What was the first music you ever loved?

What was the first song or maybe which band was the first one you ever really loved? I mean actually positively adored with an intense passion. Can you remember why? How do you feel about that music now?

Laurie Anderson - Big Science
or
XTC - "Senses Working Overtime"

I still love both.

Harold Faltermeyer’s “Axel F”

Queen - Seven Seas of Rhye. Still love its overblown pomposity and cyclical piano riff.

Dark Side of the Moon, which my dad would often play for me when I was little. It felt like a universe unto itself (still does). ‘On the Run’ stretched my naïve understanding of the frontier between music and non-music. It also taught me to think of songs as pieces of a potentially greater whole.

Laurie Anderson - Big Science
or
XTC - "Senses Working Overtime"

I still love both.

― handsome boy modelling software (bernard snowy), Monday, 23 November 2020 22:59 (thirty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

these were EXTREMELY early loves of mine as well, high five

XTC and The Cure were my first two favourite bands and the two I would always want to hear played in the car

Still adore them obv

My older cousin played me 'Exposed' by Mike Oldfield when I was maybe seven or eight, and that - along with Pink Floyd - became everything, especially the sparkling live version of Incantations.

What is the most beautiful song ever?
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here comes the rain again

― difficult listening hour, Sunday, June 10, 2018 4:37 PM bookmarkflaglink

no lie, that's another I was exposed to v young and remains the only 'thmics song I know

hall and oates - method of modern love

it was daryl’s voice + the nursery rhymey chorus + the oddly dissonant horns

also Wham! - “careless whisper”, like aural air conditioning to a baby brimstead in the mid80s summer.

I’m not as crazy about H&O now and think their albums are mad inconsistent (abandoned luncheonette, war babies, ooh! yeah excepted) but at their best yeah I still love their best singles

Never got into wham or George Michael at all but I love wham’s press photos

Toni Basil's "Mickey" and Joan Jett's "I Love Rock N Roll" were my first favourite songs. I still like 'em both, even if I'm getting a bit tired of the latter: it's one of 20 or so songs that the local classic rock station keeps in constant rotation (I still have no intention of ever turning the station when it comes on, though).

Mom claims I used to fall asleep listening to the second side of Stevie Nicks' Bella Donna all the time. I don't have any memory of that, but I do like that record.

When I was 2 I would play an LP of Pachelbel's Canon on repeat and scream "LISTEN!!! LISTEN!!!!" at my mom, apparently

As a ten-year-old I was a big fan of Bob Seger's "The Fire Inside," the one where the woman picks up a guy, takes him home, and then lies awake waiting for him to leave so that she can lock the door. I'm much less enthusiastic about Bob Seger now than I was, but I still think that's a cool perspective for a male heartland rocker to write from.

I don't remember when I started to evaluate music. I must have been young when I started putting Tubular Bells and the Beatles' blue album on the turntable, but it seems more like a fascination, almost as if it was something too removed from me to say to myself I loved it?

I vividly remember the experience of a couple of singles from late '74 when we still lived in Orange County, coming out of the little plastic radio tuned to KHJ. "Life Is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me)," which I was more impressed by than actually liked, and "#9 Dream," which I still love today.

Love Unlimited Orchestra's "Love's Theme"

Though nobody actually seemed to know the title at the time and I didn't actually procure a copy until much later. It was only in adulthood that I discovered why I strongly associated it with airline travel. Namely because a portion of my exposure to it would have been via Cathay Pacific advertisements (the original plus varying arrangements ) during very early childhood. Today... it still sounds like the pinnacle of all human achievement, LOL.

I also really loved "Twisting by the Pool" by Dire Straits. It has a very slight false ending that I was obsessed with because OMG I get a few extra seconds of song! Another song I don't particularly like today, though I have affection for it because I loved it so much as a kid.

