Welcome to First Album Reviews!

A home for my reviews of the debut albums of singers, bands, and other musicians from the 1950s to the present

I’ve been writing on Medium for a little over a year. While I’ve written about a variety of things here, the majority of the stories I’ve published have been about music.

At the beginning of this year, I decided to take part in a challenge created by writer Nia Simone McLeod. Basically, the challenge was to listen to at least 100 new-to-you albums in 2022. It didn’t matter if they were brand-new releases or very old ones. They just needed to be albums you’d never heard before.

I love music-related challenges like that, so I dove right into it! My first “new” album of the year was Elvis Presley’s debut album from 1956.

As I made my way throughout the year and through a lot of music listening, I heard many great albums. One of my favorite parts of it all was “discovering” the debut albums of many musicians. Not only did I usually find them to be very entertaining, but I also became fascinated with how different they could sometimes be from the later music made by those artists.

In a lot of cases, like with Elvis Presley’s first album and the first album from Johnny Cash, I instantly heard the magic that made those artists become legends. Everything was already “in place” for them on their debut albums. They sounded pretty much the same as how I always knew them to sound throughout their careers.

On other first albums, though, such as the ones from The Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen, I heard a lot of great music — but it seemed like the artists were still growing and discovering themselves. Their first albums were very good, but they weren’t as great as what would later come from them. But that’s to be expected in most cases, of course.

I am not in any way putting those artists down by saying the above. I love watching artists change and grow artistically as their careers move forward. That’s the way it’s supposed to be and it’s part of the fun of it all!

Because of my love of listening to debut albums, I got the idea to write an ongoing series of reviews of them called ‘First Album Reviews.’ I chatted with fellow music lover and writer Kevin Alexander about it. Kevin, who is the chief editor of the awesome music publication The Riff, liked my idea and encouraged me to move forward with it. Shortly afterward, I wrote reviews of the debut albums of The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, and Neil Diamond and published them in The Riff.

I was having a lot of fun with it all!

As I listened to more and more debut albums, I was struck with an idea:

Why not write a book about them?

It could be something like The 50 Greatest First Albums of All Time. Or maybe something like The Best First Albums of The 1980s or maybe…well, I suddenly had SEVERAL ideas for different ways I could go with it!

But I knew I could decide all of that later on. For now, I’d focus on listening to a lot of debut albums and writing about them with the intention of them being published later in a book.

I mentioned all of this to my wife (the wonderful Penelope Mayfield) and she loved the idea. She said I should go for it! Since she’s very wise, I listened to her.

At first, I thought I’d stop publishing my reviews online and instead save them for my book. However, almost immediately after I considered doing that, I watched a great YouTube interview of Medium’s CEO Tony Stubblebine by Zulie Rane. In it, she asked him what advice he’d give to those writing on Medium.

Tony replied with some very inspiring words. He talked about how writing and publishing on Medium can be very beneficial in multiple ways — to both writers and their readers.

As they continue to write and publish, authors can work on increasing the quality of their writing and also on becoming experts on the topics they write about.

What inspired me the most from Tony Stubblebine in the interview was this great piece of advice from him:

Write towards a book.

Yes!

That sounded great to me!

I decided to continue not only with my book but also with my ‘First Album Reviews’ on Medium. I could publish my potential chapters for my book (or at least very well-polished drafts of them) right here in this great place.

However, this time around, my album reviews would go a little bit “deeper” than before — and hopefully be even better than before.

Since this is going to be an ongoing series featuring a lot of reviews, I decided I wanted the reviews to have their own home. That’s why I created the First Album Reviews publication you’re currently reading.

Even though my favorite genre of music is rock and roll, I plan to write about all kinds of music here. I want to seek out and explore the first albums of artists who play genres of music I don’t normally listen to. I hope to discover (and hopefully fall in love with) a lot of “new” music I’m currently unfamiliar with.

Plus, along with all of that, I also want to share my thoughts on debut albums that I’ve been a fan of for a very long time.

I’ll be writing reviews of albums from the 1950s to the present. If you’re a music lover, I hope you join me here from time to time.

I also hope you let me know how you feel about the albums I review — and maybe even recommend some of your favorite debut albums to me. I’m always looking for great music to listen to, so please bring on your recommendations!

P.S. — I’d like to mention some of the first music-loving writers I discovered on Medium. Not only did they entertain me with their stories, but they also inspired me to share my own.

THANK YOU:

Paul Combs, Terry Barr, the aforementioned Kevin Alexander, Rui Alves, Brandy Niremburk, Bonnie Barton, Alex Markham, Karla Clifton, Chris Zappa, David Acaster, Jessica Lee McMillan, If Ever You’re Listening, Christopher Robin, Jeffrey Harvey — and many others!

In my article, I mentioned the ‘100 New-To-Me Albums in 2022’ challenge I’ve been participating in. If you’d like to see the complete master list of the albums I’ve heard so far (I’m currently up to #63) or to check later to see if I’ve accomplished my goal, please click below:

Thank you for reading! If you enjoy stories on Medium but are limited in the amount you can read because you don’t have a membership, please consider joining so you can gain full access to every story from myself and thousands of other writers. If you’d like to join, here is my referral link. By using my link, I earn a small commission — at no additional cost to you. Have a wonderful day!