Top 10 all-time favourite records

This was the very first music that I purchased of my own volition. My mom drove me to this little record shop in Astoria, Oregon, where I grew up, that has since gone out of business and I bought the cassette single of «Hold On» after falling in love with it on our local soft rock radio station. The breakdown is especially fucking awesome.

Around 7th grade I started really getting into Ministry after my middle school bandmates turned me on to them. My friend had this video and we'd watch it over and over and over. Somehow it never got old to us. The show seemed so crazy and even scary at times. They had a big chain fence in front of the stage and people kept climbing it and hurling themselves off of it and back into the crowd. Two drummers! SO GOOD.

Not just the song, but the entire album. I think most people know how epic and sad the entire Milli Vanilli story is, but I can't get over it. I was really into these songs around the same time I liked Wilson Phillips. I remember being at my friend's house just staring at the boombox and reading the lyrics and being so blown away with how much we liked it. That was like 3rd or 4th grade.

In 1994 my brother was sent to federal prison in Sheridan, Oregon for blowing up a power transformer with a MAC-10 Uzi and causing a city-wide blackout in Astoria. Anyway, my mom and I would drive two and a half hours every week to visit him and this would be our time to listen to tapes and talk about music. My mom was the biggest Hole fan, she even sort of forced me to go see them at the big stadium when they toured with Marilyn Manson in 1999. She is an even bigger Nirvana fan, so when «Live Through This» came out a week after dude killed himself, we needed something to grab on to. A couple years later my high school-era grunge band covered "Rock Star" and I sang «Well I went to school in Astoria» instead of «Well I went to school in Olympia.» Woah, I just read the Wikipedia entry about Hole and I didn't know the story behind that song being swapped out and actually called «Olympia.» Deep.

We'd also listen to a lot of Green Day on those drives. Tré Cool totally inspired my second-wave of drumming, the first wave being Dave Grohl. My mom and I loved how melodic the songs were and how many were on the albums. I think they used a weird harmonizer effect on the voice a lot and that always sounded good and funny to me. Like a choir of slightly weird robots singing this sloppy pop punk music! I haven't listened to this record in a long time, I should check it out again.

Before grunge was invented there was punk. After there was punk there was all kinds of stuff like sport-punk and pop-punk and even more sub- genres of punk-ish music. I owe a lot of my early love of music to my two older brothers. They would build crappy skateboard ramps and put on Vandals and Bad Brains tapes and let me hang out with them and skate around on my Nash board. I rediscovered this record later in 8th grade when my best friend got really into it and decided we should try to cover «Anarchy Burger» in our band, The Rejecks.

I'm not embarrassed of the music at all. No way. I really don't like the skits or Robin Williams in general, really. Sorry brother. This movie and soundtrack came out in 1987, most of which I was 6 and pretty in love with most music I heard. Every time I heard «Liar, Liar» sung by The Castaways it made me feel weird and like I did something bad. Maybe I did. That brings us to the next thing on the list...

My parents used to own a gas station/convenience store and all kinds of regulars were always hanging out around the store. There were a group of kids that were a couple years older than me. I'm sure they didn't like me, but I thought they were cool. They were mostly just mean. One day they called me over to around the side of the store where there was a phone booth and they started giggling like crazy. They told me that I should pick up the phone, dial 0, and cuss out the operator. I thought this was a brilliant idea so I did it. As soon as the fourth or fifth swear came out I felt really bad. Just as I was hanging up the phone my brother came walking around the corner and the kids ratted on me. So my brother told my other brother and they formed an alliance against me and whenever I caught them doing something bad, or whenever they wanted to freak me out, they would start singing «smooooth operatorrrrrr....smooooooooth operatorrrrrrrr» and it made me panic!

A couple of my friends really started getting into technical music. They would point out an awesome drum fill or a guitar sound and rewind and mime it out. It got to the point to where my older friend in high school installed tweeters in his car to get the full effect. Right about the same time this new Faith No More record came out. The first single «Digging The Grave» popped up on MTV without any titles or credits or anything and I was confused. Parts of it sounded like the Faith No More I knew from «Epic» and «Angel Dust», but other parts didn't at all. I bought the CD and later bought a live bootleg from the back of some magazine and I got really into listening to it technically. I found out later that they recorded it at this fancy studio called Bearsville in upstate New York, really close to Woodstock and where I recorded some drums and percussion on Devendra Banhart's album «Cripple Crow».

At first I really didn't want to like LCD Soundsystem, or I guess any band that gets so much hype. I know, I know, that concept in itself is pretty lame, but I feel like the underdog is almost always more interesting. Like Xtina. Anyway, I saw them play two summers ago and I loved it so fucking much that there was no way I was going to try and pretend that I didn't love them. Since then I've been pretty excited for their second record and when I first listened to it with headphones on... the first song came on and I was like «WHAT THE FUCK?» The first track, «Get Innocuous,» has a VERY similar bassline to a song off of my new record. I think that I have a minor, but possibly notable, subconscious or magical brain link to James Murphy. So, that's pretty embarrassing.