Last month I wrote an article about creating the playlist, ‘Story of Craig’, and the impact that it had on me. Selecting the songs from my past and reliving the memories associated with them was an emotional rollercoaster. Little did I realize how this article would touch other people as well. I received emails, texts and messages from people telling me they created their own playlists. One particular person gave me her top 10 songs and a short story of their life behind the songs. It was an awesome musical peek behind that person. This experience has encouraged me to write a monthly series titled ‘Music Makes Me’. I will pick a theme each month and create a Spotify playlist of approximately 20 songs. Then I will pick just one song from the playlist and give you a behind the scenes look at my life. Hopefully this will continue to trigger some memories for you and encourage you to share your life with others.
The theme for this month is ‘New Beginnings’. I thought this was an appropriate theme considering the angst that 2020 had brought most of us. If you’re like me you are hopeful that the new year 2021 will bring a fresh start from the challenges of 2020. From a music standpoint, I thought I would make a playlist of artists whose first album was the start of their musical journey and in some cases made a change to the music industry as a whole.
This month I tried to cover a fairly large time frame, the first year of which is 1960. The 60’s were going to birth some great new artists to the music scene as well as the delivery of this music fanatic, me. So one of my goals for this article was to find an artist whose music I love that released their first album in the year I was born, 1960. This was definitely not an easy task as you may have suspected, I was not making my own musical choices at that age. After some searching it was ironic that the album ‘At Last!’ by the talented Etta James was my choice. Almost six decades after her earliest release, I still find myself listening to her music. No matter your musical tastes, I encourage you to listen to her song with the same name ‘At Last’ from her debut album. But don’t just listen the song, take a moment to read more about the story of her life.
Some of the other artists I selected this month for their first album are Jeff Buckley, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors and Lady Gaga. I’m sure as you look through the list of musicians on my Spotify playlist you will think of others that you feel should also be included. I would totally agree there are many other artists whose first albums kicked off an illustrious musical career or had a significant impact on the music we listen to today. But I wanted to keep my list of songs to the number I promised so I stopped when I hit that number.
Again I encourage you to check out my playlist and share with me those artists you can think of that fit this month’s theme. Obviously my personally recommended best way to do that is to create a Spotify playlist of your own.
Check back next month when my Valentine month’s theme is ‘Love Songs?’.
open.spotify.com/playlist/1iJlSUkvyATo7ePDKwagrO?si=Ew46lT8kTPmsomrxF9lb4A