Being asked for my favourite anything is always a challenge for me. Somehow I struggle with selecting superlatives, so being asked to pick my favourite 13 albums for this piece was a bit of a daunting prospect. I did this over a few very busy days rehearsing for festival shows and the list was on a kind of back burner in my brain. I guess what surfaced are my all-time most influential albums although there are more that wouldn’t fit in the 13. For those familiar with my solo work there are probably few surprises, although people who know me more for my work with Lamb may find the acoustic slant of the selection a bit strange. This is basically my soul-music; the stuff I listen to at home, when I need to connect with what matters to me. Much of it entered my life early when I started to raid my folk-singer mum’s record collection and some came later as my tastes evolved.
You could say there’s a similar flavour running through the music here and that it favours a particularly broad genre (the selection is mostly white, with the exception of Alice Coltrane, and much of it harks back to the late ’60s/early ’70s even if made more recently, with the exception of Aphex Twin) but that’s the difficulty of selecting one’s influences down to only 13. With a greater number there’d be more diversity for sure but to include others here would mean excluding one of these and I guess these are the ones that had to be there.
So for now, here goes. My Baker’s Dozen…
theyesandeye is out now on Nude Records. Lou Rhodes plays Omeara in London on October 25; for full details and tickets, head here. Click on her image below to begin scrolling through Lou’s choices, which run in no particular order
