Music Monday #1: Love Angel Music Baby by Gwen Stefani

I wanted to write some posts for this blog that were a little different to the other topics I have covered so far.  I realise that a lot of the topics I cover can be quite heavy and whilst that is a place where my mentality thrives, and I find comfort there, it's not where my mind resides all the time.  I do have other interests but I haven't really shared those much on here so I wanted to change that.  When it came to thinking about what I could share one of the first things that came to mind was my love of Music.  It should be stated right off the bat my taste in Music is somewhat strange to most people in that it ranges quite a bit, there are artists you would never associated that sit side by side in my music library and they're played just as much as each other.

I wanted to lay a few ground rules in this first post, just to keep things simple for now, these posts will be made every Monday with the aim being to post 52 for 2020.  Each post will focus on a particular album and the only real rule I have is not to include compilation albums with the exception of greatest hit compilations.  The reason I made this rule is because I love Dance, Trance, Electronica, and genres of music closely related to them, these make up a chunk of my library but they are almost entirely compilations that have a mix of artists featured on them and my ratings for those individual artists vary quite a bit so without going through the albums track by track it wouldn't give a fair depiction of what I like and what I don't.  Greatest Hit albums are an exception as they tend to be centred around a single artist and they provide a greater accuracy when it comes to how my opinion of the album reflects my opinion of the artist.  The only other rule should go without saying but for the sake of clarity, these are all albums that I like, by artists that I like, I won't be featuring anything in these posts that I don't actually listen to.

To that end, the first album I wanted to feature is 'Love Angel Music Baby' by Gwen Stefani.  This album was released in November 2004, I was three months into my Diploma at College when it was released, I bought it the same day that I bought Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code which at the time had been out for over a year but had been a book that I was reluctant to read if not for any other reason than the fact it felt over hyped.  The reason I mention the book in tandem with this album though is because I read the book whilst listening to this album on repeat - that's not unusual for me I do that quite a lot music helps me think and it helps me focus, I know for most people the opposite is true and that they find it a distraction but this was never really the case for me.  If I want to use one sense in particular, I find that repetitive distraction of the other senses helps create a sort of bubble of concentration where everything else gets drowned out.

Love Angel Music Baby is one of those albums where I love almost every track - there are are only a handful of albums I can actually say I love every track and a few will feature in these posts.  The track I love most is called Serious but the album is perhaps best known for Hollabeck Girl, Harajuku Girls, or What You Waiting For.  This album for me was Gwen Stefani's peak, her magnum opus, an album that only 1 other came close to which will be featured later in this list.  It's been 16 years now since the album was released and to me it hasn't aged a day, every track still has relevance for me, each one evokes a different feeling and triggers memories of people and places that make me feel happy for the most part so it still remains as a go-to album when I want something to try and get into that mindset. 

2004 was a tumultuous year for me my Grandfather passed away close to the start, we moved house in the middle of the year, and I started college in September, I turned 16 that year and experienced so many changes and rebirths several times over that I can't look back at that year and find anything really that was static, it represents a period of flux for me or flames when the proverbial Phoenix was reborn and rose from the ashes.  Love Angel Music Baby is one of those albums that will feature prominently in my library and I can't imagine I'll ever grow tired of it or ever want to get rid of it.