The First Album I Ever Bought is an occasional guest post series where friends, family, and strangers talk about, well, the first album they ever bought. A new piece runs (almost) every Wednesday, and sometimes more often. If you’d like to submit, please see the guidelines here. My friends at This Is American Music are about to take over this feature for at least the next few weeks, so enjoy.

I was 11 years old when Bringing Down The Horse came out and it still resonates with me today. Much like the rest of the world, I heard about the band because of the insane popularity of the single “One Headlight”. The songs were well written, the band was tight and T Bone Burnett’s production really came into its own here. The Wallflowers tend to get lost in the haze of the 90’s alt-rock movement, but they really offered something more unique than most of their contemporaries.

I think the main reason why this album meant so much to me is because at the time I certainly didn’t “get” Bob Dylan, but he was and is my father’s favorite artist. I remember being elated to find out that Jakob was Bob’s son. In my mind it created this musical bond between the music my father loved and my own musical taste at the time. Everything about Jakob was appealing to me, from the way he sang (subconsciously I learned my own singing delivery from him) to the way he arranged songs. He owed a lot of inspiration to his father, as well as the likes of Tom Petty, Neil Young and Springsteen.

By echoing his influences and arranging songs with a good dose of pop sensibility, he really opened the door for me to a world of music I hadn’t appreciated until then.

Kent Goolsby is the singer/songwriter of the Nashville, TN based band Kent Goolsby & the Gold Standard, and you can hear his music here.