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For me, music is more crucial than a photo album. Play me a song and you take me right back to the sights, the sounds, the scents, and sometimes the flavors of what I was doing, how I was feeling, my experiences at the moment that song entered my life. I don’t listen to music. I enter it. I relish every individual instrument, the vocals, the harmonies, the rhythms, the arrangements. It moves my body, it insists my voice accompany it. My partner, Danny, finds comfort in the knowledge that if someone was holding a gun to his head and a flamethrower to my music collection and made me choose, the CD containing ‘our song’ would be safe and unharmed for me to play at his funeral.

Several years ago, I stopped keeping track of how many CDs and vinyl LPs I have. It just became too much. Thanks to the treasures that can be found on the internet, new music was arriving in the mail faster than I could keep count. Last tally had me at about 8,000 pieces. That was right after the start of the year 2000. To give you an idea of the depths of the obsession, these are pictures of my music room. Almost the entire lower level of our house is dedicated to my music, and the bar has been converted into my "DJ booth" (see that picture below).

The earliest memories I have of popular music in my life is…wow. Early. I remember my brother Roger being obsessed with Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” when it came out—I myself was mesmerized and bewildered by the line “clouds in my coffee.” I also clearly recall a long ride home from my aunt’s house upstate, sitting on my mother’s lap in the passenger seat of our van, watching torrential rain hit the windshield and singing along with Mom to the Carpenters “Sing.” It so happens that both of these songs peaked on the pop charts in early 1973. So I would have been a month or two short of my fourth birthday. I was hooked on radio.

Such an odd assortment of influences surrounded me. My oldest brother John started in the Doors and Hendrix era—very acid and psychedelic. Mike was all about the 70s, listening to Queen, Kiss and Heart. My mother and father were into Pink Floyd, the Moody Blues and ELO, with a history of The Supremes and The Turtles and other 60s pop groups. And my brother Roger, only two years my senior, was becoming attached to mainstream pop, like Fleetwood Mac and K.C. and the Sunshine Band.

Mostly enraptured with singing to musical soundtracks like The Wizard of Oz and West Side Story (I had begun to demonstrate an incredible soprano voice by age six), I jumped on the pop train with Roger, Yet, there were all those other influences entering my head—and for the most part, it took me at least a decade to embrace the fact that I wanted to own a Pink Floyd record.

I guess my own musical tastes were out of my control as a gay boy. I was drawn to disco: Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Village People. I was too young to see an R rated film (only 8 at the time), but I studied every commercial for Saturday Night Fever in 1977, and before long I was mimicking all of John Travolta’s dance moves. My mother was astounded—and immediately took to plopping me in the middle of the living room floor during family gatherings and dropping the needle into the groove of “Stayin’ Alive” (she had spared me her 8-tracks and purchased a record player for me).

The dancing became part of me, the singing likewise. Grease hit the theaters in 1978 and I sang it to death. I became obsessed with Olivia Newton-John. She, Donna Summer, Abba—they all carried me through the early 80s, a one-way ticket to Boy George, Madonna, George Michael. I also became drawn to this other kind of music in the late 70s, thanks to a crossover track called “Heart of Glass.” Blondie introduced me to that gorgeous blend of disco and rock, synths and guitars. New Wave. Oh yeah.

As this was all going on, I convinced myself to join the chorus in elementary school, despite there being only one other boy involved. How excited I was to enter junior high a year later to find a chorus full of other boys, even if none of them was as dedicated as me. By the time I got to high school, I’d become part of the music crowd, doing all the school musicals. I was exposed to classical music, show tunes, standards. I auditioned for and made all-state chorus (as an alternate because I wasn’t the best sight reader). When I graduated high school in 1987 I toured Europe only weeks later with a chorus and band selected from around the country.

At this point, I was already working in a record store, and found myself under the wings of a bunch of punks who taught me a thing or two about the goth side of new wave, mocking my love of Erasure’s sugary synthpop (yet still allowing me a chance at the in-store turntable to play my ‘gay’ dance selections).

By the end of the 80s, as I enrolled in college as a music major, I’d delved into the diverse spectrum of new wave and started hitting the industrial scene. Over a few years, industrial club DJs started slipping in a more danceable yet still dark sounding track every now and then. Techno. As grunge hit the radio waves, I went underground at the clubs, raving to the fastest screeching synth riffs coming out of Europe. Thanks to Sharon Stone’s seductive role in Basic Instinct, in which she lured Michael Douglas to a bisexual techno club, the moment I stepped into a similar club with a mixed clientele, I decided it was time to come out. That was an incredible and fleeting moment in the summer of 1992. Techno died faster than rockers still want to believe disco had. The segue was so easy for me. One night spent at a big club in New York City and I was hooked on deep and hardhouse, which carried me through the 90s and into the new millennium. And the first decade of the 2000s has found me obsessing over trance and electro house.

While club music is such a major influence in my music buying, the pop always remains a top priority. Along with all the other music that fills my vast collection, I ultimately have one major rule: I must own every single top ten hit released since the start of the rock n’ roll era in 1955, preferably on CD. Once again thanks to the internet and the incredible research that can be done with it, I can proudly say….

I own every single Top 10 pop hit from 1955 to the present. What a loser.

Speaking of being a loser, I spend loads of time on Amazon reviewing CDs in a way that I hope will benefit other serious collectors. You won't find any "This band rocks!" or "This singer SUX!" reviews from me. I give detailed information about the tracks on each CD, from song lengths and specific remixes to sound quality and occasionally, personal opinions about particular tracks. It's simply the information I hope to find from other reviewers when I go on Amazon looking to buy a CD. You can peruse my Amazon reviews here: My Music Reviews.

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©2007 Daniel W. Kelly