Pinching the idea from another writer friend of mine who did this exercise at social media, I will be spreading these posts between others.

I’m not an OCD type per se, but I do alphabetize my music and comic books and worse, in sequential order of their release. More significant and tedious with music if you’re not an aficionado or a journalist, which I have been both.

At an older blog of mine, I actually began listening to every single album in my then 3,600-unit collection and posting one sentence comments on them. An arduous task, I made it to the middle of my B’s before my time grew tighter and frankly, readership interest waned. I was wanking, I own it.

So here, I will be picking one album for each letter of the alphabet, and I’ll drop a brief blurb about what the album of choice means to me.

Let’s begin with Fiona Apple’s 1999 album, When the Pawn…

Tori Amos and PJ Harvey opened my eyes to female angst rock, while Ani DiFranco showed me how imperative a knuckle down (pun intended) folk-punk approach to acoustic with blistering social commentary sounded. Fiona Apple sang in a jittery, sometimes unhinged key of depressive mania, and I adored it upon first contact.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.