Oct 292008
I’ll leave it to you to define albums you associate with whatever goes on in the privacy of your bedroom – just as I’ll leave it to you whether you want to share those experiences while listening to your favorite bedroom albums. Whether your associations are as pure and innocent as those of the long-locked boy sitting by his bedroom window, tracing the dripping of a lone raindrop with his fingertip or something not so pure and innocent, what I do request of you is an accounting of your favorite bedroom albums. Take it from there, should you choose, you forlorn dreamers!
Don’t Tell A Soul – Replacements
Heart Shaped World – Chris Isaac
Animals – Pink Floyd
Apostrophe / Overnite Sensation – Frank Zappa
Makes no sense, these are just the ones I play in my “lonely teenage room”
Thanks for stepping forward and leading us into the land of sharing, Jungleland2!
Not a huge Beck fan but that “Sea Change” was great and not exactly something you throw on to get the party going…
I haven’t had a stereo in my bedroom for a long time now. Maybe that one of the signs of adulthood or old-person-hood.
Anyway, I think I could almost scientifically prove that Sister Lovers is the greatest bedroom album ever. Especially helps if its snowing outside. The first three Belle and Sebastian full-lengths also fit the bill quite handily. Anyway, they were among the albums that I listened to in this state of mind in college, when it was still age-appropriate to partake in such endeavors.
Great pick on Sister Lovers, Oats. Your comment on snow reminded me of another perfect one, simply because I used to listen to it in Montreal: “Songs of Leonard Cohen”.
Northvancoveman, you sound like you’ve been around! You may give The Great 48 a run for his money in terms of Townspeople who’ve lived in many cities.
Sister Lovers IS a good one for the tracing-of-the-raindrop part of my bedroom listening habits as well.
I lost it to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue due to a mutual appreciation of Woody Allen’s Manhattan.
Other than that, I prefer to make my own music, if you know what I mean.
when i was a kid, i would go to sleep to my record player which would drop 1 side of vinyl at a time (up to about 4 discs). Sometimes the top stack would all drop at once, at which time i would only hear my first and last selections.
however, on an ideal night, i would be lulled to sleep by the following:
side 1 of ziggystardust
side 2 of bauhaus-1979-1983
side 4 of the white album
side 3 of the wall
side 4 of bauhaus-1979-1983
cheers to heart shaped world man, i love that record.
skip spence, “oar.”
any nick drake, of course.
joy division, “unknown pleasures.”
“rubber soul” (american)
rain parade “emergency third rail power trip”
go phils.
Man, I gotta go back aways for that one. It’s gonna be oldies!
Go back to the first bedroom I remember and I had a Close N Play that I listened to my very first album on. That album? Alvin & The Chipmunks Sing The Beatles Greatest Hits. It’s probably worth a used SUV these days, but my four year old hands and that Close N Play killed it.
Then we moved and I got older and got a GE plastic record player and I played Bachman Turner Overdrive II and Manfred Mann’s Earth Band Solar Fire (which I’ve worn out four copies of and after that plastic GE, I had a decent Dual turntable for years so I just wore then out).
My last bedroom, from when I was in high school, I have to say Yes Yessongs, Elvis Costello My Aim Is True and The Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks. Those were the ones I played when it was raining and I couldn’t get a ride. My friends didn’t like them much anyway so that was the only place I could listen to that stuff.
Another Green World – Eno
Music for 18 Musicians – Steve Reich
Bach flute sonatas on Harmonia Mundi
(snowy weather special, that one.)
Teenage edition:
Lamb Lies Down On Broadway
J.J. Johnson – Mad Bebop
Jeff Beck – Wired
Wow, women can come into this room?:
Velvets – III & 1969
Ellington – Anatomy of a Murder Sdtrk
Mix tapes, mix tapes, mix tapes.
Now:
Have you seen the iPod speaker thingy?
No,it would only wake the baby, anyway.
Townspeople, you are totally getting into this as I’d hoped. Some that immediately come to mind include Lou Reed’s Berlin (for getting down with my sad self), Eno’s Discreet Music and Eno and Fripp’s No Pussyfooting (for drifting off to sleep), and long ago, Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ Imperial Bedroom, for a sense of musical majesty as well as getting down with my sad self.
I would suggest the following albums:
1. VGPS The Kinks
2. Pet Sounds The Beach Boys
3. I Often Dream of Trains Robyn
Hitchcock
4. Blonde on Blonde Bob Dylan-especially on a summer night laying next to the window.
Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely
Painted from Memory, Bacharach/Costello
Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
First three albums, Bill Evans
Kind Of Blue, Miles Davis
An Association comp I made with al their fey-est, most lushly orchestrated stuff.
Quadrophenia – The Who
See And Be Seen – Steve Ward
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – Wilco
2nd side of the Beatles White Album
Pee Wee Russell – Over The Rainbow
Any Teenage Fanclub album will do
Sure are a lot of dudes crying by themselves in their bedrooms around here.
Truth is, for me, sex and music don’t really go well together. I get distracted — and that’s even when *I* get to choose the, uh, “soundtrack.” I was briefly married to a woman who had dubious taste in music, and I learned quite early on that bringing music into the boudoir — mine *or* (shudder) hers — was a foolish thing to do. Music may be the food of love, but her idea of a wholesome meal made me lunge for the Pepto.
Unlike Mod, I can’t think of any music that might provide a compelling backdrop to a frenzied episode of onanism.
HVB
First wag to say “Orgasm Addict” or “Turning Japanese” gets an RTH Raspberry.
I don’t have any bedroom albums in the sense this post seems to ask for, but I do have some bedtime albums: music I put on while preparing for bed. It’s a weird set, and it’s been different at different times in my life, but here goes a list of a few of the main ones:
Jayhawks, Rainy Day Music
Art Pepper and George Cables duets
Hank Jones and Joe Lovano duets
Eno, Another Green World and several of the ambient records
Richard Thompson, I Wanna See The Bright Lights Tonight
Poco, Gold (it’s true, I admit it)
Linda Ronstadt, Greatest Hits
Sandy Denny anthology
Scud Mountain Boys, The First Year
George Strait boxed set
Well, Hrrundi, at least you didn’t misread what I wrote and leap to a corn-studded turd reference. No! The soundtrack for those special nights is NOT Berlin. Can anyone get it up for Berlin?
“First wag to say “Orgasm Addict” or “Turning Japanese” gets an RTH Raspberry.”
Okay, then how about Rosie by Jackson Brown?
Rosie you’re alright
You wear my ring
When you hold me tight
Rosie that’s my thing
When you turn out the light
I got to hand it to me
Looks like it’s you and me again tonight Rosie
Great raindrop tracing LP is Jean-Paul Sartre Experience’s “Love Songs”
I’ve lived in Yaroslavl (now part of Russia, then part of the USSR), Vienna, Rome, 3 different boroughs of New York City (Brooklyn on two separate occasions totaling 4 years), Houston, Baton Rouge (again on 2 separate occasions totaling six and a half years) and various locations in New Jersey (East Brunswick, New Brunswick, Hoboken, Jersey City) and now of course, I live in Philadelphia. Do I get a prize or something?