Brian Beck has held almost every role in artist relations within the music world. He worked for record labels, moved into artist management, and then was the Global Head of Music and Entertainment for Sonos. Throughout his career, he has worked closely with artists on projects centered around music discovery, curation, and storytelling. Brian currently resides in the Hudson Valley with his wife Paula and their two children.
Piotr Orlov is a writer, editor, educator, and publisher of the newsletter Dada Strain, based in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and The Village Voice, among other publications. He has held editorial leadership roles at NPR Music, MTV, and AFROPUNK, and has created music and culture programming for radio, streaming, and live audiences. He teaches writing and music history at New York University.
An intimate collection of essays by 80 widely acclaimed and esteemed artists, from Brian Eno to Erykah Badu to Angélique Kidjo to Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, each revealing an overlooked but beloved album that has resonated deeply with them and inspired their work.
Discover the music that shaped Dolly Parton’s earliest memories through her mother’s voice, the rare recording that Black Thought of The Roots discovered and continues to draw from, the album that changed the way Chris Stapleton heard and approached music, as well as selections from both Billie Eilish and Finneas.
On the Records gathers musical hidden gems and word-of-mouth albums, selected by 80 celebrated artists. Featuring essays by luminaries across genres and spanning generations, the book offers an intimate look at the music that has privately influenced and moved these artists. Each essay features an album, artist, or a set of songs that the artist feels should have been considered classics among the collective consciousness but have been underappreciated. Some reflect chapters in the work of widely recognized artists, while others are long out of print, self-released, or hard to find. Many of the essays were written by the artists themselves, while others grew out of exclusive new conversations, shaped into written stories that preserve the voice and spirit of those exchanges. Each artist’s reflection is paired with album art and imagery that bring these records to life. On the Records unfolds with the quiet pleasure of browsing a well-loved record collection—a book to linger with as much as to read.
This is the book for music-lovers who want to be inspired again, by the discovery of songs and sounds that they’ve never heard before. For listeners who value discovery and the deeper connections people form with great recordings, On the Records opens a path to extraordinary music, shared by the artists whose work has shaped the way we listen.
What We Share
An Introduction
Over the years, countless inspirations shaped the idea for a book like this. But one that stayed with me most vividly was a single night on a tour bus with My Morning Jacket. Shortly after a triumphant sold-out show, band members took turns sharing songs they cherished or felt were right for that moment. I wasn’t in the band—I was their day-to-day artist manager—but my place in that bus kitchenette seat gave me a front-row view of something I now recognize as sacred. As we headed north toward a festival in Maine, the ride turned into a traveling listening party. The bus filled with the music of Washington Phillips, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Link Wray, Shabazz Palaces, Linda Perhacs, Supreme Jubilees, and more. The joy wasn’t just in blasting the music through the bus’s old speakers, but also in playing a treasure for those who would truly appreciate it and watching the whole bus light up in response to the track you’d finally settled on when it was your turn to share.
That night stayed with me as a strong reminder of the thrill of being let in on music you didn’t know existed but suddenly realized you needed to own. I’ve chased that feeling my whole life: as a fan, record buyer, and radio programmer; through record labels, as an artist manager; and most recently as Global Head of Music at Sonos, working closely with artists and their teams. This project grew out of that same impulse: to give readers a chance to encounter the overlooked and the underheard, the music that reaches you in surprising, lasting ways.
That feeling resurfaced again and again in dressing rooms, studios, after-parties, hotel rooms, and musicians’ homes. Artists who stay musically curious across their careers find joy in sharing discoveries—past, present, or yet to come—especially the ones that aren’t obvious.
Most guides to essential albums don’t capture that spirit. They tend to be curated by critics, filled with predictable lists of “all-time greats.” Read almost any of them and you’ll find the usual Hall of Famers: the Beatles, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye. Of course their works are towering achievements. But they’re also familiar and endlessly repeated. Algorithms and AI tend to surface what’s already promoted or what resembles what you’ve just heard. Rarely do they uncover the hidden gems that true artists turn to for inspiration.
Tet—an artist I’ve been lucky to be in a continuous conversation with since around the turn of the century and who appears in this book with a story about his grandfather’s record collection—recommended a book to me. Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews finds the drummer Art Taylor speaking with a series of jazz now-legends throughout the late 1960s and early ’70s. In his foreword, Taylor writes that the book was inspired by “real voices of musicians as they saw themselves, and not as critics and journalists saw them,” noting that the same set of topics (“music, travel, critics, religion, drugs, racism, and the word ‘jazz’ ”) are repeated throughout the book. These thematic repetitions—shared private stories open for rare public consumption—are immensely powerful because they’re gathered together; with Taylor’s experience as an artist, and his personal relationships with his subjects, proving to be a “candid” guidepost. Previously known to be in existence, the stories simply required the right person to ask the right question on the right occasion in order for them to come out.
I had already been thinking about all this when a longtime colleague, Brian Beck, called to tell me that he had an idea for a book. “Let’s ask musicians we know and admire to talk about the one album that had a great effect and influence on their lives, though make it an album that most listeners haven’t heard about.” I can’t realistically express the speed with which I said yes. Like a personal vision of a “perfect”illegalscript, the project Brian proposed had all the elements: working with a dear friend whose creative acumen I trusted and shared, listening to musicians whose sounds have been longtime guides or newfound balms, and gathering stories that have rarely if ever been publicly told. A few artists chose to write down what they had in mind, already clear with their direction and vision. But a large majority of the entries in this book are edits of conversations between me and the artists, with my own voice scrubbed to let them tell their stories (with all the pieces read in their final version by the artists themselves).
I worked with a set structure: a single topic (the album) and a single set of questions/ prompts that served as a conduit for the stories the artists told. Of their own volition, the interview subjects gravitated into spaces of professional development, early-life discoveries, mid-career turns, and late-career reminiscences using almost-muscle memory—and the memories would come spilling: of family and old friends, of sunny/rainy afternoons and late evenings, time spent at home and on tour, during drives and flights, in backstages and dorm rooms. The clarity of the sounds they were telling about, but also the sounds’ emotional resonance, sometimes came out as a clear anecdote and, at other times, as an overwhelm of emotion. It’s impossible to pick one, or ten, as an example. Each conversation contained a moment when the weight of the tale—always about encountering a piece of music that takes the listener somewhere (or ends up taking them somewhere)—was a presence. Or the moment of the encounter was. Many interviewees laughed or smiled—there’ve been a lot of Zoom calls, y’all—some sighed, and a couple broke into tears and had to take a minute to gather their thoughts. I found myself crying, too.
Listening, transcribing, and editing, I was trying to categorize what was happening on all those occasions. Though, of course, the answer was obvious: To their ears, the pieces of music they were talking about no longer contained the stories of the albums’ creators. They now told the stories of the listeners—listeners who themselves became artists in a cycle of hearing and storytelling that is one of humanity’s greatest gifts.