What two prog tracks changed your life?

Jethro Tull - Thick As A Brick 

So many mentions of Yours Is No Disgrace put me in mind of the distant past. Hearing this song, Yessongs version and studio, along with Starship Trooper, not being even aware if they were not only the same songs but the same band and yet certainly knowing that I asked myself, "Who ARE these guys?!"

I may be in this thread already and I stick by whatever I may already have said, yet I also recant!

These were the songs, man. These were the songs.

Eventually buying The Yes Album, then not too much later Yessongs made all things clear to me.

"Ohhhhh! These are those guys!"

And a lifelong love affair had been firmly established.

Edited by Frankh - October 25 2017 at 00:31

Probably

Yes- Starship Trooper. Rarely a day where I dont think of it at least once.

Tarkus. ELP. That's too awesome not to mention.

Surprised to see so many stuff hard to get into being named as life changers. Prog changed my life a lot, allowing me to understand how much efforts and learning you sometime need to do to really be able to get into some pieces of art. For me getting into prog was a gradual thing. The two songs that helped me when I was 14 to become a prog lover were:

bender99 wrote: I'm going to cheat a little bit here because I really have 4 songs which were influential in shaping what I listen to, oddly always separated by 10 years give or take. 1987 - Learning To Fly, Pink Floyd.  Hardly the best introduction to Floyd, but still a huge step-up from the crap I was listening to at the time. Of course I had no idea who they were, and some older co-workers soon lent me all of their classic albums. Besides Floyd, this lead me to discover groups like Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Beatles, Who etc 1997 - Roundabout, Yes.  Never heard of the group, took a chance and bought Fragile based on the album cover. Never looked back at that point. Yes became my favorite band, and in turn I discovered Genesis, ELP, Jethro Tull etc. 2009 - Bless the Child, Nightwish.  Struggling to find any music outside the 70's that I really liked, I heard this song in a video game of all places. Liked it enough to explore the symphonic-metal genre, and soon had Epica, Opeth, and Therion added to my collection, and more importantly, Dream Theater, which would become my favorite modern-ish group, and eventually lead to my last discovery. 2017 - The Whirlwind, Transatlantic.  Looking for Dream Theater related stuff on you-tube, came upon this... and bore done day, decided to play it. One minute in and I was hooked, I needed to know who this group where these guys had come from. Unsurprisingly, from that I branched out.. Neal Morse, Spock's Beard, Flower Kings.... then somehow ended up on this website, and now have added IQ, Eloy to the list.  I've bought more cd's this year alone than in the previous 10 I reckon

From Transatlantic, you really should also have branched into Marillion...and you still should

I was going to say that I didn't think any prog tracks particularly changed my life, but thinking back, perhaps that's wrong. Back in 1975 I'd just started really paying attention to the top 40, but I was precocious at twelve, and in my first year of what we call High School the music teacher had a library of albums which he'd encourage students just to listen to in class time (easy to see why music was a favourite subject), which is where i discovered Floyd. They turned out to be my 'gateway' band. The first music I started listening to which never heard on the radio (at this stage where i lived FM radio was still a couple of years away, and we just had two AM stations playing top 40, and two ABC stations (equivalent to BBC) but neither of them were much into music).

So, 'Wish You Were Here' was their latest album, but it was really 'Dark Side' which blew my mind and turned me forever away from the commercial pop garbage everybody else in my school was apparently listening to.

If I had to pick a track it may as well be 'Brain Damage', though it was really the whole album. God I wish I could get that astonished and exhilarated by new music now.

And then, shortly afterwards in 1976 I discovered the hard stuff. Hawkwind. 'Astounding Sounds' was their current album, but I think the first two I bought were 'Warrior' and 'Doremi', so it was probably 'Assault and Battery/The Golden Void' that officially catapulted me off into underground, prog and general crazy-arsedness.

It compounded things that independently of this I was already a Michael Moorcock fanatic, so when I discovered he was associated with the most amazing band I'd ever heard, that really sealed it (though in hindsight I don't think Moorcock's contributions to Hawkwind were among their most auspicious moments).  Hawkwind were just channelling whatever the hell it was i needed at 12-13, and I stayed a fanatic til at least the early 80's. After Calvert left, Brock seemed not to have rediscovered his cosmic savante mojo. But by this time I'd discovered a gazillion other bands, prog and not. If I can chuck in a third one, I think it was around 1981 that 'Refugees' by VDGG became my favourite song, and stayed there for a very long time. End of that can still give me goosebumps.

Wish I'd been a few years older and living in Europe in 77 to see 'Quark' era Hawkwind and Van Der Graaf touring together. Ah, well.

Supper's Ready changed my life, then Close to the Edge changed it back again.

Stasis restored.

Yes - South Side of the Sky - this was my favorite track off Fragile and the one that ultimately lead to me obsessing with the album (then Yes in general, then prog in general)