I’ll be 35 in January. When I was a teenager in the early 2000s my music tastes were pretty specific: emo, screamo, and the ilk. AFI, The Used, Coheed and Cambria, Dance Gavin Dance, A Skylit Drive, etc etc etc. Since college, my music tastes have been rolling and diverse. I went in an electronic direction, then a hyper-pop direction, then hip hop, then jazz, then country, then this way then that way. I checked in with that teenage-era music from time to time over the last 15 years but it didn’t really do anything for me other than to stir a vague sense of nostalgia. But now all of a sudden (literally over this past summer) I’m fully back in. My entire Spotify circulation is angsty rock music from 2001-2006. All the greatest hits plus a ton of deep cuts I ignored as a kid. I feel like I’m home after almost two decades of walking around in someone else’s house.

Is this a midlife crisis? Or am I just being true to myself?