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Jun 27, 2012 Belle and Sebastian By Laura Studarus

Even as an adult, the results of my sheltered childhood are evident. No matter how hard I try, I give off a wholesome Midwestern glow. Or so people say—which is funny, since I grew up some 60 miles outside of Los Angeles. Not that I mind.

My parents were never fond of Los Angeles. Growing up, trips into the city were sporadic—marked with my stepfather’s complaints about the traffic (too abundant) and my mother’s notes on the crime rate in big cities (same). Curiosity sparked by my older brother’s departure into the big city to attend art school, I began to hunt down whatever traces of LA were immediately available to a teenager without a driver’s license. In the pre-internet era, this meant carrying chunks of the city into suburbia were I lived on the backs of songs heard on the radio—rock during the day (KROQ when Nirvana and Beck were still kings), and jazz at night, which I’d sneak into the living room to listen.

Despite an overwhelming desire to go all Joseph Campbell on my own hero’s journey (that is if I was indeed the hero of my own story, a fact I was becoming increasingly less sure of by the end of my senior year of high school), I was the victim a far too comfortable childhood—where in the most arduous edict my parents ever issued was “follow your bliss—and get a part-time summer job.” That is, until they unceremoniously shoved me out of the nest after two years of community college.

When recounting your past, there’s a tendency to paint your character flaws with a golden veneer. But along with my glowing smile and liberal use of the word “lovely,” and “gosh,” I also suffer from the Pollyanna-like inability to lie. So in the interest of honesty, simply put: I spent the summer cowering. It seemed so hyper-logical: I had a part-time job, friends, and a dog. I had mastered driving on freeways without crying. I was an adult. Why leave? If I hadn’t convinced myself I was above colloquialisms, I might have uttered something along the line of “if it ain’t broke—don’t fix it.”.

Facing a summer with nothing more than a few hostessing shifts to distract me, I spent my time working on my music collection. Pre-blog era (a few months later Pitchfork would issue the shot heard ‘round the world with their first Radiohead review), I inherited an older, much hipper cousin’s taste. Yo La Tengo was an instant win, although looking back on it, I probably lost cool points in my cousin’s eyes by comparing their refrains to those of my high school jazz band. Years later I would feel validated by finding out that Woody Allen also played the clarinet. Sonic Youth freaked me out. In contrast, Belle and Sebastian were inoffensive. Sweet even.

I bought If You’re Feeling Sinister, followed shortly by the recently released Boy With The Arab Strap (Followed shortly by finding out exactly what an arab strap was and then frantically erasing my search history, least my parents discover it on our shared family computer). It was melodic, and pretty, but a bit sad. I traced the themes of love, loneliness, and feeling out of place, with frontman Stuart Murdoch’s light music touch seemingly out of step with the clenching I felt in my stomach and heart as the days marched closer to August. Instead of relating, I disassociated—suggesting to a friend that we could use “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying” over the closing credits of the screenplay we were writing. It was the closest I ever came to acknowledging my emotional bind.

And so, the first day of university approaching, I packed up my things, and my family and I drove the 60 miles to my new digs. Then cool cousin, equally cool sibling, and I headed on to see Belle and Sebastian at the Greek Theatre. To say the event—in all its symbolic summer-ending glory—was completely lost on me was an understatement. I had traded fear for numbness, and no amount of twee (a term that was still several years from being coined) could bring me back. Let’s all be thankful that we some how managed to miss opener Bright Eyes. It was two years later when I finally discovered Conor Oberst graduate-level of angst.

This story doesn’t exactly have a happy ending. My roommates were catty, the apartment tiny, and after three months I found myself living back at home—my first stabs at proper adulthood left behind in a shamble of frayed nerves, borderline eating disorders, and (weirdly enough) a death threat issued over an unpaid parking ticket.

Summation? I had failed, and [expletive deleted] Belle and Sebastian were the soundtrack to my first attempts at adulthood going down in flames. I became one of their characters—not that I had the self-awareness to admit it at the time. What I totally missed in my melancholy was that Murdoch writes tough female characters, perfectly happy to concede defeat in their failures,which is all well and good and utterly poetic until you realize that most of Murdoch’s characters would struggle to make it in the real world. Is it any wonder his forthcoming film opus God Help the Girl takes place in a metal hospital? Would Judy (who dreamed of horses) have loved Belle and Sebastian? I’m apt to believe she would have flipped Murdoch a double bird for getting too close to the truth. I was Lord Anthony with his head in books. I was…quickly on my way to becoming an out-and-out bitch. No one understood my confusion and pain but Belle and Sebastian. And I wasn’t going to let them get that close. As the trite old saying goes, the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s apathy. Looking back, this should have been my first clue, how passionately I chucked Belle and Sebastian for the thought ending squeals Moore and Gordon.

And thus began almost a decade long distain for Belle and Sebastian. To the band: It wasn’t you, it was definitely me. I don’t just owe you a drink, I owe you a full wet bar as an apology for the needless vindictive things I said about your catalogue.

As with every story of love, hate, and redemption, the story has a turning point, as anticlimactic as it might be. While poetic fallacy was working in my favor (it was raining) and the setting was apt (working from home, wrapped in the blanket on the couch), it was simple boredom that drew me back to the band. They were live streaming a show in support of Write About Love. I tuned in, and found myself flush with the realization that this wasn’t just good—it was great. The stories resonated, but they didn’t sting. I was no longer one of Murdoch’s tormented characters, I was just another listener.

I had grown up.