Probably one of my top three favorite albums of all time. Mike Oldfield, stylistically and melodically my favorite guitarist of all time, has had decades-long success in Europe but never became widely known in America. He's best known here for his debut, "Tubular Bells", a truly strange and wonderful 45-minute instrumental recorded, incredibly, when he was 19 years old, and well-known for later being used as the creepy theme music to "The Exorcist", although it was not written as a soundtrack.
I do love the "Tubular Bells", but to me, "Hergest Ridge" is his quiet masterpiece. A very unusual instrumental tapestry of droning textures and odd but beautiful melodies, on which he played something like 18 rock and orchestral instruments himself, including numerous layers of quiet and highly processed electric guitars, and, just, one of those things that's hard to explain in words. It was written when he lived in a cottage in the English countryside, and sounds like it. Pastoral, airy, spacey, strange, intimate yet huge, this was one of the seminal albums of my adult taste in music, having bought it on a whim when I was 14 and had my head absolutely turned around. It still hasn't stopped spinning.
If I had to recommend one album that I really identify with, one album that could come closest to telling you in music what it's like to be between my ears, this would be a strong contender, one of maybe two in all.
I met Oldfield once, I waited for him at the stage door after a very impressive performance when I was in my 20s (which, incidentally, was on my birthday, and interest in Oldfield was so low among my friends that I had to buy someone a ticket to come with me) and he graciously came out and chatted with a small group of us fans for a while. They had something like 18 musicians on stage to recreate an album he'd made all by himself in the studio, including 4 guitar players switching off almost continuously between 25 gifferent guitars set up around the stage, a constant ballet of people getting up to fetch different instruments while others played, then sitting down and playing them for just a moment while someone else got up to get their new guitar. It wasn't even one of my favorite of his albums, but the spectacle of that performance was incredible. Then, meeting him right after he'd done that, he was so unpretentious and down to earth, it was almost anticlimatic. It wasn't like meeting one of my idols, it was just like like meeting some random guy. It didn't stop me from going gaga-starstuck and choking over my words just trying to talk to him, but, he was just a friendly and unpretentious dude. And patient with his starstruck fans, that's for sure.
