To kick off Pitchfork’s 25th anniversary, we published a list of the 200 most important artists across our lifetime thus far. Now it’s time to hear from some of these artists themselves about the music that they’ve cherished and taken inspiration from during the same timespan. Here are answers from Phoenix, Beach House, the War on Drugs, and more.
For more of Pitchfork’s 25th anniversary coverage, head here. And read our Editor-in-Chief Puja Patel's note about our 25th anniversary project here.
Ali Koehler (Vivian Girls)
This came out almost exactly 25 years ago. I remember hearing “Leave the Biker” on 106.3, my local alt-rock station in New Jersey, and being totally blown away. In a post-Nirvana landscape where a lot of pop-rock skewed saccharine, Fountains of Wayne had a biting sense of humor that really resonated with me. Long live Adam Schlesinger.
ANOHNI
My favorite album from the last 25 years is Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Power in the Blood. One of the many things I so admire about Buffy is her relentless positivity, combined with her willingness to look clearly at the past and the present, no matter how brutal the landscape, and name it. She is one of the great elders in North American music.
Buffy is one of the people I am relying on to help me understand how to move forward as an artist and as a human being. I look to Indigenous artists and female visionaries.
As a species, we are not well. There is still joy to be found in our world. But the fruit of the last several hundred years, even the last couple of thousand years, is now coming to a head with the collapse of stability in the natural world. Only a suffering, broken species would facilitate the destruction of their only home.
I try to avoid the voices of billionaires. A billion dollars is only ever stolen. Billionaires, be they artists, executives, or politicians, inevitably ask me to swallow their poisonous storytelling, and right now, only clear storytelling helps me. I want to try to be honest and understand what is happening in our world. Buffy Sainte-Marie is one of the people who helps me to ask those questions.
Beach House
This wonderful record was completely worth the long wait after Loveless. There are some moments that connect back aesthetically to their earlier records, but there are also new, deeper forms and vibes that materialize throughout. To us, it’s a great example of how a band can progress naturally. It feels like a perfect blend of lovely melodic songs and wild harsh moments. It also feels timeless.
Buck Meek (Big Thief)
It's impossible for me to define my favorite album of the last 25 years—that is a fluid thing, changing all the time. Though I can say that Jolie Holland’s Catalpa had the biggest impact on me of any album in the last 25 years. I first heard it during my last year of high school and knew immediately that it was a cipher, encrypting everything that I would come to love most about music. Catalpa was the first album that really taught me why we write songs. About necessity, about mythology’s role in survival. It taught me how to build an altar. It taught me how to honor a friend. It taught me how to whistle and about the power of rhythm guitar (Jolie is a train). It taught me to live first and then document. It taught me that truth put to melody is all you need. You can hear the room on this album, the city. You can feel the birds on the line, the people on the street, the time of day, the phone rings, a cough, a dog bark. Catalpa is a habitable environment. It taught me that we can live forever.
Bun B
Summer 1997. I was in a very strange place at this time. I was more famous than I’d ever been due to the recent release of Ridin’ Dirty. I was also in the first year of the relationship with my now-wife Queenie. So there was a lot of professional as well as personal stress on me. I couldn’t find anything to relax me. Then one night, watching MTV, I saw the “Paranoid Android” video. Suddenly, for some reason, this calm washed over me. It seemed like this song was speaking to me. I bought the album the next day and everything about it made sense. While very dense and layered at times, it was still very melodic and easy to listen to. And a lot of what they spoke about then still resonates to this day. So even now, when life starts moving too fast, OK Computer is still there to help slow it down for me.
Carly Rae Jepsen
Feist is perhaps the most magical of all artists to me. With a voice so unique in its strength and delicacy, she captured my heart in my early 20s and didn’t let go. From beginning to end, this album doesn’t miss. I can remember listening to it on my ferry rides across the water from Vancouver to North Van, where I was making my first album. I’m still in awe of how skillfully she set out to make an album of songs that flow together so effortlessly as if they always belonged together. From playful and sexy to serene and introspective, she embodies it all. As a young woman, I felt empowered seeing that we could be all things at once. I recognized myself in the complicated dynamics of it and have embraced “going there” wherever “there” may take me in my writing ever since.
