Did you ever hide a record from a friend because you didn’t want to be made fun of for having it? That was me in eighth grade with Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque.

Kurt Cobain gushed about the album in the music press. Spin magazine infamously declared it the No. 1 album of 1991 over Nevermind. But it wasn’t until Teenage Fanclub appeared on Saturday Night Live the day after Valentine’s Day in February 1992 – along with 90210 pretty boy Jason Priestley hosting – that I beelined it for the mall to buy the cassette. Before Pandora and iTunes and YouTube and Spotify, this was the way you discovered new music. You clung to the words of your idols, you tuned in to SNL, you devoured magazines and you soaked up every second of MTV you possibly could. Then you found your way to a record store as if your life depended on it.

Bandwagonesque was released on November 19, 1991, eight weeks after Nevermind, and it remains the only Teenage Fanclub album to chart in the States, reaching No. 137 on the Billboard 200. But that’s only a sliver of the story. Over the past 30 years, the band has maintained a consistent level of success in the UK with nine Top 40 albums, including three Top 10s, and achieved cult status elsewhere thanks to near-universal critical acclaim and a devoted following of global power-pop aficionados.

Teenage Fanclub just released its 11th album, Endless Arcade. I’ve barely paid attention to anything the band has done since Thirteen, the 1993 follow-up to Bandwagoneseque, and that’s on me. But I have to admit the rare times I’ve checked in, the music, while pleasant enough, didn’t hit me the way Bandwagonesque did, but then again, I’m not in eighth grade anymore. And I’m not alone in this assessment. The first paragraph of Pitchfork’s review of Endless Arcade reads thusly:

New music from Teenage Fanclub settles into the world like the first days of spring—subtly, quietly, with a sigh of relief. For fans of the long-running Scottish power-pop band, the defining qualities of their music—chiming three-part harmonies, breezy major-key melodies, and dreamy, lovesick lyrics—have come to feel so pleasant and familiar that measuring their current work against their past can seem a little beside the point: Could it be sunnier? Did it feel more exciting when you were younger? These concerns melt away within a few notes: Just open your windows and let it in.

I keep going back to one line there: Did it feel more exciting when you were younger? When I switched formats from cassettes to CDs, I think I upgraded my copy of Bandwagonesque, but I’m not entirely sure. I have no recollection of listening to it after the bitter end of eighth grade, and it definitely wasn’t in my collection by the time I got to college. But other than Nevermind, it was there in my 14-year-old consciousness more than any other album, and more than any other album up to that point in my life, Bandwagonesque made me think about girls, and in much deeper ways than anything I had heard on pop radio. I was still figuring out this strange new world of “alternative” music that Nevermind had opened up, and compared to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, the songs on Bandwagonesque felt refreshingly real, devoid of plasticity, as if regular dudes like me and my best friend Andrew could have written them about the girls we obsessed over in the early stages of our adolescence.

Still, I hid Teenage Fanclub from Andrew. I knew enough about his critical temperament at the time to know (or perhaps I assumed) that Teenage Fanclub would not pass the Andrew test. Andrew and I were and remain cosmic blood brothers. I lived on 14th Street, he lived on 15th Street, and I still remember vividly the day we met in between on the sidewalk of Crest Avenue, introduced by a mutual friend the summer before first grade. I had gone to morning kindergarten and Andrew to afternoon, so up until that moment we didn’t know the other existed, but when we met it was clear we had known each other for many lifetimes. We have bonded in many powerful ways, and music is one of them. When the two Use Your Illusion albums came out a week before Nevermind, we went to the mall to buy them but neither one of us had enough money for both, so Andrew bought Use Your Illusion I and I bought Use Your Illusion II and we swapped back and forth. To this day, we remain close despite the miles between us, distance that always evaporates whenever we reconvene; even if we go years without seeing each other, we pick up right where we left off as if we’d just hung out the day before. It’s been that way for 37 years, and it will be that way until one of us takes his last breath, but I didn’t spend one breath discussing, explaining or defending Teenage Fanclub to Andrew in eighth grade, because he had no idea the band was on repeat in my Walkman and I aimed to keep it that way. Showing your sensitivity to other 14-year-old males in 1992 wasn’t exactly socially acceptable, and compared to Nirvana and Guns N’ Roses and Public Enemy, Teenage Fanclub was wuss music, and I couldn’t bring myself to face any scorn from Andrew for admitting I liked it. I was never good in a debate, or with my back against the wall, and I didn’t feel like taking any shit for thinking “What You Do To Me” was infinitely better than “You Could Be Mine.” Teenage Fanclub was for me and only me, on my time, and I wasn’t going to let anyone ruin it for me.

