Harry Nilsson – The Point!
This album is actually aimed at children, as much as Harry Nilsson could ever write a song for children. I actually picked this one because it's a very important album to Belly as a band. It's an odd story but a boyfriend of my mom's when I was a kid introduced me to The Point! in about 1975. And I listened to it several times a day for at least a year. And then when I started hanging out with Tom Gorman, before we formed Belly, it came up that this same man was a family friend of the Gormans and had introduced the album to them as well, and they were equally obsessed with it. And so before we were ever in a band together, just as fellow musicians, we said 'we should cover 'Think About Your Troubles' one day'. We did eventually cover it as a B-side [to 'Seal My Fate'], and it was sort of this nice bonding focus for us as a band in the early days. The Point! I think it's probably one of the first extremely pointed anti-bullying messages, at a time when that conversation, shockingly, had just sort of started happening. At the time, it seemed so revolutionary to me, as a kid: "This is what we should all be aspiring to, this level of community and acceptance." But playing it for my kids now... they've heard it so much, and in much more nuanced and graphic ways. So this feels sort of naïve and innocent to them in a way. They're sort of like: "Well, yeah ..."