This just sums it all up so well - written by Laura Barton from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/mar/23/popandrock4
"I watched one of my friends fall for the Hold Steady recently. It was as if his heart just gave way and he tumbled, without grace or finesse, but with delight. I knew he'd got it bad because he'd email me their lyrics and sing their riffs as we walked to lunch. "I guess you're old enough to know," he wrote one afternoon, quoting his new love apropos of very little, "certain songs they get scratched into our souls."
It can be difficult, sometimes, to discern whether you simply have a crush on a band or if you really love them; whether their songs have merely got whipped up in the spring weather and the scent of fresh earth and sent you giddy. Some bands you inherit, of course - Van Morrison and Leonard Cohen, Dion and the Belmonts, Duke Ellington, music that soaked into me from my parents' stereo, as syrup into a sponge. I love their records the same way I love my parents: unquestioningly and unerringly, as if they shaped my musical features, the way my parents made my mouth, my nose, my eyes.
Then there have been the bands I found myself, bands that have changed my life: Pixies, the Velvet Underground, the White Stripes, the Mountain Goats. I remember the first time I heard the Pixies: in my best friend's lilac-painted bedroom, on her black twin tape deck, her long freckled fingers pressed rewind and play. There they sat, in the three and a half minutes between Bauhaus and the Dead Kennedys, on a compilation made by her older brother. My heart just stopped. The way traffic does, with a screeching of brakes, and a pause.
You love a band like this forever. Years later, you will still have pangs for all the things you did together. All those Friday nights on the back seat of the bus to town, with a bottle of Buckfast, my best friend and I, trying to howl like Frank Black. The hours the Velvet Underground and I laboured over my art homework together, me with my hands shiny with 4B pencil, Lou Reed weary from singing Heroin for the 16th time that day. The days the White Stripes walked me through the streets of London, serenading me with Hello Operator, Astro, Suzy Lee. Their new blues and the city spread out before me, succulent and ripe.
Musical crushes only placate you, they merely tell you what you want to hear, in a voice you've heard before. Bands you love seem to answer a question you didn't even know you were asking. They seem necessary in your life. And you feel like Black Francis did when he sang: "But hey/ Where/ Have you/ Been if you go I will surely die/ We're chained."
I'm half in love with Elvis Perkins just now; I've been playing his album on rotation, working my way through song by song, slowly testing their strength. Because liking a new band is like climbing a tree: you place your weight on each branch with trepidation, in case it cannot carry you; you try to discern if it is a sapling love or a true, oakish thing.
My mother always told me that she knew she loved my father when she just didn't want to be without him, and that's pretty much how I feel about the bands I love, they have taken hold in me. It's as if all the time you have been up in the lofty branches, their roots have been spreading down in the very ground of you.
The last time I truly fell for a band it was for the Mountain Goats. Two summers ago, I played The Sunset Tree, and found songs that seemed both familiar and surprising, as if I had turned over a stone in my own garden and discovered all kinds of wiggly creatures living under there.
There's one song in particular, Pale Green Things, that got scratched into the soul of me, a song of seaweed and Indiana sawgrass, death, wet leaves and horses in the paddock. It's a song, too, that makes me think of how it is to feel that love for a band rising up new inside of you: "Coming up through the cracks" it goes, "Pale green things/ Pale green things."
"I watched one of my friends fall for the Hold Steady recently. It was as if his heart just gave way and he tumbled, without grace or finesse, but with delight. I knew he'd got it bad because he'd email me their lyrics and sing their riffs as we walked to lunch. "I guess you're old enough to know," he wrote one afternoon, quoting his new love apropos of very little, "certain songs they get scratched into our souls."
It can be difficult, sometimes, to discern whether you simply have a crush on a band or if you really love them; whether their songs have merely got whipped up in the spring weather and the scent of fresh earth and sent you giddy. Some bands you inherit, of course - Van Morrison and Leonard Cohen, Dion and the Belmonts, Duke Ellington, music that soaked into me from my parents' stereo, as syrup into a sponge. I love their records the same way I love my parents: unquestioningly and unerringly, as if they shaped my musical features, the way my parents made my mouth, my nose, my eyes.
Then there have been the bands I found myself, bands that have changed my life: Pixies, the Velvet Underground, the White Stripes, the Mountain Goats. I remember the first time I heard the Pixies: in my best friend's lilac-painted bedroom, on her black twin tape deck, her long freckled fingers pressed rewind and play. There they sat, in the three and a half minutes between Bauhaus and the Dead Kennedys, on a compilation made by her older brother. My heart just stopped. The way traffic does, with a screeching of brakes, and a pause.
You love a band like this forever. Years later, you will still have pangs for all the things you did together. All those Friday nights on the back seat of the bus to town, with a bottle of Buckfast, my best friend and I, trying to howl like Frank Black. The hours the Velvet Underground and I laboured over my art homework together, me with my hands shiny with 4B pencil, Lou Reed weary from singing Heroin for the 16th time that day. The days the White Stripes walked me through the streets of London, serenading me with Hello Operator, Astro, Suzy Lee. Their new blues and the city spread out before me, succulent and ripe.
Musical crushes only placate you, they merely tell you what you want to hear, in a voice you've heard before. Bands you love seem to answer a question you didn't even know you were asking. They seem necessary in your life. And you feel like Black Francis did when he sang: "But hey/ Where/ Have you/ Been if you go I will surely die/ We're chained."
I'm half in love with Elvis Perkins just now; I've been playing his album on rotation, working my way through song by song, slowly testing their strength. Because liking a new band is like climbing a tree: you place your weight on each branch with trepidation, in case it cannot carry you; you try to discern if it is a sapling love or a true, oakish thing.
My mother always told me that she knew she loved my father when she just didn't want to be without him, and that's pretty much how I feel about the bands I love, they have taken hold in me. It's as if all the time you have been up in the lofty branches, their roots have been spreading down in the very ground of you.
The last time I truly fell for a band it was for the Mountain Goats. Two summers ago, I played The Sunset Tree, and found songs that seemed both familiar and surprising, as if I had turned over a stone in my own garden and discovered all kinds of wiggly creatures living under there.
There's one song in particular, Pale Green Things, that got scratched into the soul of me, a song of seaweed and Indiana sawgrass, death, wet leaves and horses in the paddock. It's a song, too, that makes me think of how it is to feel that love for a band rising up new inside of you: "Coming up through the cracks" it goes, "Pale green things/ Pale green things."