I was first introduced to Feist’s music at the Vancouver Folk Festival. She performed solo with her cream trench coat, white electric guitar, and foot pedals to create her own harmonies. She was such a mystery to me; so petite, yet her presence was commanding and the songs she sang were fierce in feeling. The crowd drew closer to the stage as soon as she began, and I rubbed shoulders till I was front and center.
After such a raw performance, I was delighted to discover that the album was not overproduced in any way. At times it’s funky; and others, it strikes as quite melancholy. It’s subtle, tasteful, and its writing shines through and leaves space for Leslie’s enchanting vocals to take the lead. I am a forever fan.
“Let It Die,” “Mushaboom,” and her cover of “Inside and Out” are three of the stand-out tracks to me. But the whole album feels as fresh and relevant to me now as it did on first listen.
Daniel Kessler (Interpol)
It was a milestone moment when I heard Richard D. James upon its release. The album stopped me in my tracks. I had never heard anything like it before, and its influence on me was immediate. It felt like Aphex Twin had pushed music to where it had never ventured before. It’s one of my favorite albums and still sounds as vital today as it did 25 years ago.
Dave Portner/Avey Tare (Animal Collective)
The summer of 2000 was a high point for AC. Creatively, we were at the start of what would become our most free and exploratory era and on the cusp of a journey that continues today. It seems almost serendipitous that The Unseen appeared just before the summer kicked into full gear and became our soundtrack. It was lo-fi, it was mysterious, it was part sound collage, part hook-ridden hip-hop, and part mushroom trip. (Rumors circulated that Madlib mixed the whole thing while tripping.)
We felt a kinship with the record-digger personality who could easily sample Alice Coltrane’s free piano and place it beside the soundtrack to La Planète Sauvage, making it all groove while still being a bit unhinged. It was transportive and alien but also grounded and familiar in the traditions of jazz, rap, and psychedelic music that it adhered to. It gleamed in so many of the ways we wanted to present AC: mysterious characters from another world who would infect the current trends with our own personalities and something a bit different. Never wanting to be copycats, we just hoped we could make something as personal and special. We still do.
Douglas McCombs (Tortoise)
One album that always comes to mind when considering the last 25 years is Ongakushitsu by the Japanese musician Aki Tsuyuko. Aki often flies under the radar because she’s not cranking out tons of albums, but she always makes singular and personal music, regardless of trends and styles. This album sounds like nothing else, and it’s a masterpiece.
Fennesz
Many post-1996 albums have inspired me, from Aphex Twin to Autechre or Sunn O))) to Jim O’Rourke. But I believe only one album, fsck by Farmers Manual, has actually influenced me. In 1997, when fsck was released, Farmers Manual were just kids. While I was finding it difficult to master new technologies like Max/MSP or SuperCollider, they made it look all so easy. Their punky attitude was something new and fresh for computer music. fsck sounds to my ears like free-jazz-computer-techno—nobody else was attempting this at that time. A brilliant album.
Girl Talk
Operation Re-Information was an experimental electronic group from Pittsburgh. At their live shows, they felt more like a rock band as they played computer keyboards on guitar straps, triggering samples in real time. They presented themselves as a scientific organization, and their performances also doubled as lectures on “information control dynamics.”
Their first full-length release, Ctrl, was an unpredictably wild mix of noisy synth jams and manipulated samples. It’s deconstructed computer rock. The album is all over the place but manages to have a cohesive feel.
I was just starting to make my own electronic and sample-based music in high school when I crossed paths with Operation Re-Information. They were amazing and a huge influence.
