A Little Birdhouse in Your Soul: They Might Be Giants' "Flood"@30

Two weeks in the year 1990, and two weeks after I turned thirteen, a previously unknown band from Brooklyn called They Might Be Giants released their album Flood -- and made history.

It was the first big alternative album to go mainstream, with an array of hits like "A Little Birdhouse in Your Soul", "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)", "Minimum Wage", "Your Racist Friend", and many others. Along with The Simpsons, which had premiered on television only a couple of weeks earliers -- and later on Seinfeld and Nirvana's Nevermind -- this album announced that the 1990s had arrived. It was going to be a more funky, more ironic, less conformist than the conservative 1980s that had just ended. Soon enough Bill Clinton would be president and Tarantino movies would be in theaters, and the new decade would have a feel and sound all its own.

Flood is a perfect album of great songs that still hold up thirty years later. As my young adulthood commenced those decades ago, this album came with me through it, a friend that never went away. And I still listen to it today -- like folk music, the music feels like it was never new and it never gets old.