Your own, highly subjective story of an album you love (or hate)

So often in music discussion is the tendency to avoid personal context for the sake of inclusiveness. But some of my favourite discussions about music involve personal accounts of falling in love with certain pieces of music and the memories associated with it.

Like the time a friend and I were given full reign of a branch of Threshers for a shift, ceasing the opportunity to play Aphex Twin's "Ventolin" over the Tannoy while little old ladies shopped for Merlot.

Or working about a million different temp jobs during university summer holidays 2001 with only a walkman and Pet Sounds for company.

Or the first time I listened to Tom Waits, catching a bus during an ethereal December rainstorm - I wonder if his music would have struck me differently were that not to happen?

Ceasing the opportunity?

I think he means seizing.

Seiging.

Sizing.

Enzymes.

working at the grauniad is getting to me

after what I thought was a one-night stand, early in the winter morning, tired, but happy, late for work at the bus stop, listening to the CURE's "Catch"

later that summer, warm nights, walking across a playground to get to the same girl, happy and high, carrying a bottle of wine, singing PRINCE out loud... "the man in the moon is smiling, for he knows what I'm dreaming of..."

aw

<3

I was just revisiting one: long days lazing in bed, summer '94 between school and university; devouring London Fields, Michael Dibdin and The Trial; 'Killing of a Flash Boy' and Ritual de lo Habitual (I'm playing it right now and it sounds fantastic) on repeat; and always with the image of a fiery red setting sun burned into my brain. Apocalyptic non-apocalyptic days.

6th Form cultural visit to Greece on a blazing hot bus reading Alasdair Gray's "Five Letters From An Eastern Empire" and listening to Selected Ambient Works II. The experiences are inseparable in my mind, even though Greece ain't that far east.