I believe that the records that played in the background when you were a kid determine, to a large extent, the kind of music you’ll listen to when you’re an adult. Even those who react against what they were raised with (lots of my buddies had to listen to some pretty horrid “Christian” music in their nonage), I think, are still drawn to music that sounds similar on some level. I won’t take any more time defending this thesis; I’ll just say that I’ve observed this at work in almost everyone I know.

Two recordings founded my own record collection. First, the cassette version of Neil Young’s Harvest b/w After the Gold Rush: from thence comes my taste in classic country, classic rock, country-rock, folk music—and so on. Second, Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense. This album cultivated in me a taste for intelligent, danceable music and—despite it being a live record—the use of the recording studio as an instrument. One cassette or the other was always playing whenever my family would pile in for a car ride of any length. By the time I was 15, both were worn out completely and unceremoniously discarded in favor of the CD versions.

Save for the sacred and classical music weighing down my CD shelves and portions of iTunes (owed to Arvo Pärt’s Te Deum and years of singing in choirs), every record I own now is traceable to the imprint of those two records. There’s a secondary layer of massively-influential albums—Combat Rock, I Care Because You Do, Darkness on the Edge of Town—but they themselves clearly descend from my two primary sources.

It should be really obvious which record got me listening to LCD Soundsystem.