On June 27, 2002, at a chain record store on Princes Street in Edinburgh, Scotland, I purchased the last Belle and Sebastian album that meant something to me. 

Storytelling, the would-be soundtrack to the 2001 Todd Solondz film of the same name, has its own story to tell, and a bizarre one at that. Though Solondz commissioned the Scottish indie-pop band to score half the film and personally enjoyed the resulting music, the filmmaker felt most of it did not fit the context of the movie and ended up using only six minutes of the material. A year later, Belle and Sebastian released the complete Storytelling recordings as a standalone album and detailed the saga in the accompanying liner notes. Twenty years removed, it could be argued that Storytelling the album is remembered more than Storytelling the movie, though both works are nonessential footnotes in otherwise brilliant careers. Regardless, I’ll always have a soft spot for Storytelling the album, but context is key here, too: It was a big part of the musical backdrop for my summer in Europe at the age of 24. Listening to the album in the present, it remains intertwined with that experience. Hearing the first few seconds of the opening track “Fiction,” I’m overtaken by fragments of memories, a warm wash of emotions and the bittersweet tug of the past. The music (“Black and White Unite,” in particular) makes me feel how I felt on that trip, and in many ways, I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.

In college and early adulthood, Belle and Sebastian were my Smiths. For a period of time – from the purchase of The Boy With the Arab Strap in 1998 through Storytelling and Europe 2002 – they occupied the center of my musical universe, and they were there with me through big, ugly breakups and prolonged, dungeon-level soul searching. I spent disgusting amounts of money on the import-only Jeepster 12-inches and bootleg CDs of unreleased songs. I drove three hours to Boston by myself to see them live the day after my last day of work before leaving the country. Of the half-dozen CDs that made the cut for the 50-pound pack I carried through eight countries that summer, The Boy With the Arab Strap easily got the most spins on my portable disc player. Belle and Sebastian were big by indie rock standards and several friends liked them well enough, but no one I knew loved them, at least, not like I did. Certain friends outright hated them; one roommate, in particular, had a near-violent reaction upon hearing Belle and Sebastian for the first time, scowling at me from my open bedroom door as he described what he was hearing with a lone adjective: “gay.” Thus, Belle and Sebastian remained a somewhat private obsession for me – a solitary indulgence of pathetic wallowing and romantic wanderlust – though I’ll never forget the communal joy of clapping and dancing to The Boy With the Arab Strap’s title track with a group of good friends as we rang in new year 2002 at Andrew and Jonny Boy’s Twin Lakes rental pad.

On May 6, Belle and Sebastian released A Bit of Previous, their first non-soundtrack studio album in seven years, and I listened to it front to back because I always listen to a new Belle and Sebastian album, even if every release since 2003’s Dear Catastrophe Waitress has been underwhelming or downright disappointing. As much as I love music, there are few artists at this point in my life who still get this treatment, but given my history with the band, I’ll never not listen to a new Belle and Sebastian record. I’ve determined they will never get back to where I want them to be, yet I’m still going to check in to see if there’s something there for me. And over the past two decades, the verdict has been, not much. And that’s on me, not them; I know plenty of people who didn’t like Belle and Sebastian until they started making the type of albums that made me start pulling away, and others who have enjoyed every era of the band’s career. As I’ve stated before, I’m an unfaithful music fan; my ears hear what they hear, and in 2022 I hear a much different Belle and Sebastian than I did in 1998. Some of my points, from my point of view, are irrefutable. After Belle and Sebastian signed to Rough Trade following Storytelling, they traded low-fi charm for spitshined production on Dear Catastrophe Waitress, the intentional influence of new producer Trevor Horn, whose credits as a musician and knob-twiddler include the Buggles, Yes, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Seal’s mega-hit “Kiss From a Rose.” As for the songs themselves, our beloved indie-pop underdogs starting leaning more pop than indie (whatever the hell that means), and at their saccharine bubblegum worst they now remind me of one of my least favorite bands to emerge from the blogosphere, Canada’s smugly chirpy New Pornographers. 

In middle age, Belle and Sebastian may be better musicians and better at making records – the songs on A Bit of Previous bounce along with precision and confidence, not a flubbed note or hesitant vocal to be found – but that wasn’t the point (at least for me) in their early years, when it seemed the message was more important than the mechanics. In the ’90s, they wrote some of the best Gen X songs about being young and confused and disenchanted by the world swirling around them, and the fact our 14-year-old kid, who discovered Belle and Sebastian outside of any parental influence, has leaned hard into the revelatory, tape-hiss-heavy Tigermilk – a debut album so attuned to the awkward existential dread of adolescence and early adulthood – and not say, 2010’s tired, wheel-spinning Write About Love, is telling. Reading the reviews for A Bit of Previous, one is led to believe the album is a return to form – with some of the critical hyperbole going so far as to compare it to the sacred If You’re Feeling Sinister – but listening with that promising reference point in mind creates a sort of sonic cognitive dissonance. Lyrically, songs like “Prophets On Hold” and “Come On Home” may be reminiscent of vintage Belle and Sebastian, but how close they actually come depends on how much you are willing to trick yourself into thinking you’re hearing another “Stars of Track and Field.” 

