3 Albums That Altered Your Understanding of Music After Listening to Them for the First Time

At various points in one’s life, there comes a moment when a switch flips, and your perspective on a certain matter becomes utterly different. This moment can be liberating and clarifying, as well as restrictive and confusing. Regardless, it happens, and it happens with nearly everything, including in music fandom. As you surely remember, the first time you heard the song or that album that changed your perspective on music entirely.

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For some, it is a moment that burns into your memory. No matter how many years go by, you still remember the particular instance, because, well, it just subverted everything you thought music was. That being said, here are three albums that just might have altered your understanding of music after listening to them for the first time.

‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ by The Beatles

The Beatles‘ heavily experimental album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, changed the landscape of popular music and introduced the world to the unorthodox techniques that would forever change certain approaches to music. Given its significant influence and impact on the world of music, it is likely that it had a similar effect on you.

Whether it is in the closing seconds of “A Day in the Life” or in the psychedelic harmonies of “Lovely Rita”, every song and part of The Beatles’ 1967 album is euphorically confusing and pleasantly baffling. It was ahead of its time, and as a result, left the masses questioning the foundations of popular music.

‘Blue’ By Joni Mitchell

Released in 1971, Joni Mitchell‘s Blue showed the world that music production and songwriting were still partially rooted in simplicity, cohesiveness, vulnerability, and sentimental intellectuality. Every song on the track is haunting and has the potential to translate the same effect on the listener.

One could argue that Mitchell’s album, while of course a musical body of work, is also a rhetorically poetic body of work, as it can be listened to with a linguistic ear, and not just a musical one. While musicians had released such albums before, Joni Mitchell’s album seemingly holds the heaviest weight in the softest package. And for that, its effects are eternal and spellbinding.

‘Thriller’ by Michael Jackson

Welcome to pop music, and welcome to the 80s. That is seemingly what Michael Jackson said to the masses with his 1982 pop music masterpiece, Thriller. Ornate, grandiose, sophisticated, yet popcorny are the features of this album. It redefined what pop music would look like not just for the 80s, but for the decades following.

Prior to the release of this album, no pop musicians had worked in such an individualistic-sounding sense. In other words, Michael Jackson was doing Michael Jackson. To some, when he came onto the scene, there was no comparable precedent.

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