There is a Light That Never Goes Out

In which your friendly local new music curator (quickly) talks about old music for a change, runs through a mountain of August releases, and makes way too many Smiths references.

Happy Monday, kids! There’s yapping about old music ahead. Wanna get right down to business with the new music recs? Hop down to "Some August Albums" below.

Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before

I owe a lot of my music taste to one friend I had back in high school.

He was a few years ahead of me and went to one of the fancier schools out in the suburbs. He also drove a red Mustang. I felt smug as hell when he’d pick me up at my house to go for a drive.

This isn’t his actual car, obviously. His didn’t have the white stripe.

The city where I grew up is pretty vibrant these days, but back in the early 2000s there wasn’t much to do if you weren’t twenty-one yet. CDs weren’t cheap, but gas sure was. We’d drive just to drive and to have an excuse to listen to music.

He knew I liked the Smiths (to be fair though, what sixteen-year-old doesn’t like the Smiths?), and he thought maybe I’d like a band called the Manic Street Preachers. “I just got their newest one,” he’d say. He always had the newest one, whatever it was.

I’d argue that the perfect conditions for new music discovery are being stuck inside a car with a friend and no other plans.

After that, I don’t think I went a full day in the entire two years before I left for college without playing “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next.” A song about the Spanish Civil War by a Welsh band whose guitarist had gone missing? I had never heard anything like it before. Don’t worry — it didn’t take me long to go back for The Holy Bible. It’s now one of my favorite records of all time.

Later, he introduced me to Belle and Sebastian on the same pretext: if I loved Morrissey I’d probably like them, too. He was right, but it was more than that. He didn’t know what he was handing me.

In that red Mustang, memorizing the words to “I Fought in a War,” I wasn’t thinking about genres or how bands developed their sound. I just liked what I was listening to.

A handful of years later, in 2005, I read an absolutely life-changing essay that introduced me to twee¹, to jangle pop, and to the correlation between the two. Suddenly I had the vocabulary I needed to understand why my friend knew I’d like Belle and Sebastian just because I liked the Smiths, and I was starting to understand how influential they truly were.