7. GenesisTrespass

If I had to choose a favourite band, and a favourite record, it would be Genesis and Trespass. It’s not just my favourite record of theirs, though I think it is probably their best record, but it’s just like an overall record. I feel like it’s perfect in every way. It features this folkier style of prog music, but you can also hear the influence of early music and early music traditions that a lot of English bands in particular were doing at that time based on their history of medieval music. That’s really interesting to me. This is kind of a concept album, and that’s interesting to me too in terms of making a complete album, from the artwork to the songs and having this thread running through it all. I think the line-up on this record, the Phil Collins and Steve Hackett line-up, you can’t really beat that.

I remember listening to this record when I was in high school, and all of my friends made fun of me. The person I was dating at the time in high school, his dad was a really big Peter Gabriel fan. I knew ‘Solsbury Hill’, but I didn’t really know anything else about Peter Gabriel, and I think I just went down the rabbit hole of like, ‘Oh, Peter Gabriel was in this band Genesis. Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of the later Phil Collins hits’. Then I just went the down the tunnel into full Genesis territory and found it completely mind-blowing.

I really only listened to the first two records that they did with Phil Collins after Peter Gabriel left. They’re a great pop band and they have a lot of good hits and all that. But to me, it’s just a different band. I don’t dislike the later stuff. I obviously don’t listen to it as much as earlier Genesis, but in my mind it’s a different band. They just sound different. They’re doing different things, so I don’t really think of it as being the same or being an extension of the other material. They just have the same name.