How we like music

There's a part in Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" towards the end, after Elizabeth and Darcy have gotten together, where Elizabeth demands to know how he ever fell in love with her in the first place.

"I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation," he says. "It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun."

I often find myself in similar straits when it comes to albums that have become favorites, but it never stops me from wondering, as I first become familiar with a band or an album, if this is going to be a band that I'm going to fall in love with.

There are just so many ways that a band can get at you: maybe you hear a song on the radio one day, and then hear it again and again, and finally wonder who it is. You stick around in the car long enough to find out, then go find out if they have a webpage. Maybe you buy their disc. And then maybe that track you couldn't get out of your head is the only decent one on the disc, and it ends there.

Or maybe you find out that song that you were so taken with is not even the best song on the disc. But then what you thought was the best song is simply the most immediately appealing, and in fact you come to realize that some deep album cut is really the best one, even if by then it's no longer your favorite. Your favorite is that unassuming seventh track--the one you used to skip when you first got the disc.

This is the point at which a band and an album have gotten under your skin: the point when you have a favorite track on an album which you acknowledge is not the best track on the album. Case in point: You'd be hard-pressed to admit that "The Way We Get By" is not obviously the best song on Spoon's Kill the Moonlight. They're a band that's all about swagger and feel, and "The Way We Get By" has been stripped of every unnecessary element, leaving nothing but a knot of perfectly menacing pop. It has one of the finest opening couplets of all time: "We get high in backseats of cars / we break into mobile homes." It has handclaps.

But "Jonathon Fisk" is my favorite song on Kill the Moonlight. The first couple of times through, it seems strikingly unremarkable compared to "The Way We Get By," but repeated listenings reveal a subtle structural and melodic genius. First of all, it's the story of a school bully. The melody of the verse hovers in a tense relationship to the muted guitars behind it, and the tension holds until the third verse, which opens with a line that descends down a major scale. Satisfaction is delayed, and the song is three minutes and fifteen seconds of uneasily riding nerves.

See, this is the kind of thinking I get into when a band really gets under my skin. I've tried to watch it as it happens, but it's so hard to tell. Sometimes I listen through an entire album, and nothing really hooks into me. But then, magically, at the end of the disc, I need to go back and start it again. Building Better Bombs' Freakout Squares was like that for me. Something sticks, is the thing, on albums that are going to turn out to be favorites. A melody in a chorus. Something the drums do.

I probably view these things too piecemeal for my own good. I come from a background of being a musician, so sometimes it's the little musical things that I latch onto, or just the way an album sounds. That's the way it was with Grizzly Bear's Yellow House. Right from the first moments of the first track, the feel that the band imbued the album with is astounding. You can feel the floorboards in the titular house, the glass in the windows, and the Atlantic Ocean washing up drowsily on the beach outside. Behind it, a forest stretches back up a hill, lights floating in it. Sure, maybe someone else gets something completely different from the album, but I can't believe that it won't hit an open-minded listener as redolent of something, and that's an achievement.

So I can say, most of the time, why I think this band or that band is worth your time to check out, but when it comes to how I first discovered that, I feel like Darcy. I was in the middle before I knew it had begun.