My favorite albums

I love music. It colors in the outlines that certain phases of my life create, and it defines my overall day-to-day mood and attitude.

Thrash metal and prog rock fueled my energetic and hyper-social high school and college years. Later, hip hop and jazz chilled me out and gave me a beat to work to when I started sipping lattes while working and living independently. Then psychedelic rock and downtempo electronic defined the foggy chilly days of my mostly lonely Bay Area urban lifestyle for about 5 years.

Today, I still consume music primarily in album format. I'm more likely to listen through an entire album from start to finish than shuffle through a playlist. I love the dynamic shifts from track to track under the umbrella of an artists’ sound and texture.

So this got me thinking, if I were to pick the most influential albums in my life, how would I do it, and what would they be?

At first I set about designing a sorting algorithm in order to rank them from #1 to #50. Then later I realized not only would that be time consuming (it would take 1,225 individual comparisons to rank 50 albums) but it was as pointless as comparing apples and oranges anyway.

Now I think it's enough to just choose whichever ones come to mind, but it still wasn't easy. I like to think if I ever had a large vinyl collection, these are the albums that would be in it.

Some notes included when expanding cards.