A friend on Facebook last week had been tagged in one of those Facebook list thingees. (Is there a hipster word for it, when one person lists their ten (or however many) favorite somethings, and then tags their friends to do the same? Five years ago I would’ve called that a meme, but the meaning of that word has changed drastically!) The list was about music: list ten albums that have stayed with you

I’ve been mentally writing my list in my head since I read that status, so I’m just going to write them here, on my blog. In roughly chronological order, with liner notes:

1. Forever Young by Alphaville.

Hearing this album—in my friend Carrie’s camper on our way to Lake Powell the summer I was 14—changed my life. That’s fairly dramatic to say of music, but it’s true. I had never heard anything like it, but it was like finding a part of myself I didn’t know was lost. On the way home from the trip, Carrie’s sister (who had brought the tape) decided she hated it and would never listen to it again. I, on the other hand, got home and started listening to the radio obsessively, trying to hear “Big in Japan” again. Once I found a radio station that played it—KJQ—I discovered some of my friends also listened to it; music to friends to lifestyle and whammo, one album changed everything.

2. Music for the Masses by Depeche Mode.

I can’t even explain the depths of my affection for DM as a teenager. So it was hard to pick just one album. I bought this as an import because I couldn’t wait for the American release, back when Grey Whale was selling used tapes and imports in that little shop on Center Street in Provo. As this was the soundtrack for so many, many experiences, it had to be this one. In my more dramatic moments I used to say that “Strangelove” is the only true love song, mostly because that was all I knew about love (the way the song is about just taking whatever the person you love kicks you with because you knew he’d eventually stop kicking). I can’t hear any of the songs on it without being swamped with how it felt to be me in high school.

3. 1894-1989 by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions.

I n the summer of 1989, my friend Jennifer and I went to Lake Powell for spring break. My mom was NOT happy about me going (who can blame her—a big group of kids hanging out unsupervised in campers and tents and surrounded by water?), so we fought for days before I went. She let me go, but I was on my own as far as getting there, and feeding myself, and anything else. So Jenn and I went to Lake Powell with a Phillips 66 gas card and one tape. We were already in Price before we realized that we’d forgotten the case of tapes and only had Lloyd Cole with us, which was in her tape player. Even though it was the longest drive to Lake Powell ever (we got lost more than once, and I’m not talking about small, ooooops-I-missed-the-exit detours), I never got tired of it. “Her heart’s like crazy paving, upside down and back to front because ooooh, it’s so hard to love when love was your great disappointment” is still one of my all-time favorite lyrics. Even with the ooooh. Listening to it will always be synonymous with freedom and adventure for me. (For what it’s worth: that trip to Powell was one of my adolescent life’s tamest weekends, except for a girl threatening to duct-tape my f-ing mouth closed; as I loved Lake Powell too much to pollute it with anything other than just being there, I did nothing my mother wouldn’t have approved of. Except, you know, stealing her gas card and living for two days on chips, beef jerky, and Pepsi.)

4. Sonic Temple by the Cult.

I resisted liking The Cult for awhile. It just seemed so...hard. I had to grow into it, in non-pleasant ways; I had to find my hard places before I liked their music. Once I discovered angry driving with The Cult blaring, though, I was hooked. “Wild Flower” will always be my favorite Cult song, but I love every single song on Sonic Temple. Still! And I confess: I often wish I could go angry driving with a Cult accompaniment.

5. Deep by Peter Murphy.

At midnight on the night a new album released, KJQ used to play the whole thing. The night that Deep released, Jenn stayed up late and taped it so we could start listening to it immediately. By then—the end of 1989, the start of 1990—I was deeply immersed in my goth-girl ways and had an abiding affection for Bauhaus and its incarnations. It was dark and I was in a dark place. What I didn’t know when I first listened to deep was how on the cusp of change I was, and then January came and everything really, really changed, and so deep is another soundtrack to a time in my life that is inestricable from the music. “A Strange Kind of Love” is a song that tugs me right back to complication and heartache but also being loved and treated kindly (although a bit obsessively) by a boy. I still wish it could’ve fallen on the side of friendship instead of hatred.