Paul McCartney-All the Best, which my dad dubbed for me on cassette, and I liked
Chicago-19, which my parents bought me with my first turntable as a kid

my favorite song was "You're the Inspiration" from ages like...5 to 13

I didn't like proper rock music until I got into Aerosmith at age 13-ish.

oh and Michael Jackson. fondest memories of sitting in the back of our Chevy Nova hearing "Wanna Be Starting Something" on the radio

my parents took my brother and I to see Captain EO at Epcot when I was like 7 or 8 and I cried because it was down the first time we tried to go, but 2 hours later it was back up

I think it was "Samba Pa Ti" by Santana when I was a child in the late '70s. I would hear it on the radio often, unannounced, I knew nothing about instruments so I saw colours instead. I guess that's why to this day a meaty, sensual guitar like that one is red to me, and even more red is the Hammond organ, or organ of pretty much any make. It took me some 20 years to discover it was Santana as I could only whistle the tune to puzzled record shop owners. Come adolescence I'd thought it must be Pink Floyd but it wasn't, it was that other instrumental classic ("Shine On You Crazy Diamond"). Puzzlingly enough, I'd never come across a copy of 'Abraxas' while scouring my mates' elder siblings' collections, among the many Focuses, Wishbone Ashes, Jethro Tulls, and other record covers that gave me the creeps, me being a fresh-faced Duranie since age 10.

First favorite song was "Seasons in the Sun" by Terry Jacks. I remember that because my mother asked me what my favorite song was and that was the one that came to mind, probably one of the only songs I could name at age 6. Today I hear a rinky dink arrangement of what's basically a good song (Jacques Brel composition in fact). Not long thereafter I remember being quite taken with "Lady Marmalade" by Labelle. I had no idea there was French in that song, it simply sounded like baby talk to me, but infectiously appealing.

Interesting. I alway thing that song sounds like a Tommy James song, “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” maybe. (xp)

I had just started listening to the radio consciously on my own, as opposed to just hearing whatever my mom was listening to, in 1981 or 1982, and I used to listen to American Top 40 every weekend. I liked a fair amount of the music, but the song I remember specifically responding to, and tuning in every week to hear, was the Clash's "Rock the Casbah," because it sounded completely different from everything else, especially the singer's hoarse, screaming voice. I was very disappointed when it was no longer on the show. But I got the cassette of the album from my local library and listened to it a lot.

We had the cassettes of Larry Groce's Disney Children's Favorites Vols. 1 & 2, which introduced me to a lot of Stephen Foster songs and other American folk music and I remember liking those tapes a lot. The first contemporary pop music I loved and wanted to listen to over and over was Thriller, though, when I was 5, especially "Beat It".

The Beatles and organ music (Bach, Widor, etc) Coincidentally the same things my parents loved.

Bat Out of Hell (which still owns)

Men At Work - Cargo

the beatles

also:

What is the best song on this collection of 1968 hits off a promo CD from my local grocery store chain ?

one of the first full length albums i got really into was a collaboration between mason williams and mannheim steamroller

I remember hearing “touch of gray” by the Grateful Dead and being all 4 years old like “yeah, man, the ABCs, I know what that’s about”.

the beatles

oh, actually, soul music/Motown was one of the first things I got into without parental coercion. I would just hear it and light up as a kid.

my dad had those Time Life cd collections where they'd do retrospectives of various years (most of the ones he had were 60s) and I'd always flock to these tunes

weirdly I didn't like the Beatles at all as a kid. I thought it was old people music and my dad was insufferable about them. when I became an adult is when I became a fan

Used to pretend to have a radio show and dance around the living room to my parents' Beach Boys and Michael Jackson records.

Also apparently used to insist upon listening to James Brown's most famous version of "Night Train" in the car, over and over again.

I still love all of this music.

Oh, also my mom used to sing "Hey That's No Way to Say Goodbye" to me as a lullabye, which is pretty weird in retrospect, but did the trick quite nicely at the time

I was raised by a single mother who almost never listened to music at home. The first music I clearly remember is Donna Summer's "Dim All the Lights", as that was on high rotation during the time we'd drive to the hospital to attend my grandfather who was recovering from a colon resection (at a time when hospitals permitted week(s) for recovery. I hear that song, and I immediately think of grisly stitches on my grandfather's belly.

The first music I remember as being different enough to attract my attention was either M's "Pop Muzik" or Gary Numan's "Cars", a few months later. They stood out like strobe lights amongst the greys and browns of local radio. First album I actually chose to purchase was Men at Work's Cargo (and I still think "Overkill" is their best tune). So one thing in common with man alive.

