Joni Mitchell - Blue
I first encountered that record when I was 16 and in college and a boy came round to my house.  He was a boy who I really thought was so beautiful and I never thought that he'd even notice me, quite honestly. I had this tiny little box room in a shared house with a bunch of blokes, one of which never came out of his room - (at the same time that he never came out of his room, Tom Waits released that song 'What's He Building In There?' He never came out! I was just living next to that character and you would hear these strange bangs...) - and in that room I had a little single bed, and I'd brought my only other piece of furniture, my grandmother's huge wooden record player, with built-in speakers and the record player in the middle. This boy brought round a copy of Joni Mitchell's Blue, and I had never heard anything like it in my life before. We hung out all night and he played that over and over again. When he left in the morning, all my heart aflutter, he left that record with me and I was just enthralled by it, and I still am, to this day - I just never get bored of listening to it. Every time a song starts, it's like a really good old friend walking in a room. It's just always, always welcome.