The album that changed my life... and eventually led me here.

Our question today seems an easy one - name the album that changed your life. Many music fans have songs and records that forever changed them, and the more rabid the fan, the more likely it is that there IS in fact one recording that stands out. I've always loved music, and had a string of favorite songs as a kid. But there is one album that changed me forever...

I was already a David Bowie fan when he released the album Low in 1977, and the first side of the record was full of really interesting songs and textures - quite different from the previous album, Station To Station, but that was, after all, part of the point of being a Bowie fan - you always expected something different with each album. But nothing could have prepared me for the musical thunderbolt that was side 2 of the disc. The towering orchestral sound of Brian Eno's keyboards, the Steve Reich-inspired patterns of percussion, Bowie's cut-and-paste lyrics, the drifting electronic sounds - this wasn't rock; it was a doorway out of rock. Though I didn't realize that right away.

Trying to figure out just what Bowie and his collaborator Eno were doing, and why this strange music was so compelling, took years. It led me first to Eno's own album Another Green World, which had come out a year earlier but which I'd missed, and which posited the revolutionary idea that a musical background could be as interesting as the musical foreground. Low also pointed to the burgeoning German electronic scene - I knew Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, but artists like Neu and Cluster and Klaus Schulze were new to me. And closer to home, I'd heard a little of Philip Glass's music, but this album sent me scurrying for anything that would help me understand that second side; and so I discovered more of Glass's music, and that of Steve Reich and Terry Riley as well.

Now, if anyone out there happens to remember the early days of my nightly new music show here at WNYC, 'New Sounds,' you may recognize all these names because these were the types of things that made up the shows then. (I'm constantly amazed when someone says that they actually do remember those early shows - that was 27 years ago.) (I was 6 at the time.) Without Low, I probably don't find those artists, at least not in time to start the show that charted my professional course in radio.

But of course, those artists were just a series of first steps. Eno's interest in African music led me to world music; Glass and Reich led me to look more closely at classical music; the electronic bands led to the wild frontier of computer music. And each of those things proved to be a door to still more forms of music. I still host 'New Sounds' each night at 11, but the show has evolved, hopefully for the better; and the different styles of music that have become part of it over the past quarter century are essentially a result of those various doors being opened - and leading to still more doors.

Tell us: What album changed your life? Leave a comment!.