Hamilton Leithauser
Looking back through all of the fantastic records that have been made in the last 25 years, I find the one that has probably influenced me most (and maybe I’ve heard the most), is Accelerator by Royal Trux. That may have to do with when it was released—in 1998, I moved to New York City as a 19-year-old, wide-eyed college student—or maybe it’s just because it is a fantastic record. Back then (pre-internet really), records had more than a 10-minute shelf-life, so the brightly colored Accelerator disc carouseled around my five-disc CD changer for at least the next six years. When it came out, I already knew the band and had been listening to Cats & Dogs since high school, but Accelerator brought a brand new crazy-wild sound (see “Juicy, Juicy, Juice”) that came out of absolutely nowhere.
But more importantly to me, the songs held together as individual songs rather than devolving into the noise that I tended to find pretty boring. From all the times I’ve seen them live and all the records I’ve bought, Royal Trux never struck me as having put a ton of planning into maybe anything they did, but it seems to me like Accelerator’s excellence is due at least in part to some planning or preliminary structure of songwriting. On Accelerator, they really struck a remarkable balance between structure and chaos. Every single song is good… I would say it is a “no-skipper.”
This translated to the live show as well. I’ve seen them more than any other band, and the Accelerator tour show at the Cooler in NYC was undoubtedly the top. Anyhow, I’ve never sounded anything like them with anything I’ve ever been involved in, but this record has been a tireless reference point for me over the last… 23 years (wow).
I also made an “Intro to the Royal Trux” playlist here, featuring a lot of Accelerator tracks.
Kamasi Washington
Songbook came out when I was 16 years old. The first time I heard it, I was completely blown away. It was the sound that I was searching for. It was such an inspiration for myself and all my friends! The whole band was so amazing: Kenny Garrett, Kenny Kirkland, Nat Reeves, and Jeff “Tain” Watts. They were like superheroes to me!!!
Lil B
This album is a super-special, self-produced, all-around classic. I always come back to this tape and listen and hear something new! It’s a very inspiring tape to me, and something I will always keep with me and around me. Really, you should listen to every song from front to end because it’s a movie! I love the sound, the production, the rapping on it; it’s just the most honest album I have heard and still stands relevant to this day. My favorite song on the album is “Ain’t No Sunshine.”
Liz Harris (Grouper)
I still regularly listen to and love Burial’s Untrue; I know I am not alone in how deeply I love the song “Archangel.” On each listen, I notice production details I hadn’t before. The attention to production is really dialed, and all the more impressive when you learn he used Sound Forge to make it. I felt a strong kinship hearing that, as that was also my main and favorite program (Sound Forge 7) to work with for many years. The noise reduction plug-ins are amazing and reverb as well, though I sadly lost access to the program when my old PC died.
In the version of the program I loved, one is forced to blind-mix, which makes you concentrate less on the waveforms and listen more closely. Forced to reckon with chance, a chaos element. Music that leaves a doorway open to this is my favorite. I used to do it via four-track tape recording—new takes without listening to the others. Richard Youngs has worked with blind-mixing too. And Roy Montgomery. There’s a strange and alien energy in music made this way. The process itself becomes a silent collaborator; almost occult.
Low
We knew and loved her and David Rawlings’ records before, but this record arrived as a deeper, uncharted, cryptic stretch into the possibilities of the folk song format and a new standard in dual vocal interplay. The minimalism, the edge-of-your-seat guitar playing, and the brutally perfect vocal delivery are untouchable. They always seemed like teammates to us, mostly due to the similar duo vocals and darker tone—kind of reassuring, like cooler, slightly older siblings. We met them some years later, and they, of course, couldn’t have been more kind.
Phoenix
Simultaneously building bridges to the future and burning them down.
Mac DeMarco
This is the record that sticks out to me personally as far as “influence” goes. I remember first listening to it when it came out, and there was a sort of mystery that came with it. Didn’t know a thing about Con, also don’t think he had played in the U.S.A. at that point. Wasn’t the most available thing, but our crew in Montreal at the time found out about it and latched onto it real quick.