In elementary school, I started a bad habit of liking one girl for an extended period of time – sometimes years – while doing next to nothing about it; up until 17, my game mostly consisted of trying to get girls to like me through osmosis. There was Christy in fourth and fifth grade, Kelly in seventh and eighth grade, Kate from Stow in ninth and 10th grade. Music only served to intensify these crushes while offering zero solutions for how to reconcile them; you’d think among all those songs of love and longing there’d be at least one instruction manual. So I kept looking, and the more I listened, the more I wanted to be the cool, long-haired guy in the song who got the girl, not the insecure kid with acne, braces and the bad haircut he’d been trying to get out from under since sixth grade.

Shortly after moving back to Northeast Ohio last summer, I learned that my elementary and middle schools were set to be torn down to build a new middle/high school campus in 2025. While I’m sad to know Newberry Elementary will soon be a pile of rubble, conversely, I’d volunteer to drive the bulldozer and knock Bolich Middle School into oblivion. My biggest disappointment as a kid was witnessing, and experiencing firsthand, how mean the world got in middle school. It was a sharp-elbowed contrast to fifth grade, where everyone got along, nobody cared about your off-brand jeans and the pure joy of childhood was at its sunshine peak. Then Bolich. A swirl of new faces, surging hormones and the first taste of the social food chain. Andrew and I found ourselves adrift in the indefinable middle – not quite popular and not quite nerds – and depending on the day, our presence was tolerated by those ahead of us in the pecking order or we were targets for their random cruelty. The inconsistency was frustrating and confusing, not to mention brutal on my mental well-being.

Near the end of eighth grade, I was sick of everything and everyone (teachers and classmates alike), sick of the bullshit flying at me from all directions, and I kind of gave up. High school was on the horizon, I was firmly entrenched in my college-prep track, and I simply stopped trying – stopped trying to get A’s, stopped trying to please adults, stopped trying to be a model student. And I got called out for it. My teachers and guidance counselor organized a conference with me in a room I never knew existed, furnished with little more than a long table built sturdy enough to withstand serious conversations and install fear in the weak. And they basically told me they saw right through what I was doing and let me know the shit attitude I was trying on for size wouldn’t serve me well in high school, and they suggested I shape up before the end of the year or suffer the consequences. I nodded my head and said little in response, then spent the remaining days until summer break silently stewing in a state of robotic compliance, neither acting out or actively participating in class, turning in my work and taking my tests while offering my teachers little in the way of emotional response. There were no citizenship awards that year, to say the least.

The only effort I made that spring, besides Little League baseball, was a last-ditch, horribly executed attempt at securing a girlfriend before the summer, and that’s when I abruptly turned my attention to Candice. A new girl from who knew where, Candice had appeared out of nowhere at the beginning of the school year with her long lashes and big doe eyes, and she somehow managed to position herself on the outer fringes of the popular clique. She was sweet, a little shy and nice enough to me to make me think I had a chance, and with the social vacuum of summer looming, it was time to do something bold, and should I fall flat, I could spend the next two months in hiding while I worked through my humiliation under headphones. So with little advance warning or any attempt at a traditional middle school courtship, one day I got up the nerve to ask Candice out, and it took her all of a nanosecond to say no – or more accurately, “Let’s be friends.” At the end of the day, I went home, collapsed on my bed and thought about Candice while I stared at the ceiling and listened to Teenage Fanclub. But really, I was thinking about Kelly.

