So the question has been posed: what music has most impacted your life? For me it is Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks. I remember buying it, locking myself in my room, and listening to it straight through twice. I was mesmerized not only by the songs and the lyrics, but also the CD booklet (I know, it should have been on vinyl). On the inside there is this amazing, rambly analysis of the album by Pete Hamill. Who is Pete Hamill? I don't know. But he sucked me in with this deliciously worded essay,

"In the end, the plague touched us all. It turned up in America,
breeding in-a-compost of greed and uselessness and murder in
those places where statesmen and generals stashed the bodies of the forever young...."

I read it a million times and still didnt know what it meant. But it meant something. And it was good.