The song you loved at 13, you love forever
Tonight I see Crowded House in concert. Very big deal.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the song that you loved when you were thirteen is the song you will love for the rest of your life.
There is research on this. As economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has shown, “The most important period for men in forming their adult [musical] tastes were the ages 13 to 16. What about women? On average, their favorite songs came out when they were 13. The most important period for women were the ages 11 to 14.” The charts don’t lie (NB the chart is from 2018):
It makes sense. You are developing your own taste at 13. You have purchasing power (oh, Sam Goody, how you took my money). You are differentiating from your parents. Hormones imprint every sensation on you.
So while I was going to write a post about Peter Attia, a doctor whom I had never heard of until yesterday, but whom I have read two articles about in the last 24 hours (in The New York Times and in Bari Weiss’s Free Press)—he is into prolonging human life, and his project (detailed in his best-selling book) involves a lot of tests for various blood lipid, sugar, calladrine, and synpathor levels (I made up the last two items on that list, but they sound good)—I have to save that post for later this week.
Today, I have to write about Crowded House, whom I am going to see in concert tonight (greetings from Philadelphia, where I have driven four hours to see them, which is not a typical move for the 48-year-old dad that I am). I got the tickets last year, but then the band, which is from New Zealand and Australia, canceled the American leg of that tour and postponed the shows for a year. So this has been a long time coming.
I am very excited.
Crowded House is not my favorite band or musical act, and the truth is I don’t know more than half a dozen of their songs. (I know about five times as many songs by Lyle Lovett.) I can only name two of the band’s members. I know way more about R.E.M., the Beatles, Steely Dan, the Jayhawks, Guns ‘n’ Roses, The National, Mötley Crüe, and plenty of other bands than I do about Crowded House. I have seen Lake Street Dive in concert four times in the years it hasn’t occurred to me to look for Crowded House tickets.
I suspect that, even if you are a big music fan, you are in the same boat. If you are about my age, and American, you would surely recognize a couple Crowded House songs (“Something So Strong,” “Locked Out”) but probably have no deep connection to the band. They were never covered by American music media, never had an iconic video on MTV. They were an ’80s pop-band, kinda New Wave-ish, cool hair, neo–British Invasion (except from Down Under), but more serious and more durable than, say, Flock of Seagulls. Though with less great hair—remember the Flock’s hair? Or shall we say wings? Lookie here:
But Crowded House is a very big deal to me, for one very specific reason: their song “Don’t Dream It’s Over” is my favorite song ever. It’s funny: I hesitate as I even type those words. It seems too big a commitment. Am I really placing it over every song by Bob Dylan? Every song by the Beatles? Every beautiful Broadway tune? Is it better than “Here Comes the Sun” and “Wild Horses” and “Here Comes the Night”? To say that it’s my favorite song ever is to make a commitment that I am not sure I can stand by, and that won’t hold up over time; it feels like asking a girl in February to go to prom.
But the song came out in 1987, when I was in seventh grade.
And when I hear “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” I feel thirteen again. It peaked on the Billboard chart in April 1987, but I remember it as a summer song, the summer I turned thirteen, during the middle summer of middle school. I had just survived my first year at Wilbraham and Monson Academy; that spring, I’d got cut from j.v. tennis, got a bit part in the school play, marveled at Jeff L’s boasts about his exploits with girls (which I now realize were lies), and gotten lots of rides from my parents to weekend chess tournaments. That summer, when I wasn’t listening to the radio, I was riding my bike to Video Galaxy XIII (were there twelve other branches?) and renting movies. I am not sure what drove my film interests that summer. I saw a lot of Hoffman and Pacino (Kramer vs. Kramer, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon) and other ’70s fare (The Sting).
We didn’t have MTV, and I never bought a Crowded House album, so the song existed only on the radio, where it played all the time. Thank you, 96.5 WTIC-FM.
Also big that summer: Genesis’s “In Too Deep” and Chris De Burgh’s “The Lady in Red.”
When Tom Petty died in 2017, I was hit with the belated realization that my favorite singers and bands wouldn’t be around forever; in fact, they were about to start dying. I hadn’t known how much I loved Petty’s music until I knew that I’d never see him perform it. I promised myself I’d go to more concerts. I know that the bands I see today are not the same bands that lived inside the radio when I was in junior high or high school. Except Daryl Hall, who from a distance anyway looks unchanged from 1985, everyone has aged. But then again my vision isn’t what it once was, so they look the same to me, or close enough.
And I can always close my eyes and just listen.
The new Jews
One thing I’ll miss about hosting the podcast Unorthodox is our annual conversion episode, for which we always found some truly amazing, moving stories. I never got tired of the stories of people who have made big changes (in religion, sexuality, career, whatever). I like change. Today, Tablet ran a forum featuring a number of converts to Judaism. It’s a really, really fun read. Check it out. Sample quotation:
I don’t really feel as though I chose. I don’t remember ever making the active choice to convert. It was just something that became more and more apparent to me.
Happy Shavuot, friends.