Blown Away

blown away

Just occasionally an album comes along that changes everything for the listener, introducing them to a prodigious new talent. The amazing thing is that it may be a different album and artist for each person — as my father-in-law says “that’s why all the cow gets sold.”

I reckon I first heard Sinéad O’Connor’s album The Lion and The Cobra in early 1988, shortly after it came out, when my colleague ‘Shug’ gave me his Walkman and said I just had to hear this album. Normally the overlap between my taste in music and Shug’s was wafer thin, but this music blew me away with its ferocity, rawness and yet also a great delicacy.

After that I bought and enjoyed every one of O’Connor’s albums until she finally leapt off the rails — most albums released in the 21st century.

I was reminded of that first encounter earlier this year when I first heard the album Psychodrama by Dave. Once again this is a debut album containing songs written with rawness, ferocity, delicacy, but also insight and empathy. This is an album with a narrative running through it; one to immerse yourself in the story being told even if you feel rap music is not generally your thing.

This Was Originally Posted To A Site Called Just Good Music

Back in the day (17 years ago), a group of friends and I started a site called Just Good Music. It lived for years - and caught eyes - to such an extent that we were approached by record compnaies to write reviews … remember records?

And then a fatal error in 2014 - by yours truly - and the site was gone. ☹️

The Wayback machine still has it in their archives. If you are interested, you can find it here.

Fast Forward and the domain had a bit of a rebirth with some good people from the Micro Blog community. We got some good posts - but it really never caught on. So, the site was taken down and those posts moved to here. This is one of the posts - look up to the top right - that is who wrote the original post.

People First

On a side note, you might be interested in People First, my current singular focus.

If you want to know more - you could do no worse than;