I love "Overkill" , though it hits pretty close to home lyrically

"Overkill" is genius. Being an Australian kid of the 70s, apart from one or two things I remember from the radio ("Space Oddity", "Fox on the Run") my obsession was ABBA, and I bought their compilation on cassette around 1976. Around the same time my folks had the first Elton John comp in the car all the time, so these two albums were my first great loves.
https://img.discogs.com/0_ZfJnrOcym3hHh93MYWzioTRVs=/fit-in/600x945/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-15844557-1598830102-6964.jpeg.jpg https://img.discogs.com/bYajilbYuoVWe_PFGTlbMXoqqIM=/fit-in/386x600/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-4663918-1371500677-9691.jpeg.jpg
I remember drawing a picture in secret with a friend of mine showing the women from ABBA with their clothes off, but I don't think I did that for Elton.

ahh yes the family did love Elton and Billy Joel, but were more Joel-inclined because my folks are from NY

Probably the Star Wars soundtrack.

xp yes the Joel was strong in our household, but not loved as much by me

Phantom of the Opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Disney tunes. I also deeply loved "Total Eclipse of the Heart," which seemed like the biggest and most emotional music possible. My friend and I created a whole dance routine one afternoon which involved somersaulting off the couch during the choruses.

My tastes have not improved.

I have told this story before on this forum, so I am sorry to the (maybe) two people who pay attention to me who read it before...

I didn't have an older brother to share Kiss 8-tracks and my dad liked the oldies station but not much else. I was an OCD kid diligently writing down the American Top 40 with Casey Kasem on the radio (not knowing that I could get Billboard magazine for that list and several dozen more). This was in the early '80s when I was not quite a teenager.

Two songs during that era had a huge impact on me: "Back In Black," which made the top 40 for like, two weeks, and "The Stroke," which had a longer run. That was how I discovered that I much preferred loud guitar-oriented fare to the pop pablum that made up the bulk of the chart at the time. Essentially I was gonna either be a metalhead or a stripper. Anyone who has met me will say I made the right choice.

To this day my subhead tagline (or whatever it's called) on social media references those times: "Loud guitars shit all over 'Bette Davis Eyes'."

"Kill The Poor" - I was barely music-conscious, I'd get vaguely into something I heard on the radio like Ini Kamoze or the doo wop oldies station my grandma put on in the car.

Then a friend I made the first week of junior high gave me a tape - side one was Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables and I'm pretty sure it genuinely changed my life.
(The other side: a Mighty Mighty Bosstones medley.)

I have no idea how or why I ended up with it, but Amii Stewart's 'Knock on Wood' single was my first-ever 7". I've loved the b-side basically since I learned to talk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1VLJv5kq_Y

great thread.

as for my answer, it's an ambiguous one: hiphop. just, generally speaking. it was the first style of music i heard where it was like even the "bad" stuff was way better than anything else i had ever heard.

Probably the AM gold top 40 tunes my camp counselor played on his radio in summer of 1974. “Rock The Boat” from the Hues Corporation the one I remember most.

as a kid I used to mishear the lyrics as "I'd like to know where you got the lotion" and I kept asking my mom why the main narrator of the song kept bothering guests to borrow sunscreen

One of my earliest musical memories was hearing “Silly Love Songs” on the radio on the way home from the beach in CT and loving it. Didn’t know shit about the Beatles yet, either.

Three different musical memories, all dating back to when I was between 6 and 12 years old (1986-1992):

1. I was heavily into Transformers as a kid and I remember REALLY loving Stan Bush' 'The Touch' which was used in the 1986 animated movie (and I remember being very excited when it was used in the epic climax of the S3 series finale).
Nowadays I don't think of it as a very good song, but I can't help but smile when I hear it & recall how it made me feel when I was a kid.

2. On holidays, in the back of the car, I listened along with my sister to her walkman. She had a lot of the Beatles on cassettes and I think songs from the White Album stuck with me most. I remember loving Bungalow Bill and Blackbird.
Now, I still rate the Beatles very highly and I also really love the White Album. I wouldn't rate Bungalow Bill with the best tracks on it though, but I certainly like it (Blackbird is still a highlight for me).
(I also remember enjoying the Bangles, but I hardly listened to their stuff since then.)

3. I was heavily into Irish and Scottish folk music: Dubliners, Tannahil Weavers. For a long time 'Whiskey In The Jar' as performed by the Dubliners was my most favourite song. The Dubliners also were the first band I ever saw live (1992).
As I gradually started listening to other bands, I sort of turned my back on this kind of stuff and didn't really listen to it for many years. I've been revisting it sometimes over the past years, it's not something I listen to often but it still makes me happy.

Probably the Star Wars soundtrack.

