As a young child my mother always had music playing. A lot of it was opera and classical, which didn’t appeal to me at such a young age (I still don’t like opera), but I always had age appropriate kiddie albums to listen to. I had a turntable in my bedroom and Mom would put an album on for me to go to sleep to. If I was still awake when the side was over, I would yell out for her to turn it over and she would come and turn it over. I remember many nights of her coming into my room to tell me to stop singing and go to sleep.

As I got older my brothers became my influence. My mother ingrained a love for music in me, but it was my older brothers’ albums that influenced what I listened to. To a large extent BarryL still influences me by introducing me to new bands all the time (I hope that I’m able to influence him a bit too).

As you would expect, Barry was into Yes, Kansas, Genesis and other progressive rock bands. I used to listen to his copy of Leftoverture and his Pink Floyd disks all the time. Our older brother was more into stuff like Alice Cooper and David Bowie. Between the two of them I got a pretty well rounded education in rock music. And since Barry has always been a huge collector of music, I had literally hundreds and hundreds of albums at my fingertips.

I blame him for my overflowing CD collection today.