A long-term relationship with a band is not unlike one with a human being – over time you either grow closer together or further apart. And it’s hard to begrudge a band that once sang “You could either be successful or be us” for getting where they got with their career almost in spite of themselves. On the other hand, given the literary eloquence of their early work, I never thought I’d hear a Belle and Sebastian song that used the word “douchebag.” Then again, I never thought I’d get excited about furniture, but it’s a state I’ve been in on several occasions since moving to the suburbs, so here we are. Bands change, people change, times change. Listening to A Bit of Previous, I get the sense the core members of Belle and Sebastian, now in their late-40s and early-50s, are at a similar juncture in their lives – perhaps, like me, asking themselves where the hell the last 20 years went – as the prevailing theme on the album is aging, and in the hands of Belle and Sebastian, it sounds incredibly dull. There’s a lot of boring shit about middle age and most of it doesn’t make for compelling music, but nonetheless, they try. On “If They’re Shooting at You,” Stuart Murdoch sings about being busy and having “jobs to do that would make you dizzy,” and it brings to mind my brother’s on-point social critique about people defaulting to how busy they are as a stock response to how they’re doing. That’s where we’re at in 2022, back-patting ourselves for having full calendars, wearing a hectic schedule like a badge, and hearing this modern trapping of adult life play out in a Belle and Sebastian song, one far removed from “A Summer Wasting,” is thoroughly depressing. The willful detachment in early Belle and Sebastian songs was admirable and enviable, a life worth pursuing, and listening to A Bit of Previous I can’t not hear the ruminations on fatigue and the loss of freedom as certain heroes and heroines from my past losing their way and landing in the middle with everyone else. Then again, I willfully moved to a stuffy Midwestern suburb two years ago, so who I am to judge? 

In any case, hearing Murdoch lament his “creaking bones” and “the nightly slog” makes me feel old, and I never dreamed listening to Belle and Sebastian would make me feel old, but here we are. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, not with so many beloved albums of my youth celebrating 25- and 30-year anniversaries. There’s a sometimes subtle, sometimes overt thread running through this writing I’ve been doing since moving back to Ohio, and that is, I’ve been staring at my age more than I ever have. We stop talking about cognitive development in human beings once they reach a certain age, but I’m certain that everyone in their 40s starts waxing nostalgic at some point, and the algorithms are paying attention to this process unfolding in my own life, as the sponsored content in my Facebook feed is skewing noticeably older. I made the mistake of biting on a few links from AARP’s Gen X gateway drug the Arrow, and now they just keep popping up. I’m also seeing a lot more clickbait about colorectal cancer and the like, and I don’t like it. I still live like a twentysomething in many ways, but I’m about to age out of the 35-44 demographic and the marketing world is coming on to me in ways that are far more freaky and far less sexy than in the past, and none of it is about freaky sex – unless you count the implied freakiness of the sponsored posts for non-medical boner remedies. I don’t Google this shit or talk about it in casual conversation, so who the hell is spying on my phone and thinking this is the way to my discretionary income? I stand erect and demand answers.

Getting older isn’t very interesting, and it’s often bland as evidenced on A Bit of Previous, but despite what some aging indie rockers might tell you, it doesn’t have to be perpetually boring either. I certainly don’t feel that way about my life. Sure, there’s nothing exciting about a drive to Streetsboro to restock the house with salt pellets for the water softener, or wondering how we’re going to make the time to take half a day to power wash the green gunk off the deck, but even when you’re young you can’t get around buying groceries and scrubbing the toilet and punching a time clock. I’m lucky I love what I do, and I still get excited to wake up every day and do it. I’ve managed to stick around music this long and turn my passion into a career, even if these days it’s mostly spreadsheets and account balances. It’s very grown-up, and I’ve been fortunate to sidestep much of the grown-up world over the past 20 years, but here we are. Whimsy is a rare treat where two decades ago it was front and center, and it’s difficult to see through the kaleidoscope of youth — hell, it’s hard to find the damn thing — when you suddenly find yourself, at least vocationally, responsible for the livelihoods of several adults. I’m grateful for the wayward path that got me here, but sometimes the sense of duty and ticking of the clock coil around me. Belle and Sebastian’s early songs were often about finding your way in the world and discovering the beauty when you stumble off the path, but on A Bit of Previous, the path sounds like a straight shot to a dead end. I don’t often wish for a cul-de-sac, but listening to this album, I wish I could gently turn around and go back the way I came, if only for an hour or two. With that in mind, I revisited Storytelling and my journal from Europe 2002, looking for some cheap time travel and a way out of the minor mental rut brought on by A Bit of Previous, and what I wrote on the last page of the journal resonated in a moment when I needed the naked, garbled perspective of a younger and sometimes wiser version of me:

How stupid we could be not to realize how fucking simple everything is and how difficult we make it for ourselves and all these impediments and blinders we put in front of/on our senses. Walking around in circles and taking long, roundabout roads to get there. It just is! And it’s beautiful and simple and that’s the beauty and simplicity of it.

In middle age, I often lose sight of the simple things, and I imagine my fellow fortysomethings do the same. But growing old, as bland as it can be, is not a death sentence, and waiting there on the path ahead of me are plenty more kaleidoscopic moments to frame in time, and at some point I’ll find my way back to the prism for good.

Enjoy this week’s episode? Support independent writing and consider contributing to The Suburban Abyss tip jar, sponsoring an upcoming episode or telling a friend. Thank you for being here.