I had weird rules about recording and guitar up until I heard this record, didn’t like using any guitar effects, never used keyboards, things like that. Chucked out most of those after I spent some time with dolphin love; was maybe the first time I’d heard something contemporary with a lot of weird elements that didn’t feel whack.
Since those days, I’ve gotten to know Connan, played with him a bunch, and have become friends. I love all his music; please listen to this record. Thank you, Mr. Conch.
Nicolas Godin (Air)
From the last 25 years, there are a few records that I cherish. They all have in common a huge amount of freshness when I heard them for the first time, and I will never forget those moments. My number one on the list is Homework by Daft Punk. At the time (January 1997), Paris was the place to be, and I was living in this maelstrom of energy and creativity. My dream was to make a classic album like the ones I grew up with, and suddenly, my neighbors achieved that with some basic home studio equipment in their bedroom. They really showed me the way and therefore changed my life forever. God bless them.
Sharon Van Etten
I first discovered Portishead at a record store called Vintage Vinyl in New Jersey the summer of my junior year in high school. I listened to all kinds of music at the time (Sonic Youth, Ani DiFranco, Liz Phair, Beastie Boys, Fatboy Slim), but there was something about Portishead that made me think more about vocals than I ever had before. I wasn’t a serious singer yet on my own, only in choir, and Beth Gibbons encapsulated the image in my mind of something I began to want to be. Dark, vulnerable, but tough. Mournful, angry, sexy, all hypnotically woven together with beats and live strings and tasteful scratching. Beth stood strong and stark in the midst of this ensemble and rose above it all with her commanding, crystal vocal, and I was lost in the songs from the get-go. From make-out sessions to long drives alone to referencing as a source for my own sonic palette, Portishead has been a beacon since my teenage years, and I thank them.
Stephin Merritt (The Magnetic Fields)
I have listened to this album hundreds of times, probably more than Tusk even. I would call it the equal of On Land, tied for best ambient album ever, though supposedly it’s considered lo-fi house or whatever. For a few months in the throes of my lockdown nightmare, when the silence in New York City was broken only by banshee ambulances, this album was essential to my sanity.
Thundercat
I remember discovering this album with Cameron and Taylor Graves, Ronald, and Kamasi around the same time. We were teenagers, of course, and it sent us (more so Cam, Tay, and I) on a metal quest (lol) that actually led them (Cam and Tay) to play in the band Wicked Wisdom with Jada Pinkett Smith (lol). The cool thing about discovering this album—and there never being anything like it before or after, and still to this day it stands alone—[is that] when my daughter came of age, I hand-passed that album down to her (Sanaa, my daughter, who I have given a nickname “Derp Cobain” lol), and it’s awesome to watch her ears and mind expand and grow from hearing the awesomeness that is Slipknot. Rest in Peace, Joey Jordison.
Timbaland
OutKast’s album Speaker Boxxx/The Love Below was always one of my favorite albums. They brought a whole new sonic to the game and changed the game with “Hey Ya!” and “The Way You Move.” It was just groundbreaking at that time.
Tony Di Blasi (The Avalanches)
J Dilla’s cut-up sample masterpiece is a spiritual experience to listen to. There is something more to this than just music. A layer of otherworldliness. He accesses another dimension that we intuitively know resides in us all. The way the compression is used adds a kind of breathless feeling. It’s haunting, surreal, experimental, and heartbreaking. Layer upon layer of hidden sample meaning unfolds the deeper you dive in and the longer you spend with this record.
Donuts feels like both darkness and light at the same time. Sitting at the point where joy and sorrow meet. Dilla transmuted his final time on earth into a work of art that will remain eternal.
Vince Staples
This album has been a constant throughout my life. It’s really unique. Nowadays we get a combination of singing and rapping in a lot of music. But back then, it was a risk. So for her to sing like that early on, combined with the subject matter, the arrangement of the album with its throughline, and how it just flows with you… it’s definitely a classic body of work.
