When Amy Douglas was a teenager, her parents sent her to a boarding school for troubled kids deep in the Arizona desert. There she fell deep into a depression and struggled with an eating disorder. Then a cassette copy of The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads helped turn her life around.
“That album was full of energy and really helped me to become alive again,” she remembers. The music was also her constant companion when she’d go running. “It was my solace and it was my motivator to reconnect with my body that I had been completely disconnected from and become friends with it again. I wore that tape out.”
(Originally aired: August 25, 2006)
>> Is there a work of art that changed your life? Tell us in a comment below — or by e-mail.





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I too was sent away to the desert, in Utah though and my parents had an escort bring me there.
I wasn't allowed to listen to music but I remembered the lyrics to a lot of Tupac's songs like "Me Against The World"...and writing them gave me comfort because like me, he expressed feeling alone. This meant that in that feeling, I wasn't alone.
Hunky Dory by Bowie. At the time I loved Prog Rock and big big concerts were starting to be the norm. 30 minute songs etc. I listened to Bowie and everything changed. There was drama, style sand the future in 3 minutes. No one else had heard of him. He was just a picture in Melody Maker. It put me in a very exclusive group ad a young teen. We stood out. From there T.Rex, Roxy Music and eventually punk took over. But it was Bowie first and always.
The Clash and London Calling was my anthem. The Specials were my happy place. The book that changed my life was Darkness At Noon! By Arthur Koestler. As the story by a former communist leader reflecting on his life while awaiting death during the Stalinist purges...a long discussion about the value of one generation fighting for a future and the rights they have to sacrifice successive generations, so long as a better future arrives was a mind-bender...and turned me from punk rock anger to a champion of individual effort.
You said to let you know about a record, movie, book etc that changed your life. I grew up in Bettendorf Iowa and left for college when I was seventeen. This was 1980. I was a very troubled kid who acted out and didn't know what to do with myself. In my second week of college I went to see a movie that changed my life, and maybe saved it too. That movie was Pink Flamingos. Up until then I had no idea that people just picked up cameras and made movies with their friends. We didn't use words like empowering back then, but seeing P.F. made me feel like there were endless possibilities in life, that you didn't have to be rich, or beautiful or even normal to be happy, that you could laugh at the people who were laughing at you, and to stop taking myself and my problems so seriously. It was a resounding 'get over yourself and do something' message that filled me with something like joy. I'll always be thankful to John Waters for that.
If I had to single out one album that changed my life: Document by R.E.M.
I was 16 years old, the music was politically charged with an urgency that isn't unlike the times we live in now. There's many other albums that had a profound influence on me; Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd, The Doors' first and self-titled album, and Led Zeppelin II, but when I think of the albums that I went to first in my stack of records on a daily basis and cranked until my ears almost bled, it was Document.
"For Artists Only" didn't exactly change my life, but it was a useful reminder that though what one makes in the studio might be initially difficult for uninitiated folks to grasp, people shouldn't be condescended to for not being hip to the subtleties of drawing, painting, sculpture, etc. After all, artists are usually hoping other people will see what they've made, and maybe even like it.
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