Philip Glass/Kronos Quartet - Dracula

It's Halloween, which can only mean one thing - dusting off my all-time favorite Halloween album: Kronos Quartet performing Philip Glass' score for the original Dracula. I now have the movie, too - thanks, Jen's parents - but for years the music alone has been my fall soundtrack. Haven't spent much time out of the city lately, so there hasn't been any walking through the falling red and yellow leaves with strings dancing in my head. But when I put this on, the leaves appear right in front of me. Sometimes I'm a kid again, trick or treating around my old neighborhood. Sometimes I'm back in the Czech Republic, taking train rides around the country to castles and hiking around for hours with my old discman.

If you don't have this album - and especially if you haven't seen the movie, which is a work of bloody genius even with the old soundtrack (the DVD gives you a choice) - you're missing out. Sure, it gets a bit repetitive in the middle sections, but, to me, it's to Halloween what Nat King Cole's The Christmas Song is to, well, you know. Released: August 31, 1999. ESSENTIAL.