It’s a spiritual thing. The music feels like you’re being brought towards it. You can feel the point of view. Black music to me is rooted in spiritual connectivity. If you look at rock and roll or blues or soul, we have been through so much, and that’s being translated into music. When you listen to “To Zion,” when you listen to “Nothing Even Matters,” you feel the emotion put into it. As a whole, the album is just perfect.
The War on Drugs (Anthony LaMarca)
This album is my favorite kind of album, one where once you put it on you know you are listening to the whole thing start to finish. Little themes from different songs pop up all over the place, and you get an overall cohesive vision without it being “concept album”-y. I was starting my senior year in high school when it came out. At the time, I was obsessed with Talking Heads, XTC, the Band, and the Beach Boys. My older brother was in art school in Cleveland at the time, and I would drive up there from Youngstown and go to some of his classes; from that, I was also getting exposed to Philip Glass and John Cage. All of these artists taught me a lot about using really simple means to create something really complex and interesting.
After hearing the 2004 version of SMiLE, I found some bootlegs of the original sessions, as well as digging into Smiley Smile. A lot of those recordings are really repetitive, but sometimes staying in one zone or one mood is just as engaging as changing all the time. That idea of simplicity is also present in Brian Wilson’s songwriting; they sound more complex but are usually simple chords with uncommon bass notes. Maybe my biggest inspiration (or at least most current inspiration) from this album is in its joyfulness. There’s so much darkness that surrounded the original SMiLE sessions (and subsequent Beach Boys albums): substance abuse, emotional abuse, untreated mental illness.
The new version is sometimes corny (Brian’s voice is Auto-Tuned, the production is really slick… like Broadway or kids’ music slick), but it’s also the sound of a bunch of musicians supporting Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks’ vision which had gotten squashed for almost 40 years.
That idea is something I’ve been drawn to more and more these days when collaborating with other people. I used to think that there are “right” and “wrong” musical ideas, but I think it’s more about if something works or not. Even if what you are creating is meant to express pain or some darker feelings, I don’t believe that the path to get there needs to be painful. Making music is a gift and should ultimately be fun and joyful, even if it’s hard sometimes.
The War on Drugs (Charlie Hall)
Every five years or so, a record comes along and becomes a constant companion, a weekend guest who never leaves and simply becomes part of the family. Just as the Clientele Suburban Light and the Radio Dept.’s Clinging to a Scheme before it, Meshell Ndegeocello's Ventriloquism turned me upside down and inside out. This is a record for any time, any day. Songs like “Don’t Disturb This Groove” and “I Wonder If I Take You Home” and “Private Dancer” all reveal new emotional depths in Meshell’s hands (to say nothing of this absolute monster of a band—Abe, Chris, and Jebin. The spaciousness of the grooves and the delicacy of the playing have inspired me both musically and spiritually. It’s pretty wild to hear an artist you thought you knew, playing songs you thought you knew. But it turns out to be beyond the magical beyond. In attempting to illuminate these songs, Meshell actually illuminates herself. Meshell belongs in the pantheon.
The War on Drugs (Dave Hartley)
Voodoo by D’Angelo is the one album that held my hand and helped me shake off the toxically masculine rock music with which I had been inundated in high school and early college, that opened a gateway in my mind to several galaxies of music, that completely turned my head around as a bass player, that still sounds fresh as a fucking daisy, that is at once welcomingly accessible and impossibly deep, that has never left the car-visor Case Logic CD organizer of my mind.
The War on Drugs (Robbie Bennett)
I was sitting in tour catering at a festival in Suffolk in 2014 and heard the Jayhawks playing in the distance. I’ve never run so fast.
Wilco (Glenn Kotche)
This record fascinates me to this day. Rhythm is at the forefront here—with sparse layers (inspired from African drumming traditions) ebbing, flowing, and unfolding to create a beautifully measured work that is simply captivating. Melody and harmony are born from this process in exciting and unexpected ways. That it sounds completely electronic and studio-concocted but in actuality is performed on acoustic instruments (traditional jazz trio of drums, piano, and upright bass) is the icing on the cake. It’s inspired me to continue to search for fresh sounds on my instrument and delve deeper into complex rhythmic structures. There is nothing else that sounds like this music—it’s perfection. And each of the several times I was fortunate enough to see it performed live was a completely enjoyable and rewarding experience—three absolutely wonderful and interesting musicians producing truly compelling sounds and making something only they could.
