Listening to My Life: Brothers in Arms

My brother was a classic-rock kid, a Baby Boomer’s baby. Though born in 1983, only three years before me, Seth strode into record stores with the confidence of a guy who’d been knee-deep in Woodstock mud. He believed he was diversifying his collection when, during junior high, he purchased the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. I tried to get even more modern with No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom, but he refused to admit the album into our room’s sonic sanctuary. Contemporary music was for my headphones.

Our hierarchy was probably typical of siblings—the elder made decisions and drew the boundaries of what was acceptable, while I, the younger, followed along. When my mimicry became exasperating, Seth asserted himself. He once noticed me trailing him at a backyard party and began circling a tree. We orbited twice before I caught on and sulked off.

Seth could be despotic, but he did school me in music appreciation. With nighttime lessons whispered from top to bottom bunk, he instructed me on the coolest Beatle (Ringo) and the greatest Simon and Garfunkel hit (“The Only Living Boy in New York,” though this would later change to “Bridge Over Troubled Water”), why Billy Joel screams “oh, rock and roll!” in “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” and what The Who’s “Pictures of Lily” means, really, if you think about it. When mp3s entered our lives, he chose The B-52s’ “Love Shack” and J. Geils Band’s “Centerfold” as our first downloads. And from time to time, when we dueted on “She’s Leaving Home” from Sgt Pepper, he took both Lennon’s and McCartney’s melody lines, leaving me just the chorus’ high falsetto harmony. It was years before I learned that the real recording alternated frontmen.

We overlapped for one year of high school. Seth drove us every morning as we air-guitared to Boston’s “More Than A Feeling,” which lasted exactly as long as the drive from our house to the school parking lot. Even then, into our teens, I remained careful not to croon along to radio songs, lest he shame me into silence. “Who sings this?” he would ask. I’d proudly brandish an answer—likely a product of his teachings—and he would reply, “let’s keep it that way.”

When he left home for college, I was surprised to find myself terrified. Years of aping and idolizing and adhering had left me without many opinions of my own. I navigated the freakish milieu of high-school identity, which included phases of indiscriminate rebellion manifested in black hoodies, dyed-blue hair, messenger-bag acquirement and wholesale safety-pin affixation. Seth encountered college rock and all its minions. As my individual tastes cohered, he allowed newer bands to trickle into his library. But only gradually.

At a peak feeling of modern-age superiority, I sent him a package of burned CDs—still hardly balancing the huge trade deficit I had mounted over the years—that included The Wrens’ Meadowlands and several mixes full of bands I considered appropriately transitional for a classic-rock aficionado. Our rare conversations about music afterward revealed growing pains. He labeled my aesthetic “intelli-emo” when I outwardly identified with Cat Power’s uplifted depression in “Colors and the Kids.” I spoke condescendingly about his opinions of anything made post-1975 in the same withering tones he'd once used with me.

Recent years, however, have seen a détente. Seth looks around himself more, and I no longer feel that anything I was costs me anything I am. Our tastes don’t fully coincide, but there’s a healthy Venn diagram, stretched open wide in the middle for discussion.

This past winter, when I decided to move up the Eastern seaboard, Seth loaned me his Honda for the drive. I had almost arrived when I grew tired of my car-music choices. I checked his glove compartment and found one jewel case, slim and clear. My own scribble labeled it The Meadowlands—the copy I had sent him six years earlier. No words had ever passed between us about the disc, and I couldn’t be sure that he’d ever even listened to it. But I think he did.