Like many, many others, I started to really get into music right around the time I started high school. The year before was when I first took in interest in anything that wasn't played on the radio, and as I dug deeper and deeper, I found myself spending nearly every dollar I had on albums, and taking pride in listening to bands that few, if any, of my classmates had heard of. Like any other sensitive 14-year-old being brutalized by the onslaught of puberty, music became the most important thing in my life because I identified with it. Paul Westerberg, Thom Yorke, and Michael Stipe said things that crossed my mind on a daily basis, and to this day, their music means the world to me.

This trend basically continued throughout high school, with me exploring various bands and obsessing over them because they allowed me to put my own life into perspective. But then, I graduated high school, and like most people do when at that age, I felt horribly old. I listened to The Beach Boys a lot that year and it scared me than as an 18-year-old, I was probably past the ideal age to get into Pet Sounds. It was ironic; I spent all of high school listening to music to deal with feeling sad, and now, I was sad because it didn't have the same effect anymore.

Now, I'm even older, 23, and nearly old enough to rent ultra-porn and I can safely report that the days of me relating to music with the same intensity that I did as a 14-year-old are likely over. Probably because I have a bit more perspective. If I got shot down by a girl, or a passed over for a job, I still might be bummed about it, but I'm smart enough to know that it's not the worst thing to ever happen to anyone, and that I'll likely recover from the disappointment fairly quickly. The days of moping along to Radiohead for two hours because the girl in my math class just wants to be friends are mercifully over.

This isn't to say that I don't still play the crap out of albums that describe how I'm feeling. There were several songs on Japandroids' Celebration Rock that perfectly captured my mood the first time I heard it. Songs that I describe being young, and chasing dreams but also feeling increasingly insecure that those dreams might come such as "The Nights Of Wine And Roses" were, and still are, the perfect soundtrack for someone finishing college, and still figuring out what they're going to do next. What's different between now and then is the lack of melodrama involved. Relating to music is now something I can do quietly, without freaking out because a musician happened to say something that made sense to me. In a way, this is far more rewarding.

Despite my initial fear that getting older would mean I wouldn't get as much enjoyment out of music, it's actually given me the maturity needed to understand what a songwriter is getting at without instinctively thinking about how it happens to describe what happened to me in gym class last Thursday. When you're 14, you tend to be self-centered, primarily because you're figuring out a lot about yourself at that time, to the point where it can be hard to think about anything else. You're exploring relationships for the first time, and beginning to deal with real world disappointment. And that can be scary, so you need a friend to get you through it. Music is that friend for many people, myself included. But when you get older, you're capable of putting things in perspective, and realizing that you are not the center of the universe. As a result, you are less tempted to instinctively tie every song you listen to your own life, regardless of how tenuous the connection may be. What this means is that when you do relate to music the connection is more genuine, and you can relate to it in a more honest way. I thought the end of my teenage years would me the end of my close relationship with music, but the end, it was just the opposite. In order to get a true understanding of what my favorite bands were saying, I needed to grow up.