In hindsight, this ineffably cool debut was perfectly on-brand for Sevigny. For the last 25 years, she has gone from cult films like Kids to acclaimed TV shows like “Big Love,” all without abandoning her credibility as a tastemaker in the worlds of fashion and music.

As early as age 5, she had a plastic record player and a small collection of vinyl discs. Her dad would always bring the latest records—Blondie, Lou Reed—back to the family home in Darien, Connecticut, one of wealthy Fairfield County’s most quintessential suburbs. Her older brother, a hardcore and hip-hop obsessive, would let touring bands crash at their house.

By the time she regularly started sneaking off to New York in high school, she was hanging with skaters and partying with ravers, drawn to various strains of fringy weirdness. She remembers once doing acid and falling in love with an Argentinian boy who turned her onto the Grateful Dead. “When they jam, and it gets really crazy—that’s my favorite thing in the entire universe,” she tells me. Back then, she wore Doc Martens and had a single dreadlock in her hair; sitting in a meeting room at the Four Seasons in L.A., her straight blond hair is now tucked behind her ears, and a thin gold cross dangles over her black-and-white floral top.

“I have a hard time even going out and listening to music if I don’t like the sound system now, it’s really awful,” she adds. Her preference is to relive the songs and albums of her youth from the comfort of home, having mostly given up on buying music released in the new millennium—though releases by psychedelic folkie Mira Billotte of White Magic, witch-house misfits Salem, and super freak Ariel Pink are exceptions. “If music is on, I’m so concentrated on it that I can’t do other stuff,” she says. “I’m not very good at singing, but I’m really good at singing along.” Especially if it’s to one of the records on this list.