Do you remember your first record? Your first concert? Well this isn’t about that. This L is about three artists/records that influenced you over the years –- you as a musician, . So letap talk about your road.
Age 8: Beastie Boys, “Paul’s Boutique”
I would love to say that I was first drawn to this album because of its pioneering use of sampling, but the reality is that I just liked “Shake Your Rump” because they said “rump,” which was a forbidden tag in the Lee household. I remember sneaking this one home on cassette in my waistband and rocking it quietly after bedtime. Since then, the Beasties have come to represent the perfect artistic aesthetic to me: sampling, records, weird vintage t-shirts, hilarious music videos, musicians who love sports, instrumental funk, and rap music. They’re number one, always. All of the music I’ve made in the past ten years owes probably too much to them.
Age 16: DJ Shadow, “Endtroducing”
A lot of the biggest album influences in my life were ones I really disliked initially. Endtroducing is ominous, dense, bizarre, and I couldn’t stand it. Fast-forward 14 years, and this is an album that is coming with me to the desert island. Maybe even if I can only bring one. For Shadow to sew old jazz interviews, metal guitars, forgotten drums, and science fiction together – on a cheap sampler, no less – was a mind-blower and extremely inspiring. But this is more than songs made out of sampling; it is houses and planets and sculptures, with all these unexplored dark corners. It’s music without rules. This is also the single best album of drums on Earth.
Age 28: Tune-Yards, “Bird-Brains”
The new Tune-Yards album is great. But her first is the best thing I’ve heard in many a year, and it influenced an entire album (Ampersand) I went on to make. I don’t know whether you would call it influencing or straight-up ripping-off, but when I learned she recorded that whole album on an mp3 recorder, I definitely borrowed one to make all the beats on my album the same way. The sound of the album is bristling and fuzzy and alive, like summer nights in humid places, and her voice is the most powerful I’ve heard. It is lo-fi only if lo-fi means awesome. I got to see her at the Lion’s Lair two years ago, and there weren’t more than eight people there. It was very cool to see the Hi-Dive sell out last month when she came through again, because it meant my favorite musician doing it today was getting the proper recognition.
Patrick Lee’s new album, “Passerine,” is out now on Denver-based Bocumast Records. He will release the album on July 14 at the Meadowlark.
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Ricardo Baca is the founder and co-editor of , the co-founder of The UMS and an award-winning critic and journalist at The Denver Post.
