Perched on a stool at the Dubh Linn Square bar (RIP) three years ago, I waited for a date.
First dates have never really sat well with me, an insecure, bumbling mess of a human on a good day. So I did everything I could to make the experience as comfortable as possible. I got there first. I may have had a beer before he walked in. I planned to meet him at a place I went to so often, it felt like a security blanket.
So I didn’t feel too nervous, even as the blurred bits of curly brown hair, denim and red plaid that I was waiting for bounded toward me. He sat down, I took a breath and we started talking. It could have been the beer, or the coziness of the bar, or how he somehow instantly made me feel at ease, but we talked for hours that night, mostly about music.
My now-boyfriend and I bonded over a shared love of Elvis Costello and The Beatles. I was shocked when he asked me to tell him in detail about every Bruce Springsteen concert I’d been to (even though he knew going into this that I could talk about those five shows for hours). He introduced me to one of his favorite bands, the Canadian quartet Sloan. And it’s been like that pretty much every day since—we share music with each other constantly, go to concerts, talk about albums. He basically taught me a course on the Beach Boys, and I did the same for him with Springsteen. It’s part of our routine at this point.
He texted me a few weeks ago: “I found something you’re gonna love, but it will be a huge distraction.” I clicked the link and found a site that offers a three-tiered system to rank your top 50 albums—top50.topsters.net. The format gives you four top spots, 16 “second-tier classics” and 30 “other favorites.” He was right; it’s nearly all I’ve thought about since.
I made my first pass at it when I got home from work that day, setting all kinds of arbitrary guidelines as I went along, like the Springsteen Rule: one album per artist per tier, named after my favorite musician and an attempt to avoid Bruce overload.
But my boyfriend immediately called me out on the lack of Springsteen—no Nebraska, Greetings from Asbury Park, The River, or Born in the USA—and the fact that I labeled Born to Run an “other favorite.” Imposing restrictions on myself was dumb. I wasn’t being true to myself.
my boyfriend texted me a few weeks ago: ‘I found something you’re gonna love, but it will be a huge distraction.’ He was right; ranking albums is nearly all I’ve thought about since.
We talked about the merits of those albums, and I went back and did it again, and then once more a few weeks later. Working on it, I realized, was the real reward—not in setting a definitive ranking. Each album I considered had meaning attached to it. Meaning that has, for all albums, changed since the first time I played them.
And it’s the albums themselves that helped bring me and my boyfriend together in the first place. I was a high school freshman when I first heard Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True, and, at the time, it was unlike anything I’d ever heard. His “angry young man” persona, biting lyrics and catchy, diverse melodies sucked me right from the first words of “Welcome to the Working Week.” It completely changed the way I listened to music, and it clued me into what else was out there to discover.
It then became something my boyfriend and I had in common right off the bat on our first date. I told him about my love for that album, and we talked a lot about Elvis that night—I have to give the guy some credit for bringing us together (thanks, Elvis). It all came full circle when we met him at a book signing a couple of years ago. I thanked him for that album specifically. As far as the list goes, it’s one of my top four albums.
We shared our lists with our friends over enchiladas in Philadelphia last month, and then again with his dad. We talked about the processes we used, why we chose certain albums over others. There were some common threads—each list had at least one Beatles album on it (not rare among many rankings, I’m sure); my friend and I both included Led Zeppelin IV. We all also had something on our lists that someone else hadn’t heard, or that reminded us of something we’d inadvertently left off or considered but ultimately decided to leave off, like the White Album.
My list included the Beach Boys’ Wild Honey—the title track of which my boyfriend’s dad used to listen to every morning before going to high school in Trenton, a story he shared because of our lists. He also told stories about seeing Led Zeppelin play live, and about the first time he heard some of his favorite records. He made me CDs of items on his list that interested me—one made up of tracks from John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman’s eponymous album and Rachel Z’s Moon at the Window, an album of Joni Mitchell piano covers, and another of bonus tracks from Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen and Laura Nyro’s Christmas and the Beads of Sweat—and one of a live Heart show after talking about the band’s classic Dreamboat Annie, a second-tier album on my list.
There is so much my boyfriend has introduced me to over the last three years—Big Star’s #1 Record, The Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle, every Beach Boys album on my list. And Sloan—forever, and criminally, underrated—has become one of my favorite bands. Their Between the Bridges, One Chord to Another and Navy Blues are all part of my Top 50, but I never would have known about them on my own. And the same goes for him—Bruce’s Darkness on the Edge of Town made the preliminary version of his list, and it’s an album I introduced him to.
Our relationships with these albums as individuals has changed since we shared them together—just as listening to the Hamilton soundtrack changed after I started talking about it with my mom, or how #1 Record turned into something I got to introduce my dad to after my boyfriend showed it to me.
So although the list is still incomplete, that’s OK. The constant revisions are fun. Reminiscing and talking about these records is even better.
She Said, She Said is Samantha Sciarrotta’s monthly column for the Hamilton Post.,
