Fucking Rockwell

Lana Del Rey (2019)

I have said this before and I will say it again: the only reason Bob Dylan has a Nobel Prize in Literature and Lana Del Rey does not, is misogyny! This album is Lana The Poet at her best. While I love Jack Antonoff’s layered production, once stripped, the songs are not particularly complex. It’s the same archetypes of the 3 or 4 chord songs we would recognize in many other popular songs. Lana is not reinventing the wheel. Hell, Venice Bitch and Happiness is a butterfly have the same chord progressions. The beauty of this album is taking these widespread musical tropes, and making them seem fresh and uniquely Lana. Creating an sonic aesthetic around them that is  And the lyrics… my my my, you found this, you need this // take a deep breath, baby let me in! I can write a whole thesis on the lyrics in this album, but as a testament to how deep she has gone consider my recent realization. In California, Lana’s protagonist is talking to her former lover, or perhaps to all of them, inviting them back to California, telling them she’ll “Pick up all of [their] Vogues, and all of [their] Rolling Stones“. Not too long ago, I was listening Joni Mitchell’s California, where she is yearning for California and all the “pretty people there, reading Rolling Stone, reading Vogue“. I realized: not only is Lana referencing an iconic Joni lyric, in her song with the same title, like a true Americana artist she is, but is also painting a vivid picture for us, of her and her lover(s) — they are the pretty people in California reading Vogue and Rolling Stone! Every crevasse of this album is full with thoughtful lyrics that reference American cultural cornerstones and employ them in the most sensitive and sensible storytelling. Poetess!

2. Be The Cowboy

Mitski (2018)

There is this shoemaker in my hometown who keeps singing birds in cages in his shop. The birds sing beautifully, so beautifully that I was enchanted enough to walk in and ask what kinds of birds they are, and why their song is mesmerizing. There is a trick, the shoekeeper said, you need to cage the males separately from the females — that’s when the song is the best! The protagonists in Mitski’s songs remind me of these poor poor birds. They sing the most beautiful songs, but the melodies are born of painful yearning, for the lover you can see but not have. Yearning is a dominant emotion in this album. Not only are the protagonists afflicted by these unresolved yearnings, to be seen, heard, loved, but the music itself generates an incredible sense of yearning, as vocals blend into instruments, and are dragged into a sparse distant spaces. A sonic yearning. At face value, the songs feel short and leave something to be desired. But that is precisely the feeling of yearning that transfers to the listener that makes this album a masterpiece. Mitski gives us these vignette-like, vague stories, with vivid and emotionally captivating characters, whose unresolved conflicts make us wonder… now what? I want more! Maybe that can explain why I have listened to this album for more than 140 hours. (If you want to read more Cowboy thoughts, about this album and myself, read this blog.)

1. Titanic Rising

Weyes Blood (2019)

Have you ever ascended to Heaven? Floated into the Vast Universe? Do you remember what it was like in your Mother’s safe, warm womb? If the answer is no to at least one of those questions, you have to listen to Titanic Rising. This album is lyrically modest: it talks of the disillusionment of our times, of awoken naivete, of banal problems like the troubles of adulthood, burnout, or the downfall of monogamy. The album is also musically monumental! It flirts spectacularly with both sparseness and fullness, feels like it is stretching and compressing time, a Universe of its own. Rooted in a folky tradition a la Joni Mitchell, and rich with the 7th-chord Heavenly progressions a la David Bowie, the twist is in the tense dissonance, so reminiscent of the Orthodox Christian church music I grew up with, that makes the music feel Godsent, makes me want to go on my knees and worship. Just listen to the outro of Something to Believe or the intro of Movies and tell me you have not discovered God! Music that makes you feel small. That and all the songs are fucking bops! Get in your feels babes!