This November, I’ll be telling 30 stories about 30 albums. The albums on this list are not necessarily my favorite albums, but they are the ones that are instantly associated with a time and place. All of these albums represent a chapter of my life. This is the story of those albums, and by extension, the story of me, presented mostly chronologically.

Album 5: Head On The Door by The Cure.

I spent a few years in Catholic school where I was a shy, introverted child. Well, I was always a shy, introverted child, but after a year of sexual abuse when I was seven and my parents refusal to believe me when I told them about it, I retreated entirely into myself. I became even more isolated. I trusted no one.

When I was a freshman in high school, because my sister’s University of Michigan education proved to be rather expensive, I traded a small Catholic girls’ school for an enormous public high school. At public school, there were more kids in my grade alone than in the entirety of the Catholic school.

I was never very good at making friends, but somehow, in that gigantic city of a school, I managed to make two of them, both boys and both punks. One of them took my musical education rather seriously. He started recording albums onto cassette for me. I still have some of them.

The first tape he gave me had Head On The Door on it. I listened to that tape until I damn near wore it out. It was my first introduction to alternative music and I wanted more. MORE!

This album started a musical obsession that’s still going on, which has resulted it a music library that’s over 200GB, and spans most of recorded human history and genres. I can listen to my library for 122.7 days without hearing the same song twice. Head On The Door was just the first. I don’t recall being all that much into music before I heard this album.

As I mentioned in the first post in this series, I’m a synesthete and this was the first album where I tried, rather unsuccessfully, to draw what I was seeing. I took a cursory look around for those drawings, but I couldn’t find them. I’m fairly certain I still have them somewhere though. Maybe I’ll post them some other time.

Favorite track:

Tough choice. Really, this album should be listened to straight through as I heard it, so I’m just going to put the first track, because it was the first one I heard.