I’m probably the last person on the planet to make this discovery, but Spotify! Spotify! is really very good, isn’t it? I have been using it all morning, listening to past musical fascinations and obsessions, and as I listen to this, I think of that, and as I find that, I remember the t’other. It’s quite habit-forming. You know how it is when you have a tune stuck in your head, on and off, for a decade or so, and you can never quite remember how it goes after the mid-point or something, and then you find it on the radio and suddenly all is restored? Well, I’m finding it rather like that, only to the power of a very large number indeed. (Gosh. A maths reference. Steady…)

All this mp3 malarky has made me think about the albums (see how old I am and marvel!) that have been significant to me in one way or another. So here is a reasonably random selection of favourites, and a quick waffle about what makes them so, at least in my case.

1. David Bowie, Station to Station: I love this album. I bought it first when I was about thirteen, and going through what can might be termed a rather extreme relationship with Mr. Bowie (for ‘extreme relationship’, read ‘complete geek about it’). I have often thought that the use of headphones and – at that point – a Walkman can establish a particularly intense connection with music, particularly when said music is blasted into one’s tiny brain at a volume loud enough to demolish approximately half of house. Perhaps that is the reason that I know every last lyric, every ludicrous geee-tar moment, on this album. Equally, perhaps that’s why I genuinely don’t hear it as a 1970s sound aesthetic, which, I suppose, it probably is. It remains a favourite because I now find it oddly comforting, probably because I associate it with being a teenager, and with trolling about with my mum in her slightly nutty little car while she did slightly nutty things as she drove.

2. Royksopp, Melody AM: Whenever I hear the first track of this disc, ‘So Easy’, I am transported to the first trip the aged parent and I undertook in the First New Car We Had Ever Owned. Well, I say new; it was actually six months old, but bearing in mind that prior to that, our cars were normally not only not the current model but not the one before that either, this thing seemed like a whole new breed of vehickle. I mean, for one thing, you didn’t have to use a clothes peg to keep the choke out while the engine warmed up; for another thing, the choke was automatic! As in, no room for interestingly revvy moments when one forgot to retrieve the aforementioned clothes peg, and no overfilling of the petrol tank because the fuel gauge didn’t work, and no need for a hammer when attempting to close the sunroof! Ah, happy days.

3. Joni Mitchell, Blue: this takes me to either La-Que-Sabe‘s sofa, where we sat and talked of things witchly for hours while upstairs the Sabelets slept quietly, unaware of our chocolate-scoffing ways, or to Earthenhouse in any evening of last November, when the witchling was going through a phase of sleeping the first stage of the evening in a small cot in the sitting room while Quercus and I quietly pottered about, eating dinner and chatting in the half-light thrown by the little string of flower-lights which live at the top of the bookshelves. The quiet calm of Blue seemed perfect falling asleep music; she slept through the entire album, waking only as it finished.

4. Jamiroquai, Synkronized: I’m back in university accommodation, living with Quercus for the first time, contaminating our entire flat with strong wafts of incense and blasting ‘Canned Heat’ on Quercus’s frankly most excellent stereo.

5. J. S. Bach, Goldberg Variations (perf. Glenn Gould): I hear Glenn Gould singing along in the background, and I think of my mum, telling me about his tendency to play from armchairs, as we sat in the car park of the school where she taught. She had just finished for half-term, and I had come to hear her play duets with her partner, a professional pianist with whom she had a most unusual relationship.

6. Maurice Ravel, Complete Works for Piano (perf. Werner Haas): this finds me lying on the bed in my room as a first-year undergraduate (before I met Quercus); I listened to ‘La Vallée des Cloches’ and ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’ almost obsessively, probably partly because I missed my mum so much when I was first away. She sent me a recording of herself playing various Bach preludes and fugues, and she had learnt ‘Le Tombeau’ as I did my A-levels.

7. Steve Reich, Electric Counterpoint (perf. Pat Metheny): Quercus hears this and thinks of British Columbia; for me, it’s driving back from Wales with him, after our first holiday together.

8. Gustav Holst, The Planets Suite: I bought a passel of CDs when I had an insurance claim settled just as I started university; I still remember walking into the shop, in Canterbury, and shelling out what seemed like a shedload of moola on music – this, Werner Haas, Glenn Gould and a few others. It’s just one of those snapshot moments, somehow, mentally. (Preferably I’d like to cheat here, and add the St. Paul’s Suite – the memory here is not the obvious one [we used two movements when we got married], but rather of driving west on the A30 dual carriageway with La-Que-Sabe in the back, talking about music as we tried, the day before the actual wedding, to work out what we’d like to use.)

9. Thievery Corporation, The Mirror Conspiracy: for most of my first degree and a good portion of my MA, I worked for Star Child, a small shop selling incense, herbs, general witchy jiggery-pokeries, and music. Oh, the happy days – sitting behind a counter, and obscured from view by a haze of incense so thick you couldn’t cut it with a spatula, I read most of my academic reading list in the quiet times, and worked my way through various witchcraft books when trade was brisk. Still ranks as one of the best jobs I’ve had, I think, if only in that it provided such very excellent access to such very excellent things.

10. Rachmaninov, Symphony No. 2: just because it’s so beautiful that it almost ought to be illegal. In fact, it probably was at the time.

And you?