n May, I attended my second Belle and Sebastian show. The first time I saw them was in autumn 1997, and at the time I had a stronger attachment to them than I’d ever had—and probably ever will have—to an artist. I collected a few live tapes, pored over lyrics, and was a card-carrying member of the Sinister massive, the band’s mailing list and my first experience with online music discussion.


The first I saw B&S, the band nervously shuffled onstage and played gorgeous, lyrical, detail-attentive songs with a singular voice to a hushed cabal of worshippers. This time, the band was a graceful soul revue playing limp 60s pastiche to a large crowd. Of course, for me it was a major disappointment. In 1997, through Sinister, I publicly obsessed about something very private. In a way, finding others who felt the same way validated my attachment to B&S. But the band changed. Thankfully, so have I.


This year I seem to have completed a journey in which I’ve switched from having public obsessions about private music to private obsessions about public music. Somehow it seems healthier. I’m a much happier person than I was in 1997, and much of indie music no longer articulates my fears or desires. As a result, I no longer go begging to musical altars by seeking solace in artists whom I feel share some sort of worldview or—groan—pain.


Not coincidentally, I also got married this year. It seems that, like pop music, marriage is a very private interpretation of a public institution. (And like my musical journey, one that is completed after the public acknowledgment of one’s private, personal love.) I no longer need to seek in music what I wanted for myself, because I’m fortunate enough to have it all and more. Instead, musically, I seem to seek what I now have in my life: elegance, wit, charm, style, grace, and beauty. Increasingly, I look for one song at a time, and this year, among new music, I found it most often in microhouse, bootlegs, pop, hip-hop, dance, and ragga.


So maybe I no longer need to believe in pop stars, just pop songs. There are no allegiance, no sides; there are only sounds. The author is no longer as important as, me, the listener. In my indie-kid days I may have eyed both happiness and pop with suspicion, but maybe that’s because I used to have a little and now I got a lot. “Make a new cult every day to suit my affairs”? No, thanks. “It’s all good for me”? Ah, that’s much better.