6. Ink by The Fixx.

So it was 1991, and I was sort of putting my life back together, and I was dating this boy, and we’d broken up in April but then gotten back together, and all summer we just hung out and spent time together driving around in his white Jetta and yeah...I totally married him, and this Fixx album is the soundtrack to that summer. I hadn’t ever had a strong connection to this band...but I loved this album, the white Jetta, the boy.

7. Little Earthquakes by Tori Amos.

This is the first CD I bought. I loved “Silent All These Years” the instant I heard it, but we were in that awkward transition then—we didn’t own a CD player but didn’t want to buy tapes anymore. When we finally bought one, during the summer we were building our house, I bought this first for myself even though Kendell hated Tori Amos. (He still does.) Even though Becky hated Tori Amos. (She doesn’t anymore.) It’s good it’s not possible to wear out a CD (is it?) because I would’ve worn Little Earthquakes out as a tape. Every song means something to me, both from that time in my life and from other connections as I’ve continued to listen to it, but mostly it has taught me something (that I am still learning) about finding my own voice. (Scarlett’s Walk was equally important to me, but in a different way. I listened to it every day driving back and forth when I was student teaching, and it gave me courage to walk into that school every day when I was terrified and unsure of my choices and wanting desperately to do nothing other than drive back home to my babies. But as I am limiting myself to one album per artist...)

8. Yourself or Someone Like You by Matchbox 20.

I remember going into the music store in the mall and trying to explain this song I’d heard on the radio: it’s something about boxes of rain, and what would happen if the singer were the leader of the world...Yeah. The poor little teenager had no clue. I finally figured it out. This album (and most all of their music) has stayed with me because it taught me that music could connect and relate and have awesome lyrics—and still be just really, really fun. Plus it reminds me of being the mom of just one child, how terrifying and exhilarating that time was.

9. Films about Ghosts by Counting Crows.

Is it cheating to include a “best of” album? Not always, though, does a best-of album really get the band’s best stuff for me, usually because I tend to like the songs that aren’t played on the radio as much. Has anyone ever heard “Recovering the Satellites,” “Holiday in Spain,” or the incomparable “Anna Begins” on the radio? (Plus...it’s got all the ones that were on the radio, like “Einstein on the Beach” and, yes, “Mr. Jones.”) “She’s talking in her sleep—it’s keeping me awake And Anna begins to toss and turn, And every word is nonsense but I understand.” Swoon. I forget how much Counting Crows is intertwined in my grown up life until I listen to this album, but seriously: everywhere. Every song reminds me of something. I’ve made lesson plans with it, and scrapbook pages; I’ve sung along to every single song hundreds of times.

10. AHK-toong Bay-Bi Covered.

Maybe it’s odd that my favorite U2 album is mostly not sung by U2? As much as I love U2, and as strongly as The Unforgettable Fire influenced me, and no matter how some of their lyrics could be tattooed on my body they are so much a part of me, I love this album the best. It’s a remake of Achtung Baby, with songs by Damien Rice, Nine Inch Nails, Jack White, and DM (among others) and each cover somehow gets exactly to the substance of the song and turns it into more of itself than it was. I discovered it one morning when, driving to work, I heard Depeche Mode singing, what!?, “So Cruel,” and then I confess I didn’t do much librarian-ish stuff until I discovered how to get my hands on it. Luckily Becky had heard it, too, and that same morning she went about purchasing it for us. Since then the album has gone with me nearly everywhere, trips to California and Mexico, countless runs and races, in the car to funerals. Even in Rome, where Becky and I listened to that DM cover while we walked by the Tiber. It’s never gotten old.

This list was harder to write than I thought, despite a week’s worth of thinking about it. Mostly because I could’ve made it twenty albums long. (Not included, but almost: 21 by Adele, Ceremonials by Florence + the Machine, Swing the Heartache by Bauhaus, Disintegration by The Cure, The Soul Cages by Sting, Violent Femmes by the Femmes, Fumbling Towards Ecstacy by Sarah McLachlan, Upstairs at Eric’s by Yaz, Wonderland by Erasure, Vicious Pink by Vicious Pink, Dead Man’s Party by Oingo Boingo, and a whole bunch of others I’m forgetting.) What are your most influential albums? Link me up if you write them down!