So I was listening to episode 73 of the podcast, where Amanda and I were talking about the albums that influenced us as teenagers, and at one point I mentioned something that I have mentioned before on both the podcast and this blog, which is that I listened to my fair share of Metallica when I was a teenager.  Not only that, but as I got older and essentially grew out of Metallica, I came to realize that I didn’t really genuinely like most of the band’s music.  Oh sure, there are songs that I think are still really good–“Whiplash,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” “Master of Puppets,” “One,” “Nothing Else Matters,” and “Hero of the Day” are still ones that I will put on rotation every once in awhile–but I hit a point in my adult life where I realized that I listened to Metallica and some other metal bands when I was a teenager mainly because I wanted to fit in with the guys I was hanging out with.

And yes, I reread that sentence and it sounds utterly ridiculous, but at the same time is so true, and I think that my fellow nerds will understand it.  When you are hanging around a group of people with similar interests and you’re … well, you’re a bit of an introvert who is unsure of himself … you want to fit in.  So when the guy who’s kind of the alpha of the group declares that a particular band or album is required listening, you either borrow his copy and tape it or you procure a copy of it yourself (I still remember the odd look on my aunt’s face when she gave me Kill ‘Em All for Christmas and asked if “this was the one you wanted”).

Anyway, I was listening to the episode and the Metallica point came up, and as I went through the rest of the episode and really reveled in the differences between Amanda’s and my musical tastes, I started thinking about what I either listened to in secret or completely missed out on while spending the better part of four years chasing my friends’ musical tastes.  I mean, there were bands or albums that I didn’t discover until I was in college, and there were also things I used to kind of sneak-listen, keep in my Walkman, and lie about when asked “What are you listening to?” (hence the time I got caught with a Righteous Brothers tape).  And maybe if I’d had the balls, I wouldn’t have had to not tell my friends that I was checking out Goodbye Yellow Brick Road from the public library or that I had taped most of 10,000 Maniacs’ Our Time in Eden and found that more enjoyable at times than, say, Ride the Lightning.  I liked Paul Simon and Van Morrison and had a pop-rock sensibility that I just took way too long to fully embrace or at least admit to embracing.

But regrets are really not worth it at my age and instead of lamenting my bad choices made in my formative years, I’m going to list five musical acts, albums, or songs that I almost missed out on but eventually caught up to after high school.

Better Than Ezra.   Credit for introducing this band goes to my friend Valerie, who was really into this band when we met in the fall of our freshman year of college.  Deluxe had come out in February of 1995, so I was within about six months of its release when she introduced me to them, but during that February, I remember that I had just started going out with a girl whose favorite band was Live, so there was a lot of listening to songs that featured references to afterbirth (seriously … you couldn’t have thought of another lyric?).  Better Than Ezra, and by extension bands like Gin Blossoms and Dishwalla (both of whom played Loyola at the end of our freshman year) were this lighter, radio-friendly rock-pop that washed up in the wake of the end of the earlier part of the decade and songs like “Good” and “In The Blood” found their way onto my car mix tapes.  I personally prefer Friction, Baby, which was the 1996 follow-up to Deluxe, but I will say that these 3-4-minute pop/rock ditties were much more replayable than a seven minute-plus metal dirge.

The Clash.  Yes, even though I said that Dookie was my gateway to other punk music, I didn’t buy my first Clash CD until the very end of high school.  I had been watching some documentary about the history of rock and roll (in fact, it may have actually been called The History of Rock and Roll) on channel 9 and saw the episode about punk, which covered the 1970s punk scene and went specifically in depth with The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, The Clash, and X.  The last of those groups was never one I would get too attached to, but I had heard of the Ramones by that point and shortly thereafter (this would have been May or June of 1995), I took my hard earned money to Borders and picked up the U.S. version of the Clash’s first album (it was the only one available at the time and the only copy I ever owned, so I can’t even say I was doing punk right).  I really loved it, especially their cover of “I Fought the Law” (which, like a dork, I will pair with Mellencamp’s “Authority Song” on playlists from time to time).

