[Note: I have not been writing in a long time, and I am out of practice. This is a long and rambling post, just to let you know. You have been warned.]

My brother-in-law recently tagged me on Facebook in a meme that asks people to post a picture of an album that had influenced their tastes in music — no discussion, no explanation, just a picture of the cover. I couldn’t do this.

What good is just seeing the album cover without knowing how or why the music affected you? And isn’t “taste in music” just a little narrow? I want to know how the music affected your life, not just your tastes. Does the record remind you of the elder sibling who would play it when they were getting ready for a big test? Was the album “your record” with your boyfriend, and when you broke up you played it endlessly to try and soothe yourself? (I’m looking at you, Kathy B., my next-door neighbor in the dorm my sophomore year in college. You’re the reason I hated Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon until I was in my late forties and the Not-So-Little-Drummer Boy convinced me to listen to it all the way through. I still can’t stand the part with all the alarm clocks, having had to hear that through the walls at midnight when I was seriously ill with bronchitis.)

So, here are thirty albums that have changed my tastes in music, or simply changed my life:

To go with the most recent one, the soundtrack to Hamilton. Hamilton convinced me that rap was music. True story: when I went to see the show, I found myself in a conversation with the late middle-aged white woman next to me about…. Kendrick Lamar. I no longer listen to much rap music, but I’m a lot less snobbish about it.

The others, in not quite chronological order:

The first two Warner Reprise Loss Leader albums. My siblings used to play them, and introduced me to musicians from Frank Zappa to Randy Newman. Some of the songs on them (especially Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today”) have become my favorites.

The soundtracks to My Fair Lady (the Broadway cast album) and The Sound of Music (the movie soundtrack). My father loved musicals, and these were his two favorites. He passed that love down to me.

Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the White Album (aka The Beatles), Abbey Road, Let It Be. Because… the Beatles. Having elder siblings, the Beatles formed a large part of the soundtrack to my childhood. I love them in spite of that fact. (Although “Revolution No. 9” on the White Album gave me nightmares and made me shudder inwardly whenever I heard airport loudspeaker announcements for years.) There were other albums my siblings played a lot (Surrealistic Pillow by the Jefferson Airplane comes to mind) but the Beatles’ albums were the most influential.

Woodstock. My first exposure to Joan Baez, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, and Santana. (I have the film on DVR and watch it occasionally, skipping past the non-performance portions. I’m no longer interested in seeing what was in fact a massive clusterfuck and an environmental disaster.)

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme and Bridge Over Troubled Waters, Simon & Garfunkel. I love S & G — another love sparked by my siblings.

John Denver’s Greatest Hits — the first album I bought with my own money. It inspired me to get round glasses. Even though I wouldn’t have called it country at the time, I have come to think of Denver as one of the best of the late seventies/early eighties country writers.

Dave Brubeck’s Time Out. I am not a big jazz fan, but “Take Five” is on my “five pieces of music I would take to a desert island” list. (So is Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” but I do not have a particular version of that in mind.)

Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes, Jimmy Buffet. When I was in high school, the seniors got to choose what they wanted painted in the locker area. We picked the last line of the title track (“If we weren’t all crazy, we would go insane”). What can I say? We lived in Florida in the late seventies. Jimmy Buffet was a beloved figure.

Speaking of Jimmy Buffet, Volcano and Coconut Telegraph got me through a dismal, drama-filled snowy last semester at Wellesley. I still smile when I hear “Boat Drinks.” (“I gotta go where it’s WARM!!!!!” perfectly expressed how I felt after four winters in Massachusetts.)

The Stranger, my introduction to Billy Joel. (I need to thank my sister for this.) I went on to buy 52nd Street and even more significant to me, Glass Houses. The latter album has one of my anthems on it (“You May Be Right”).

Indigo Girls, Indigo Girls. The Rocket Scientist and I saw them at Emory University on a night where they opened for a series of Sam Shepard one-act plays, with maybe fifty people in the audience. Our friend from New York stated that “they were totally derivative” and “would never amount to anything.” Um, no. When, a few years later he was challenged on this, he said the duo’s success simply demonstrated the appalling taste of the American public. Some people just can’t admit when they’re wrong.

Graceland, Paul Simon. As much as I love it, this album will forever be etched in the memory of a stupid three day trip across country when the Rocket Scientist and I first moved to California. We got into a fight somewhere in Arizona and stopped talking to each other. The tape went through three complete spins, and we were too mad to break down and ask if the other person wanted to change the tape. It was only when it hit its fourth pass through that one of us (I think it was me) changed the tape.

Greatest Hits, Randy Travis. My moot court partner in law school insisted on playing this for me, and got me to admit that maybe, just maybe, I could like country music.

Lonesome Standard Time by Kathy Mattea and Come On, Come On by Mary Chapin Carpenter. I got hooked on women-centered country in part because of these two albums.

Two mix tapes given to me, one by a close friend that had “Number Six Driver” from Eddie From Ohio, and “Tobacco Island” by Flogging Molly, and the other by the Not-So-Little Drummer Boy who believed, rightly, that I needed to expand what I listened to, and gave me a mix CD which included Foo Fighters, Lenny Kravitz, and Sublime. Mix CDs give me warm fuzzies; someone thought enough of me to share what they loved.

So that’s thirty… there are so many more, of course. My music is not as varied as it should be — heavy metal is not represented in my iTunes, save “Enter Sandman” by Metallica (with the SF Symphony), and I know very little popular music past, say, 2010. And, aside from Hamilton, very little rap. And a lot of Broadway, possibly more than any other single genre. And tons of holiday music. (One of the reasons December is my favorite month.) And a little comedy from George Carlin, Monty Python, and, of course, Weird Al.

I’m not sure what any of this says about me.