‘We listened on long car or train journeys, I put her on while walking or cooking, I played her to my family,’ writes Daisy Johnson of her first encounters with Lizzo’s Cuz I Love You. Today she finds the songs ‘as exciting as they were the first time around’. Okay, so it’s only been two years.

The term ‘album’ began with classical music and 78s. Even when technology was sufficiently advanced to allow four minutes of music on one side of those heavy shellac discs, you would still need a fair few to accommodate a symphony of moderate length. They came in a folder resembling a photo album. Editor Tom Gatti explains this in his introduction, the book’s longest piece of writing. Of course, what Gatti and his contributors mean by an ‘album’ is a group of songs, and something more than the ‘two hits and ten pieces of junk’ that was Phil Spector’s description of the LP. Gatti believes one of the first proper, thought-through albums was the Beatles’ Rubber Soul in 1965, forgetting Frank Sinatra’s Capitol LPs of a decade earlier, among them In the Wee Small Hours and Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! Discussing the album as artefact, Gatti rightly praises the LP cover, singling out Sgt. Pepper, though missing the significance of its printed lyrics (it was the first pop album to have them). When the LP gave way to the CD, he says, you could no longer roll a joint on its cover. Perhaps, but the hard plastic cases were better for chopping powder. Finally, and notwithstanding the unlikely return of vinyl, the artefact disappeared altogether.

Gatti is deputy editor of the New Statesman, where these pieces first appeared. Most but not all are about pop albums from the late 1960s to Lizzo. But there’s also Clive James on Ellington at Newport, Ben Okri on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, and John Harris on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme; for Sarah Perry, it’s Sequeira Costa playing Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto; for Neel Mukherjee, Clara Haskill and Mozart’s D minor and late A major piano concertos. ‘Did I know,’ Mukherjee wonders of his eight-year-old self, ‘that “Klavierkonzert” meant piano concerto? Did I know what a concerto was? It goes without saying that concepts such as d-moll and A-dur came later and had to be learned … but did I work out then that Clara Haskill: Klavier meant name of pianist: instrument?’ These questions are linked to the smell of his piano teacher’s room in Calcutta (‘incense, Sunday chicken curry, naphthalene’) and the sound of the 1950s recording: ‘That hint of hiss in the hinge between the solo piano’s lead and the orchestra’s following in the mighty adagio of the A major concerto – life resides for me there.’

Life, indeed. With any great album, by which I mean any album that won’t go away, its significance is personal. David Mitchell’s first encounter with Joni Mitchell’s Blue (on cassette) is coloured by listening to it on his Walkman coming home over the Malvern Hills. Erica Wagner connects her childhood friend’s father’s playing of Steeleye Span’s All Round My Hat on a Rhode Island porch (like Mukherjee, she was eight) with her later decision to emigrate to England. Marlon James insists that Björk didn’t save his life, but you feel she might have.

But where is this music’s power? Often it comes down to a voice. For Rankin, John Martyn has the voice of ‘a whisky-soaked angel’, while Bonnie Greer can ‘hear the bourbon in [Janis Joplin’s] veins’. Listening to Liz Fraser sing for the first time on This Mortal Coil’s It’ll End in Tears, Patricia Lockwood hears a voice ‘rooted, aerial, as flexible in its upper registers as it was rich in its middle, revolving around an unchanging axis of pitch, poured into various blown-glass containers of made-up language’. To Daljit Nagra, Morrissey’s voice on The Smiths’ Meat is Murder conjures ‘quaint English churchyards inside Victorian railings under rain; it’s the sound of an English beach crying for custom; it smells of Arthur Askey and Kenneth Williams, of the backstage dressing room when the comedy’s worn off; and when Morrissey yodels, I taste bonfire parkin’. (For the benefit of readers unacquainted with the north of England, he means a dark, treacly ginger cake eaten on Guy Fawkes Night.)

Linda Grant says she never wanted to see Joni Mitchell live because she had ‘no interest in sharing her with total strangers’. But a personal relationship with music is not the same as knowing the musician. After a concert in Cambridge, Clive James exchanges smiles with Duke Ellington, but that’s it. Moments before Rankin is about to appear on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs and tell the world that ‘Solid Air’ is the one song he can’t live without, he finds himself eating lunch in the same London restaurant as John Martyn. Can he go up to him? Of course not. ‘My one and only chance,’ Rankin writes, ‘and I blow it.’