Who Let You Listen to My Music?

On May 7th, Baltimore indie rock station WTMD debuted the new song by Fulton Lights called Little Town of Not No More. Do you think Andrew Goldman, the brains behind Fulton Lights, would love to know that there was someone out there in radioland that heard the debut, loved the song, listened intently for the name of the band and the song once it was over, and then muttered it to himself over and over for the next hour until he was able to get back home and find it on Soundcloud? I am sure that is exactly what Andrew Goldman hoped would happen when someone heard his song. But, maybe, just maybe, Andrew Goldman would not be as excited when he found out the circumstances of this listen. For that person was me. And I was not engaged in any hipsterish behavior such as ironically playing chess with an old man in a dangerous park in West Baltimore or riding a single speed bike in Fell's Point. I was driving to Costco in a minivan with five kids.

(An aside: hearing new music with kids in the car is great because their minds are sufficiently uncluttered that when you yell back to them: "Remember this title! Panic Switch!" or "Remember this line: 'Self help guru with neck tattoo'" they can easily spit it back to you when you get home. It's a good reason to have kids. [It works better when you have more than one kid, because then they repeat it back and forth to each other.])

This isn't just the case for Fulton Lights. There are a bunch of Baltimore bands (Dan Deacon, Wye Oak, Future Islands, Viking Moses, Monster Museum, just off the top of my head; other people would add Beach House but I don't really care for Beach House) who have put out great music in the last couple of years. There's probably a real "scene" up there in Baltimore. And I am not the target audience for any of them. Not a one would say, "Yeah, we play music for people like that guy."

I guess I should be more bothered by this, but I really like it instead. Instead of speaking truth to power, I am speaking truth to coolness. You may have carefully crafted a sound that you think only intelligent modern young liberals would like and yet here I am in your audience proving you partially failed. I like to think that if I went to a Dan Deacon concert, Dan would look into the audience, see me and think, "That guy doesn't belong! Who let him in? Why is he listening to my music? Why are there five kids with him?" (This is a variant of the Ben Gibbard Wrong Audience Problem. He once said something to the effect of that it was really strange looking into the audience and seeing the cool people who would have beat him up in high school.)

The sad reality, though, is that I have aged out of the scene so I can't torture the artists I love with my presence. I have become content with just listening to the music and not trying to go down to clubs in Baltimore to see shows. Maybe it's a subconscious decision analysis (the negative value of getting mugged in Baltimore when multiplied by the likelihood of such mugging exceeds the positive psychic benefit I would receive of watching Viking Moses in a dive under I-83) maybe it's a value issue (I would prefer to go watch my kids play baseball games) and maybe it's because it's because no one I know around here likes the type of music I like because they are old and set in their ways so I have no one to go with. Whatever it is, 35 year old Doug makes excuses for not going that 20 year old Doug would not have.

(Aging even affects if I am willing to listen to a band. There is a new Baltimore indie band called Legends of Etcetera that gets a lot of play on WTMD but I cannot like because they just graduated from high school. I feel like an old weirdo even if I just listen.)

I didn't think I would ever get here. I guess that means some of those Projections (to use a term from A Swiftly Tilting Planet) of sitting in a basement listening to Kraftwerk and watching the Giants or loudly telling my teenagers that there hasn't been any good music made in the last decade or going to a Counting Crows/Hootie and the Blowfish concert because they represent music from my youth regardless if I liked it, all of these Projections are becoming sharper, clearer, more likely. And while they seem monstrous now, maybe 45-year-old Doug won't mind watching Adam Duritz and Darius Rucker harmonize on A Long December. (But I am still going to do what I can to make them Might-Have-Beens and not realities.)