On Vox: QotD: My Musical Influence
Which friend or acquaintance most influenced your taste in music?
Submitted by Rev Stan.
I had a close friend in high school that turned me on to David Sanborn and Mannheim Steamroller.
Although Mannheim Steamroller is best known for Christmas music, I was quite interested in the Fresh Aire series for a while. My favorites were 1-5 (with themes of the four seasons and space), when Chip Davis hadn't started on a Late Romantic sound-- older synthesizers (which tend to sound better, in my opinion) and less full orchestra instrumentation.
David Sanborn was good, as long as he stayed in his smooth city jazz groove-- the Another Hand album seemed like an attempt at serious, highbrow jazz, which I didn't quite care for.
I also got a tape copy of the Xanadu soundtrack from him-- I could see why it was such a smash hit. Oddly enough, I liked the movie, although it was supposedly a box-office bomb.
We had a mutual friend who was listening to Depeche Mode, and so we started listening to that. One of my sisters used to be a fan and I met someone in college who listened to them a lot, and so I followed their recordings pretty steadily, and went to a concert on the '98 tour in Seattle shortly after getting married. My friend dropped a great deal of interest in DM a little while before then, but I managed to snap up a few of his old CDs as he was about to sell most of them to a favorite used music store of mine.
I stopped buying albums after Ultra was released (as I tend to prefer their stuff from Violator all the way back to Speak & Spell), but I catch some of their new songs now and then.
Originally posted on jaklumen.vox.com