Editor’s Note: Dan Warden is the latest contributor to On the Couch and we would like to thank him for bringing his musical taste and expertise to the blog. Dan is a musician, an artist, and author. He has been playing and writing music for about 15 years.

I have had many jobs over the course of my adult life, one of the most challenging and rewarding was teaching Air Force Technical Training.  Technical training can be incredibly tedious, and unfortunately leaves very little room for interpretation or creative thinking.  Trying to do my part to alleviate this, or maybe just to alleviate my boredom, I decided that question and answer sessions were necessary to stimulate intellectual discourse.  I would typically start a class by asking questions such as, “If you could talk to any animal in the world, what would it be and why?”. Sometimes I asked the class to solve a riddle,  but my favorite question to ask was what album changed their life?  Unfortunately too many of my students thought of music as merely background noise, something to fill up space, and never had the life-changing experience that music can provide.  That however was not the case for me.  As an artist and musician, there have been many albums that have changed my life and I would like to share with the On the Couch readers my five most influential works.  Please note, these are albums that had a huge impact on me, but are by no means my top five favorite albums.

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