With 30 years recording experience including working with acts such as The The, Anna Domino certainly knows how to make an album!
Here she looks back at the 5 albums that influenced her life the most.
(In the beginning was Mahalia Jackson, the only voice who could stop my otherwise incessant howling)
1. Early years: Aretha Franklin – I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You
“This record seemed to hold everything I didn’t yet have the words for. I learned how to work the hi-fi, studied it and took it to bed with me until it wore out and cracked.”
Buy here.
2. School: T Rex – Electric Warrior
“A sexy, powerful, ridiculous, hilarious and sublime Joy! An antidote to the idiot rigours, alienation and weird cruelties of school- an ally who would surely understand.”
Buy here.
3. Leaving home: Lou Reed – Transformer
“Lou Reed and David Bowie, a match made in heaven. It was touching and tough and flawed, frail and generous, simply cut but beautifully fashioned. I picked up the guitar and sang along. It gave me license to write songs that only sounded like me. A favorite record forever.”
Buy here.
4. Hello New York: Brian Eno – Another Green World
“These songs went to the heart of me, undid me, sent me dreaming. Woke some deep longing for twilight in a surreal landscape- some un-namable place. Solitary, cold, a bit frightening, waiting…”
Buy here.
5. Out, into the world: Cesaria Evora – Miss Perfumado
“So much beauty and mystery and power… Without understanding a word. There are not enough years in a life to hear it all. Made me start traveling for the sheer love of human beauty; other culture, food, ways of being, songs. And all that weird stuff we hold in common.”
Buy here.
There was a long period of time when nearly every new release seemed earth shatteringly important and required repeat listening, over weeks/months, to crack the code, hear the clues. Even now I hear a song a week that shakes my sense of order and makes me want to start all over. It’s glorious and somewhat exhausting…
