When I got home I anxiously listened to it, there in my room, on my little home stereo, and then I listened again. The lyrics were something worth reading through more than once. The band played a lot in each song, yet it felt right (in years to come, of course, I'd find that I was among a small, but extremely devoted legion of fans who feel that way.) Everything felt different and beautiful and right in a way I'd never heard music sound before. Seventeen years later, it still feels exactly the same way.

Bill Frisell - Live: My first real exposure to jazz was either John Coltrane's Sun Ship or this - time has erased the gap between the two, but it matters little. Either way, I was in way over my head. I bought both in quick succession, but found Sun Ship simply way too much and traded it in shortly.

Somehow, I held on to Live - something about it spoke to me. Frisell's twisting, turning, yearning guitar kept me baffled for years about what was really going on. It didn't help that bassist Kermit Driscoll worked similarly odd lines on his instrument, and that drummer Joey Baron refused to play a straight beat, or even play normally, clacking and clanging about his kit instead of just hitting the cymbals and drumheads. Perhaps it was the billing on the wrapper of Frisell being "jazz guitar's Hendrix" that kept me coming back, but I just knew there had to be something serious going on with this guy. I was right.

King Crimson - Thrak: Just because King Crimson is one of my all-time favorites of all-time doesn't mean that I have to trot out the old standard In the Court of the Crimson King. I don't particularly care for it, regardless of it's standing as a prog-classic. The one that I return to, time and time again, is 1995's Thrak. Not because it was my first — because it wasn't — but because it was the first that really involved me in the music. The rest that I had up to that point — Starless and Bible Black, Red, Discipline, Beat — I listened to, but not into. Thrak got me to sit down and really tear apart the music, listening for each note and how it reflected on what another musician was playing, like good free jazz would cause you to do. It's probably no coincidence that jazz was just starting to make a serious dent in my musical life at this point. Where many have come and gone, however, King Crimson has stayed.