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It wasn’t until about the fourth time that I drove back from New England to the Philadelphia suburb where I grew up that I began to notice the thickening light. It’s a subtle phenomenon. The visual recalibration doesn’t really kick in for sure until I’m past New York City, driving down the New Jersey Turnpike, and watching pine trees rush by on either side of the car. In Boston, the sunlight is pure and thin, and in the late afternoons it comes slanting in at a low wintry angle and turns white steeples the color of cantaloupe flesh. Mid-Atlantic sunlight is more substantial stuff––yellower, too––and it’s rich with dust or pollen or rain vapor. I like each kind at different times. If I’ve been home for more than a few weeks I get anxious to leave, and the splashes of northern light that set the Maples ablaze every fall are refreshing to the point of disorientation or even joy. But the light holds more in Wallingford––more heat, more water, but also some twenty years of layered familiarities, all of which fan out and crowd in every time I drive back. Home is uncomfortable, but it’s my everyday jacket.

The first time I heard the band Neutral Milk Hotel was in a high school philosophy class. Each student brought in a recording of what they thought was a good pop song, specifically good in that it measured up to David Hume’s criteria for aesthetic excellence (for public school, this was a pretty creative class). I brought Bruce Springsteen. My friend Peter brought Neutral Milk Hotel. He played “Holland, 1945,” the sixth song from their second album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It begins with a second or two of upbeat strumming, and then there’s a goofy little count-off––“two, one-two-three-four”––at which point the song really begins with what sounds like a fuzzy explosion. The low-fidelity sound is completely intentional. Released in 1998, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was recorded on a four-track tape machine, and there are moments on many of the album’s tracks when a high vocal line or screaming brass chord will overload the apparatus and set the whole sonic space buzzing, which is exactly what happened to my seventeen-year old brain as I sat in philosophy class listening to “Holland, 1945.” I could not have articulated the transformation, but I was aware that something inside had come wonderfully unhinged.

I bought the CD as soon as I could, and for a year or two In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was the greatest music I had ever heard. My mother, who sometimes tried to be interested in the music I liked, hated Neutral Milk Hotel, which was an added bonus. She hated everything about it that I liked: Jeff Mangum’s keening vocal overconfidence, the way the instruments whip every song into a frenzied volume contest, the insane melodicism. My father heard Neutral Milk Hotel one time that I can remember, and only just the first thirty seconds or so before he reached for the volume dial on our car stereo. I don’t think we said a word about it, and future car trips were soundtracked by an innocuous mix of Bob Dylan, The Who, and Steely Dan. The album did what it was supposed to do to my parents: it pushed them away. Liking music that makes the veins bulge in Dad’s forehead is one of the things that makes being a teenager worthwhile.

Pop music is generationally specific, much more so than other kinds of culture. Moviegoing is a lifelong habit, and children actually spend a lot of time trying to sneak into the violent, sexy films that their parents go see on the weekends. (The MPAA ratings system, authoritative and opaque, adds to the mystique; I remember shutting my eyes in the theater when Kate Winslet disrobed in Titanic, thinking that PG-13 made it literally illegal for 12-year-old me to be seeing her breasts.) Literature is either neutral or shared ground. Catcher In the Rye and On the Road have been teenage bibles for more than 50 years. I have the sense that I missed out on the real golden age of teenage rebellion, the ’50s and ’60s. Then, adolescents were members of the first generation to be fed on the explosion of pop culture that took place in the wake of WWII. As the Hollywood Production Code withered until its death in 1968, movies, which had always managed violence, began for the first time to get bloody. The Sexual Revolution had literature to match. Philip Roth and Bonnie and Clyde stirred up levels of parental outrage and indignation that I do not know and cannot really imagine. My bloody movies look like my parents’ bloody movies, only a little more so, and as a teenager my books were mostly theirs to begin with.