Wilco (Jeff Tweedy)
It’s hard to picture where I’d be without this record.
Wilco (Mikael Jorgensen)
I’d been a fan of Stereolab since I first saw them open for the mighty Yo La Tengo at Tramps in NYC in 1994. I was completely unaware of all the reference points they folded into their sound, and as a result, everything felt completely new and timeless at the same time. I just loved their hypnotic, trance-inducing music, which my friends and I called “Motion Rock.”
Laetitia Sadier’s prescient first lyric from the song “Brakhage” seems like something you can sing even louder today:
We need so damn many things
To keep our dazed lives going
Many things to keep our lives
Lives going, so many things
It’s increasingly difficult to remember a time before mobile phones/internet/smart-everything, but this record came out 10 years before that bellwether year of 2007, and yet it sounds just as fresh and relevant today as it did back then. These recordings are lush universes that repay close attention. The skillful and tasteful production of John McEntire, Andi Toma, and Tim Gane served as a roadmap for what was possible, musically and sonically in the studio.
The track “Diagonals” opens with what at the time seemed impossible, a drumbeat that stayed in time but raised in pitch. It wasn’t until I started working at McEntire’s Soma in the coming years did I learn that the effect was called Frequency Shifting, a cousin to pitch-shifting. The sound is intoxicating and riveting against the frenetic marimba patterns and sets such an interesting and unusual tone for the tune. There is studio trickery ranging from subtle to overt around each and every corner and it still feels exciting almost 25 years later.
Stereolab embraced the album format, and the album-side track “Refractions in the Plastic Pulse” is a suite of gurgling pop confection that detours through outer space. It’s well worth a late-night listen. The blend of pop writing, Laetitia’s strong lyrics, and the production are still unmatched.
Wilco (Nels Cline)
My wife Yuka started listening to this wonderful outpouring of creativity, versatility, and imagination as soon as it was released, and together we have listened to it in amazement more times than I can count. Esperanza composed the music and focuses primarily on singing (though she does play some acoustic bass and other instruments) while backed by her insanely talented band (and guitarist Matt Steven’s superb articulation, harmonic sensibility, and tones certainly got my attention) for this concept song cycle/stage show (which we eventually witnessed at Town Hall. Jaw-dropping…).
The music’s freewheeling and often startling twists and turns often envelop the listener like a torrent of creative expression or fever dream that one never wants to wake up from, feeling simultaneously meticulously crafted and urgently spontaneous. Hence, it fascinates and inspires with every listen. I guess that means that it influences me! It is music by a powerful and prodigiously talented artist that is beyond category. The way I like it!
Zach Hill (Death Grips)
I first saw U.S. Maple live in San Francisco opening for Pavement. This was at the Fillmore in 1999. Their album Talker had recently come out. Watching them that night, I could feel that I was gaining an access to myself that wasn’t available to me beforehand. In performance, they were second to nothing I’d ever seen.
I said to a friend afterward it was like a big pregnant snake on stage squeezing all the air from the room and doling out oxygen when it hissed. Then Acre Thrills came out in 2001, and I was consumed by it. As a fan, I consider their entire discography a consolidated masterpiece, but Acre Thrills fully peaked me.
In 2002, my band Hella opened for them at their Sacramento show date and I went on to reference that Fillmore performance when writing the lyrics to a Death Grips song called “Hacker”: “I got this pregnant snake, stay surrounded by long hairs, a plethora of maniacs and spiral stairs”—the pregnant snake being their performance, long hairs in reference to their first album Long Hair in Three Stages, and Spiral Stairs being the second guitarist in Pavement known as Spiral Stairs.
Very influential.
