There are three albums that, for me, hold the following characteristics:
- I listened to them repeatedly when I first discovered them. No, really, I mean many, many times.
- What attracted me to them first was their sound, not the lyrics. I only really started appreciating the lyrics after the hundredth time I listened to them. (I actually do this with most music.)
- When I delved into the rest of the artist’s catalog, nothing else had the same effect on me. It’s not that their other albums were bad in any way; they just didn’t magnetically attract me like these. This is really the key characteristic for the purposes of this list, which is why I titled the post “singular albums.”
To be clear, I don’t mean these are the best albums made this these artists. I don’t really have opinions about music in that way. I like what I like, and it’s not any more complicated than that for me.
Also, I don’t know why these albums affected me in the way they did—and I’m uninterested in understanding it. I think this is related to my hatred of those “behind the scenes” features that used to come on DVDs. When I truly love something, I prefer to leave it unanalyzed.
The three albums are:
- Hozier, “Wasteland, Baby!”
- Florence and the Machine, “Dance Fever”
- David Benjamin Blower, “We Are All Here”
