Welcome to the first post of Please Like My Music, an utterly self-indulgent series in which I talk about the albums I have come to know and love over the years. Though not strictly ordered by timeline, the first few installments in this series will focus on the very first cassettes/CDs that left a lasting impression.

Like most people, my parents played a formative role in my musical education. The problem is, however, is my parents barely had anything approaching a coherent ‘taste.’ My dad’s album collection (as far as I know, my mum didn’t really have her own section) included an odd grabbag of titles, from Seargent Pepper to Verdi’s Requiem to a giant compendium of Beethoven that neither he (nor my mum, brother or I) ever listened to. I cannot, in fact, ever recall my father playing a record on his own volition.

Mixed into his oddball collection were a few children’s albums, titles like Anne Murray’s There’s a Hippo in My Tub and a recording of Teddy Bear’s picnic, with the record literally in the shape of a bear. I have warm feelings about these albums but only because they remind me of feeling cozy at bedtime as a child.

But the first album that broke my brain was a kitschy novelty album featuring Ravel’s Bolero and the infamous Bizet fave, the Les Toréadors bit from “Carmen” all recorded on a Moog synthesizer.

I have no idea how my dad came into possession of it. A bad, last minute Christmas gift maybe? An inside joke? For me, it was simply there on a shelf in his smoky study, for me to take out and beg him to put on, in part because of the tantalizing and terrifying front cover of an orchestra of Moog cables performing for a conductor with a 6mm jack for a face.

The record is notable for introducing me to the facsimile of classical music before I even heard ‘the real thing,’ which is a common theme for many eighties babies, born into a culture where the parodies were far more numerous and visible than their subjects ( I like many others repeatedly watched and inexplicably laughed at the Simpsons’ and SCTV’s takes on great films long before I got around to seeing the originals, which were almost never shown on TV and weren’t available in suburban video stores).

Because of this, Bolero is for me, to this day, meant for the synthesizer. I cannot listen to actual orchestral recordings of this piece anymore; they sound thin, predictable, flat in comparison, which is odd because I’m not really a fan of the Moog. It reflects the problem of music first impressions.

While this not an album I really ever revisit or think about, it is the first one that I truly remember liking in some way, probably because I listened to it during a period of insane temporary synesthesia familiar to most four-year-olds, in which each odd Moog sound signature had an accompanying shape in my mind. This music was truly three-dimensional.

It is also an awkward fusion of the traditional and conservative with the progressive and modern, which is a kind of bland shorthand for what generally drives my taste in music today.

Everything You Always Wanted to Hear on the Moog — Andrew Kazdin, Thomas Z. Shepard (1972) was originally published in Please Like My Music on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.