Listen Up: Is It Wicked Not To Care?

The following is a list of artists who once, at some point in the not-far-away-past, released albums or at least handfuls of songs that I cared deeply for, but whose most recent albums I, for some reason, cannot be bothered to care about at all:

The easy explanation for this is that the albums just aren't very good—that they're merely “eh” albums—but I'm not sure if that's true. M.I.A.'s /\/\ /\ Y /\ came out last week to a hailstorm of dueling assessments, and even the people who dislike it really really strongly definitely dislike it; whatever you might feel about it, it's clear, at least, that you will feel something about it. But I could not care less. I kept testing myself, even: “Do you want to listen to that new M.I.A. record yet?” I would ask myself while scrolling through my iTunes at work. And then I would answer myself with a listless shoulder-shrug, like a surly thirteen-year-old's silent reply to his mother's suggestion that he go to the school dance on Friday. “Everyone else is—why not?”

Eh.

I've never been an incredibly active M.I.A. listener—my interest in and enjoyment of her music has been more by proxy exposure than anything else, but I like her nonetheless—so I guess my diffidence isn't totally strange. Also sometimes I feel like there is only a finite amount of Care in the world and when a certain number of people have opinions about one thing then the supply runs out and leaves everyone else incapable of feeling one way or another but it's fine, it's no one's fault, they just ran out of Care. But with the other albums, to continue the surly-teen-vs.-insistent-mom thing, it's like I'm suddenly uninterested in hanging out with not just some random kids from school but that I'm shunning my once-close friends. I adore Boys and Girls in America—not so much Stay Positive, The Hold Steady's 2008 album, but I like that one pretty good, too. Josh Ritter's The Animal Years is one of my all-time favorites, and still hits me hard when I'm not looking; The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter, which he put out in 2007, is also excellent in ways that for some reason I tend to forget, but includes “The Temptation of Adam,” probably the best song he's ever written. And then both of Band of Horses albums have been, at times throughout the last four years, my constant companions; the giddy, slow-stomping “The General Specific,” from 2007's Cease to Begin, is still one of the most-played tracks on my iPod and one of my favorite songs of the last few years.

When I saw Band of Horses at Central Presbyterian Church during SXSW in March, they played that songs and a whole fistful of new ones and I was fully ready to love Infinite Arms, the new record, which I played for the first time a month or so later while on a long, long drive through North Carolina. It seemed like the perfect way to break in the album—the wide open highway, sun out, just me and the new songs and a few empty hours to get to know one another. But then I found my thumb inching towards the skip button about a minute into every track, my initial restlessness soon turning into a kind of mild panic as I realized the recorded versions of the songs had captured almost none of their live greatness. At the church, lead singer Ben Bridwell's brown hair had turned stringy and black with sweat a few songs into the set, the sinews of his tattooed neck straining at the mic with every chorus, but now the songs just sounded tepid and dry, patted-down and more like they were being played in a church than when they actually had been played in a church.

There's probably some reason for this (likely something to do with the band self-producing the album, if I had to make a guess) and I could probably root out the real source of my boredom with the record if I could just stand to spend a little more time with it, but I can't be bothered. “Eh” is the best I can do for this one and also The Hold Steady's Heaven is Whenever and Josh Ritter's So Runs the World Away, which I actually keep forgetting even exist. It's not that I don't care about any albums right now; I do care about some. Just not the ones I feel like I should probably care about most.

I see two explanations for all this. One, there's either something temporarily flawed about me and my listening habits, or something flawed about these albums in particular, that won't last—either I will come around to the records, or I will slip back into caring with the next record, and my continued affection will be restored. Or two, I may have begun the irrevocable process of growing away from these bands—I may be leaving them behind, may be turning slowly to something else never to return, no matter how excellent their music is or continues to be.

Most likely it's the first thing, but can we talk about the second one for a minute?

I've really only been listening to music of my own deliberate choosing for about fifteen years, and even that's a generous estimate because it's counting my purchase, on cassette, of Hootie & the Blowfish's Cracked Rear View as the beginning of my life as an autonomous music listener. But still! Fifteen years! That's not very long, I know! But it's long enough that there have been distinct periods of time when I listened to bands that seem completely inexplicable to me now, enough that in recent years I have noticed these phases and come to the slow realization that what I like now is perhaps also going to seem strange and funny and utterly foreign to myself in several years' time. I trust my own taste now but I also trusted my own taste when I was fourteen and oh so carefully picking out the dozen best albums to order from BMG Music Club after convincing my mother that it was a good deal and totally worth her letting me use her credit card information for—which is to say, I trusted my own taste when I was at least as equally excited about Lisa Loeb and Barenaked Ladies albums as I was about the perforated stamp-stickers I got to tear off, lick and apply to a form in order to obtain said albums.

I think every adult I know who cares about music has a memory like this about their earliest musical preferences, and no matter how much nostalgic affection they retain for the music they once loved so dearly, most now recognize their teenaged taste almost as that of another person—at best endearing, at worst embarrassing. I'm sure at one point someone said or thought of my thirteen-year-old, Hanson-adoring self, “It's only a phase,” and I'm sure I wanted to eviscerate that person because the emotions I was feeling about my favorite music at that point in my life did not feel transient; they felt all-encompassing and total and permanent, and I could not imagine not feeling the way I felt about that band for the entire rest of my life. But of course I didn't; of course it was a “phase.” There's something about that word, though, that I still distrust as much as I did when I was fourteen—something to do with its glib dismissal of the feelings of teenage girls, something about the implications of any emotions or thoughts experienced or produced during one of those fleeting periods of time as being less legitimate, less vital, less earth-shattering than those of more stable, decisive adults.

Because we all know adults are so very rooted in their tastes; we know they like the same things for years and years, that they like them for the right reasons, and that they're fully aware of what specifically appeals to them about what they like. We know that when they die, their record collections exist exactly as they did when they were—oh, what year is it you cease being the victim of “phases”? Seventeen, eighteen? Anyway, all those years, we know nothing changes, no tastes shift, no old sounds suddenly become unpalatable, no new sounds seem alluring but eventually prove to be a passing infatuation; adults own every single album by every single artist they love, because those artists are stable, adult artists that grow seamlessly along with their stable, adult fans. Used CD stores and yard sales and Half.com are, we know, exclusively the repositories of predictably-passed teenage phases—because phases, like pimples and inexplicable hormonal surges and sexual confusion and anger at your parents and feelings of awkwardness and social malaise, simply are not things that adults experience!

Oh, right.

But anyway, like I said, I don't think I'm drifting away from these folks. Most likely, this is its own kind of phase; I'll snap out of it eventually, I'm sure. But until then—well. Eh.

Rachael Maddux is Paste’s associate editor. Her column appears at PasteMagazine.com every Monday.