Same here, though I think it was ROTJ, this one (which was so f-ing cool to look at as a kid):

https://img.discogs.com/98r8P3CnDaUmSOddh5J0O-BbK2s=/fit-in/300x300/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(40)/discogs-images/R-3230062-1321461235.jpeg.jpg

mine was Shakespear's Sister "Stay" - the video as much as the song, the mix of campy goth melodrama and sincere performance. I still love it and it's probably the biggest formative influence on my taste, I love the ideal of pop as bold spectacle and performance as a role to inhabit. Obviously the song/video is so easy to parody and the reasons for that are clear, but I think the elements in it that make it so are also the elements that drew me to it.

my musical awakening was basically the 2 Tone era.
i had enjoyed music previously (random cassettes bought from Woolies, TOTP taped off tv etc), but this was a whole new level of enjoyment.
for my 12th birthday (Feb 1980) someone gave me a 7" copy of My Girl by Madness, and that was it.
from then on (until hip hop/acid house) i had to get everything i could with the lads on it.
still love'em when in the mood, but rarely listen to them now due to burnout

boxedjoy, I was also obsessed with Shakespeare's Sister aged 11/12, more the whole Hormonally Yours LP than Stay, used to listen to the tape a couple of times a day for about a year, if I had last.fm all my life they might still be my top artist based on that alone. I was quite protective of them and hated the Newman & Baddiel sketch, they were clearly in on the goth camp joke, without it ever becoming a pantomime.

when I was 5 my favourite song was Happy Birthday by Altered Images

by 6 my favourite band was Madness. my uncle John gave me a Baggy Trousers 7", my first record which I still have. my mum also had the Complete Madness compilation LP, a Squeeze singles LP and randomly a Jonathan Richman 7" which was basically all I listened to if I put anything on myself.

didn't pay much attention to music apart from that for most of the 80s, until I was about 12 when house music was appearing on TOTP and I got really into that

first album I ever owned and played to death was Pet Shop Boys - Disco (a remix collection with suburbia, panninaro, west end boys etc). When I was much younger I used to play my mum's ex-jukebox 45's that were a mix of very white 50's/60's pop hits, oddly no Motown, and with the odd 70's ones as well (the strawbs, the theme song from the movie Convoy). I think I had an Adam and the ants stage that lasted for about a week when I was 9 and my brother bought Antmusic (from Woolworths of course).

Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel. When I was 5 or 6, my parents got me the K-Tel Breakdance cassette, which had one side with questionable breakdance instructions and another side with a mixture of legitimate electro hits and session musician copies of the same. For example, they had the original Electric Kingdom by Twilight 22 but Tour de France was credited to a group called 10-Speed. I didn't learn that it was a Kraftwerk song until I was in my twenties, probably. Fortunately, Wheels of Steel was the real thing, although iirc it's a slightly shorter edit. That song just blew my mind away. I didn't understand what I was listening to at all! Up until then I had mostly just heard my dad's Beatles and folk records. I had a Jackson 5 album and Thriller at this point too. I thought there was an ENORMOUS band in there and that they brought in an actual dad and his kids to do the little spoken word "Adams, North Dakota" bit. It was the most amazing thing I had ever heard and just made me feel so good from start to finish.

Side note:
What I've just learned in scanning through the discogs entry for Breakdance, is that there were multiple different track listings for this release. So if I had lived in the UK, the opening track would have been "Break Dance Party" by Break Machine followed by Kids' Rap (The Hip Hop Beat) by The Rapologists* Featuring Flakey 'C' & Early Daze...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gx1FYoMsRw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78S2a_bR3Js

...as well as a version of Let's Hear It For the Boy by some group called Joy & the Sticks that is not available on YouTube. I don't think I would have been as captivated by any of these selections.

However, Latin American pressings got It's Like That by Run DMC!

Air Supply - “All Out of Love”

What can I say? I was loaded up on Sudafed and this song spoke to my 11 year old brain. And heart.

oh, I loved "Take On Me". I would sing it to my brother, but being like 4 years old, I kept saying "take on knee"

lol and Mr Mister "Broken Wings". but of course I was so young I took the lyrics very literally

i don't have any relevant additions, but here's the hiphop sample of "broken wings" because lol samples, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX1cvDPDn30

The first music I remember *needing* to hear again was soundtrack stuff - Star Wars, the Rocky montage music. In terms of pop music, it'd be stuff on the radio; I recorded You Win Again by the Bee Gees and Cherish by Kool and The Gang and just listened over and over. Then it was Bat Out of Hell and Infinite Dreams and I was away.

my parent's vinyl copy of Creedence Clearwater Revival's Chronicle vol 1 especially their cover of "Heard it Through the Grapevine"

my first musical memories are my dad playing guitar & singing john prine songs, especially "spanish pipedream" & "please dont bury me" and me thinking it was the greatest shit ever

I also deeply loved "Total Eclipse of the Heart," which seemed like the biggest and most emotional music possible. My friend and I created a whole dance routine one afternoon which involved somersaulting off the couch during the choruses.

