A special list for this special day: Six albums that are directly responsible pretty much everything I love in music. And why:

The Beatles - Reel Music: It always goes back to the Beatles, doesn't it? Why would I dare include this, a lame compilation instead of one of the sacred albums? Because this really was the first. A nine or ten year old me listening to this in the back of my dad's pickup truck on a little boombox with friends. I didn't even really know what I was listening to at the time. It obviously meant something to me because half of my listening choices today reflect back on what the Beatles were playing in the bed of the truck when I was a kid.

Def Leppard - Pyromania: The soundtrack to countless camping trips with my friend Matt as a kid, Pyromania would blast from the cabover bunk of the motorhome as we made our way from place to place with my parents. More than just a soundtrack for our trips, this is, without a doubt, one of the greatest hard rock albums of all time. There isn't a bad or wasted moment on it - from start to finish, it's one solid wall of simmering, burning guitars, great hooks, and catchy choruses. Not a hint of filler. Well, except for that weird drum-loop thing that winds out the album.

Rush - Presto: When I was a teenager, I would regularly lull myself to sleep with music. Usually a tape in my Walkman was the preferred method, but sometimes one of the two good local rock stations, 98 KUPD or 93.3 KDKB, would do the job. One night, the moment my headphones went on, I heard something I immediately knew I wanted more of, but when the song ended it faded directly into another song, and I never heard who the band was.

In those pre-internet days, it just wasn't possible to Google the lyrics, so I kept listening, night after night, hoping I'd run into the song again. Sure enough, many nights later, the song came on again and, afterwards, the announcer gave me what I needed to hear. Two words: Rush, and Presto, the title of which was the very song I'd been listening to. I knew something was very different when I picked up that cassette in the Wherehouse - it just looked different than everything else I listened to. So minimal - no gaudy mascots, no garish colors, no cheesy band photographs. So . . . classy. I bought it with little hesitation.