Where this actually gets a little funny is that I brought this CD to the house of one of my friends who was that “alpha” of the group and seemed to want to dictate everyone’s musical tastes and the reception he gave the album was pretty indifferent.  A few years later, he was listening to London Calling and I remember standing there like, “Huh.  So … you’re full of shit.”  I mean, it took a while but I finally came to my senses.

The Cure.  Now, I can’t say that I’m a huge fan of The Cure.  I don’t own a single album, and I think I may have only ever downloaded four of their songs: “Just Like Heaven,” “Love Song,” “In Between Days,” and “Lovecats.”  But I did have a friend in high school who absolutely loved The Cure and had I not been lured in by the siren call of “I Alone,” I would have probably let her get me into the band.  Because I have found since that I really do enjoy quite a bit of the 1980s new wave/alternative sound than I was willing to admit to in high school (except Morrissey … sorry … I can’t …).

And if I had listened to The Cure, I would have actually fit in at my high school.  There was a huge contingent of Cure fans who were pretty popular and had the type of musical tastes that one could get a real education out of.  I just never gave it a shot and while I want to say that I don’t know why, I have to say that I think a lot of it had to do with the way that a group like The Cure was seen, among some of the guys I was hanging around, as “chick music” or even “gay.”  And I will be the first to admit that it took getting out of my hometown and even going beyond the confines of my college to really understand how homophobic I was as a teenager–not that that was the complete reason I rejected The Cure, but since my musical tastes (at least the public ones) were so dictated by how I was perceived and I tended to be the butt of my friends’ jokes anyway, it’s not shocking that I allowed it to shape my view of what is a really solid band.

Sarah McLachlan.  So I’m in my freshman year of college and listening to, of all things, a CD put out by Loyola’s a cappella groups, The Chimes and The Belles.  One of the tracks on the CD (and I own the CD … in fact, you can hear selections from it in the episode) is The Belles covering “Elsewhere,” a song I had never heard before and I think I might have had to ask someone where the song was from.  At any rate, that was the first time I had heard anything off of Fumbling Towards Ecstasy and that was strange considering that the album had been out for easily a year and a half and was right in my 10,000 Maniacs/Cranberries/Lisa Loeb wheelhouse.  But again, when you’re tracking down old Metallica albums or trying to find those rare Nine Inch Nails singles because that gets you cred with a group of guys who could barely get a girl to look at them, you tend to miss the siren call of Canadian singer-songwriters.  In the years between that moment and the early 2000s, I’d buy most of the rest of her discography at the time, including Solace, which has two of my favorite songs of hers (“Path of Thorns (Terms)” and “I Will Not Forget You”) as well as a book of her sheet music.  In fact, I remember downloading the guitar tab to “I Will Remember You,” printing it out, and figuring out how to play it on the piano (something I did for Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” as well).  But the piano’s influence on my musical tastes is actually going to be the subject of another podcast episode, so I’ll move on.

The Entire Decade of the 1980s.  By the time I moved in with Amanda in the fall of 2000, I had an enormous Eighties music collection.  When I was a teenager, I would rock the hell out whenever the Totally ’80s commercial would come on:

But beyond my well-worn copy of Born in the U.S.A. and a few random songs I’d taped off the radio here and there, my Eighties game was weak and I went right on ignoring it while I chased the latest alternative and metal trends.  And honestly, that’s the biggest shame, because even back then, I thought that “Centerfold” by J. Geils Band had one of the best hooks ever recorded and I still remembered all of the words to “Everybody Have Fun Tonight.”  So when, in the late 1990s, the Eighties retro thing went huge with movies like Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, Grosse Pointe Blank, and The Wedding Singer, I was all up in that.

I guess if there’s a conclusion to this it’s that you really shouldn’t give a shit what people think when it comes to your favorite music and I wish I had been more sure of myself, or at least sure enough to say that it’s okay to like what I liked.  At least I eventually learned that.

Not that I don’t have musical regrets.  But that’s another story for another time.