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The best part of getting into music while growing up is the constant sense of discovery. This feeling disappears as the years go by. Most adults who spend a lot of time and money on music know the lay of the cultural land. The new albums we hear (or that I hear, anyway) come with heaps of info — press clippings, band bios, membership histories, label tags, and countless other bits of data. But as kids, we’re still vulnerable to the happy surprises that come with context-free songs and albums.
I miss this phase in my musical upbringing. Now that it’s over, I’ll likely never have another experience like the one I had with Pixies. A friend introduced them to me by way of Surfer Rosa when I was about 14. I knew nothing about them, and couldn’t really place them in a genre. The short, fast songs said punk rock, which I was familiar with. But Pixies sounded too happy to be punk, and the songs weren’t about politics or anything else I could make sense of. (That they sung in Spanish half the time didn’t help.) I just knew that I liked whatever it was that they were doing.
