One’s favorite album is telling. Favorites are deep—often they are connected to certain people or places in our lives and are always closely tied to the memories of the time we’ve spent with them. They are sacred because they are unique to each of us. They are our own. In this installment of Most Valuable Play (MVP), Sad Souls tells us about his favorite.

I walked home recently, sure that I was going to write this article about Yo La Tengo. Painful was going to be the album, and I would write about how well-deserved the guitar solos feel throughout the album and how their almost apologetic singing inspired me. However, no one would ever peg me as a rock fan. I’m embarrassingly unaware of most rock bands, and I came to wondering how much of Painful I would like if I heard it for the first time today.

I guess what I like about Painful are the songs that have simple, barely melancholy melodies. However this preference has existed longer than my affections for Yo La Tengo. I found the two-person group ISAN at the root of this inward quest and realized it was my discovery of their album Plans Drawn in Pencil that set me on the path to appreciating the naïve melancholy present in a lot of my favorite songs today.

This sound is my musical home. It’s my old sweatshirt. It’s the way I wish I felt all of the time. In a moment of indecisiveness, often brought on by the dizzying freedom of listening choices (or just choices in general, sure) the world has to offer, Plans Drawn in Pencil will surface and remind me of its dependability. There’s something about the resonance I feel with ISAN’s music that remains hard to explain and I hope some of my visual accompaniments will help.

I’m not really a writer. These things can be hard to describe, you know? Maybe one should not ask the reader rhetorical questions.

I found ISAN in high school. I remember listening to this album with my friend Kevin in his room, dissecting different parts of the songs to get ideas for ourselves. At the time I was also infatuated with glitchy ambient music from Japan, so it was more a matter of time than miracle that ISAN became part of my life. However, for some reason their songs were more than just tracks I could add to an all-ambient playlist. Each song stood on its own. The tracks on Plans don’t meander. They take you, if you’re anything like me, exactly where you want to go.

I’m particularly fond of the track above this text. I sampled the beginning in one of my songs. I think it might be the sine wave sounds that draw me to this album. Yeah. I’ll always love sine wave sounds. The sound is like a bell in a blanket.