This was meant to be a facebook post, but then I got qualmist about how maybe it was a little bit too personal for friends only,and decided instead to post it to EVERYBODY ON THE ENTIRE INTERNET. HURRAH. Ok, here it is. It's about music, predictably: 15 ALBUMS: [The rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen albums you've heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me, because I'm interested in seeing what albums my friends choose.] DISCLAIMER: These are not the 15 albums that I love the most, or the ones that I think are best, whichever criteria it might be that you're using to define 'best' at any given moment. They're the ones around which memories have crystalised and hardened to such an extent that I fully expect to be hanging on to them long after I've started mistaking my children for my siblings and have been packed off to the nursing home/labourcamp/privatised incinerator for the elderly and infirm which will no doubt be the only option for impecunious OAPs once this government is through with our health service. ANYWAY THAT IS NOT THE POINT I AM NOW TALKING ABOUT MUSIC THAT I LOVE AND CARE ABOUT: 1 - The Mountain Goats - Tallahassee I first came across the Mountain Goats through the good offices of a close friend who was going through a horrendously painful break-up and, as a result, linked me to possibly the most acrid divorce ballad ever written, 'No Children'. Although I thought it was great, I was a callow 23 year old at the time, and was more interested in taking ecstasy and listening to Dodgy's 'Staying Out for The Summer' and Das Racist's 'Pizzahut/Tacobell' remixes to pay much more attention. When I finally got round to following up the tip, I bought the only MG album in the shop, the excellent but slightly less mindblowingly, accost-you-in-a-dark-alleyway-and-hold-a-knife-to-your-throat-while-divesting-you-of-small-change-family-keepsakes-and-probably-underwear arresting 'We Shall All Be Healed'. So I forgot about them for a while, and listened to some more Dodgy. Hey, I thought. Mountain Goats. They're on the longlist. I'll get round to it one day. It didn't matter that my friend was practically howling at me to buy Tallahassee. What the fuck, I thought. He howled at me to buy St Vincent, too, and he was definitively wrong about that. More Dodgy. When I finally did get round to buying it, it sat virtually unlistened on my iPod for a few months. And then it was November, and it was a pisswet day, and I was hungover as hell and I had the glaze in my eyes from too much shagging and I also had the sinking feeling in my stomach that, at the age of 24, I was learning to recognise as an early sign that I was falling in love (again) with the wrong person (again) and suddenly 'Staying Out For The Summer' didn't seem quite the thing. I was walking down Crookes Valley Road in Sheffield and put Tallahassee on - maybe because I wanted something to match the bile and dread of 'No Children', maybe because I was going to work and I knew that if I listened to it, I'd have something to talk to my friend about which wasn't this new and painful dread in the stomach. And then I heard: 'I handed you a drink of the lovely little thing On which our survival depends People say friends don't destroy one another What do they know about friends.' Bizarrely, that love-affair - despite possibly the most acrid beginnings in the history of relationships that John Darnielle might plausibly write a concept about - worked out pretty well. In fact, if anything, it's the only time I have ever fell completely, besottedly, and embarrassingly in love with two people at the same time. One of them, predictably, was John Darnielle.