I keep imagining you as one of the guys in white robes and glowing eyes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcOxhH8N3Bo

around 4:15

when i was a kid we had a budget comp CD of aretha franklin's greatest hits. i remember being FLOORED by "respect" — i mean, deeply moved, but also overjoyed. my little brother and i used to do this thing where he would jump up and down on the bed and pantomime the "sock it to me" background vocal part and then i would "sock it" to him with a pillow.

"countdown to ecstasy" was another CD that was in steady rotation, and although i'm not a huge steely dan fan, it's still a very important record to me. my mother moved to a different city this spring and this was one of the records we played during our 10+ hr road trip. it occurred to me that it's probably one of the very few records that we both know all the words to.

the chorus of "Born to be Wild"

i remember as a wee kid on independence day, some older cousin or another would always allot me some paltry amount of non-dangerous fireworks to go light on my lonesome. and i remember thinking that i had to coordinate lighting them in order to make the most of my comparatively unexciting private fireworks show. and i'd think to myself: fire all of your guns at once and explode into space

- "To Sir with Love," from seeing the film at the drive-in
- bubblegummy stuff like "Dizzy," "Sugar, Sugar" and Andy Kim's early hits
- Ray Stevens' stupid novelty songs like "Gitarzan" and ones with titles that make we wince (and not realizing how many of them were covers)
- Beatles singles from '67 or so

New Kids. Though it's possible I was more into the cartoon and the fashion plates.

I reallly don't kno. The first lp I ever bought wasa copy of Oklahoma when i was 12 so wonder if I was heavily into musicals. Did used to watch the Sunday afternoon film o British tv in th emid 70s. Also knnow I got to see teh Jungle Book when i was a toddler and had the single when i wasa little older.

First stuff I started buying heavily was mod related British bands and soul from the mid 60s and bits of the Jam etc. I still love teh mid 60s stuff.
May have enjoyed bits of heavier rock that were turning up on TOTP late 70s/early 80s. and post punk pop a little later.
My brother was playing things like teh Stooges and Velovet Underground from the room next to the living room at the start of the 80s so I was picking up on them in my early teens also Can. Then i went from the mod stuff to more psychedelic stuff from it being played in mod discos. I also know I loved X Ray Spex in my early mid teens. & other bits and pieces of punk stuff like taht.
THink I've mainly just picked up on more stuff along those lines. Picked up most of FUnkadelic in the late 80s too.

But what exactly i really loved when in my childhood i can't remember brilliantly. Do remember some bits of glam turning up on the radio when i would have been i my mid 00s.
I know I wound up with a copy of Motown Revue live in Paris which would have been bought mid 60sby one of my parents . Also remember having the red Beatles double around the time it came out. Also Nina & Frederick who were an infamous gangster combo or was taht when he went solo?
I think we had a Scott Joplin which might have been in th ewake of The Sting bringing him back to attention. Also there were a few trad jazz lps my mother had bought in the early 60s. Do remember a Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore lp being something I listened to quite a bit too though that's not music.

not sure if I have a correct way of retracing my steps since childhood and thinking what turned up when.

As a kid, I was into Top 40 radio, and often listened to popular LPs of the day (Thriller, Like a Virgin, She’s So Unusual, Brothers in Arms... uh, Dare to Be Stupid, Eddie Grant, Alphaville)—but Wish You Were Here is the first album I remember getting into via a side channel (camp counselor) and being totally fascinated with, felt like it was special and “mine,” etc.

somehow neglected to add having been driven around bits o fEngland asa child to go and see Morris dances. ONe of my mother's schoolfriends was marriede to the gy who's on stage leading the Morris dance in the St Trinians Great Train Robbery. The family lived about a 10 minute walk away from where I spent part of my childhood and we'd be driven around in this mini woodie car to various parts of at least Essex and close counties.
I probably connected to other music since i used to dance around to music asa small child not sure what though.