Who influenced your music taste most

[kexodusc]

Hmmm, probably friends...I had a few music teachers that tuned me into some piano and cello specific stuff, that led me to search for other music, but just hearing new music my friends were listening too was a big part of it.

Acutally that's one of the first questions I ask of new acquaintances...if I ask what they listen to for music and they Lady Gaga, I know to wrap up the conversation pretty quick.

[Rae]

Well, it's already been said, but so many of the folks here shepherded me into the broader musical world. I had the advantage of stumbling across this board in 1999 when I was still in my formative years and it's shaped what I listen to ever since. I remember that early on we did a comp series that was supposed to be our favorite songs-- the songs that had defined us and transformed us over the course of our lives. I eagerly put my own together so that I could trade it for others and I remember Davey gently saying "seriously? These are your all-time favorites?"... my tastes have grown a lot in the intervening decade and my horizons are a lot wider.

I first got into record collecting off of an issue of Rolling Stone that I picked up at a garage sale that had one of those "500 Essential Albums" lists in it... it must've been from the early 90s because I remember Loveless, Pretty Hate Machine, and Nevermind on it but not much past that. For a while I was on a mission to buy every album that was mentioned. Looking back, it was an incredibly narrow and reductive list but at the time I felt like I finally had a roadmap to a mindblowing world.

A few years later, I dated a woman who set my whole world on its ear (and not just musically). She basically introduced me to the concept of music as organic and populist and not something always created by the canon of rock gods. In some ways, I thought of her as the punk rock older sister that I never had (like in the Juliana Hatfield song, which is actually a perfect encapsulation of this thread).

From 2003-2005, I worked in a record store and that was it. All of the walls fell down and I was able to explore and consume all types of music as voraciously as I liked. I got burned out after a few years, especially from working retail and starting to see music as commodity, but I was exposed to tons of stuff before I did.

Acutally that's one of the first questions I ask of new acquaintances...if I ask what they listen to for music and they Lady Gaga, I know to wrap up the conversation pretty quick.

Wow, that must be incredibly limiting. Some of my favorite people love music that I can't stand, but I can't imagine not knowing them.

~Rae

[Slosh]

My parents were 21 when I was born ('68) and I grew up listening to The BeAtles, Led Zeppelin, The Stones, James Taylor, Pink Floyd, Jimi, Traffic, etc.

I had a good friend who had an older brother in the Navy and he came back all excited about this new band he discovered and thought they were gonna become really big someday. It was 1975 and that band turned out to be AC/DC. About 4 years later he was home on leave again and had a boot Iron Maiden tape (this was before they had an album out yet).

In the early '80s my first serious girlfriend (well, serious for 7th grade, anyway) always listened to X- Los Angeles, a welcome change of pace after all of that classic rock and metal. I never did become a huge punk fan but certainly listened and learned to appreciate a ton of stuff I probably would have dismissed out of hand if it wasn't for her.