Guided By Voices/Robert Pollard (in general) It all comes back to the Beatles, doesn't it? In a roundabout fashion, I mean - Guided By Voices is about everything that's happened in rock in the past 40 years, but the Beatles (among many, many others) are a big part of that.

Where King Crimson got me to be hypercritical, Guided By Voices allowed me to free myself from that and simply listen to the song again. Because that's how you have to take Guided By Voices — purely on the quality of the song. The recording quality varies so greatly, from the lowest of lo-fi boombox recordings to polished studio material, that you either settle on a few higher quality ones and go no further, or you just give up on the band altogether, or, like me, you just give in and embrace it all.

Hidden under the hiss and the rumble, mixed in with the jump-cuts and jumbled song structures, the dedicated listener can find some of the finest rough-cut gems rock music has to offer. That Pollard makes little effort to make it easy on us makes it all that much better. Where many musicians obsess over making sure every note is nuanced and perfect, Pollard simply wants to get his music done and heard and will do whatever he needs to do so, including putting it out, quickly, under countless pseudonyms that keep the followers on their toes. With a mind this creative, asking him to overdub a flubbed note will simply stifle him. Better to let him get on to his next 30-second long gem. As the joke he says goes, he comes up with 5 songs sitting on the toilet, and 3 of them are good. Why hold that back?

It's pretty easy for me to see how these form a strong backbone of my musical self. It's not all I listen to, but the majority of what I listen to branches off from directions set in motion by each of these. It's really rather amazing how simple it gets when you trace it all back to the roots.