Candice was nothing more than a temporary stand-in, a failed diversion, for the flame I carried for Kelly for two years. Kelly was smart, pretty and I made her laugh – mainly with recycled SNL skits, and primarily Wayne’s World – and shortly into our seventh grade year we became attached at the hip; at least, within the safe confines of the smart classes. Everywhere else – in the hallway, in gym class, the cafeteria, anywhere she was under the watchful eye of her clique – she ghosted me. That doesn’t make Kelly the villain of this story any more than it makes me the victim – this isn’t a dickish, High Fidelity-style takedown of a girl who rejected me; this is middle school we’re talking about and it’s terrible for everyone. Anyway, I was too lovestruck to stop punishing myself, and the attention Kelly gave me in class more than made up for the times she pretended I didn’t exist. She had to have known I liked her, and I was pretty sure she liked me, but there was a lot standing in my way, and most of it was named Brian. Brian had swagger. He was brash, good at basketball and had a pair of Guess jeans for every day of the week. I was bashful, bad at basketball and wore Bugle Boys from Montgomery Ward. Kelly and Brian. The most popular girl and the most popular boy. It was like a bad ’80s movie that never resolved itself in my favor a la Patrick Dempsey in Can’t Buy Me Love. Just saying their names together was like rinsing my mouth with battery acid or taking a power drill to my temple. I never punched a locker, but most days I wanted to, especially when I saw them together in the hall or holding hands at recess. For two years, Andrew got an earful of my Kelly conundrum and was compassionate about my situation to the extent your average 13/14-year-old boy is equipped with compassion, but he was basically in the same boat I was with one of Kelly’s friends, and for the life of us we couldn’t figure it out.

Shortly before the short-lived Candice debacle, my awkward waltz with Kelly arrived at a strange juncture where she started expressing interest in who I liked. Clearly she knew I hadn’t gone out with anybody since sixth grade, and while she didn’t know definitively that she was the roadblock standing in my way of middle school romance, if she hadn’t picked up on any of the clues, then she was hopelessly clueless. But Kelly was too smart to be that dumb. It started to feel like a chess game. She was still with Brian or one of the other buttmunches she cycled through while I secretly pined for her, but her sudden interest in the object of my desire had become almost insistent. And this led me to speculate, to daydream, that perhaps the middle school riptide was finally turning in my favor. Kelly prodded me for this sensitive information for about a week, and while I danced around the topic in her company, in private I spent all my waking hours devising potential ways to tell her, and finally, on a Friday, I wrote her name on a sheet of college ruled notebook paper, folded it into a paper football and gave it to her at the end of the day.

I was a nervous wreck all weekend, wondering how Kelly would respond and what it would mean for the rest of my days at Bolich – and how quickly it would get me beat up. When it was time to face the music on Monday, I could barely make eye contact with her. Which in the end didn’t matter, because she never said anything about it, never wrote me a reply or acknowledged my admission in any way, and I never got up the nerve to say, “Well, what do you think?” Her silence was devastating, and in response, I made a full emotional retreat. Overnight, I turned aloof, feigning disinterest, and I’m pretty sure I was downright mean at times. Then came my desperate pivot to Candice, and once word got around, Kelly’s first serious attempt to talk to me after I had shut the door on her emotionally came across like an interrogation: “I heard you asked Candice out.” And I wanted to burst out, “Yeah, and it’s your damn fault! And you’re probably to blame for that bullshit conference I had with my teachers, too!” But I said nothing of the sort, and only tucked my tail further between my legs. Meanwhile, in the middle of this melodrama, one day I found myself alone in the boys locker room with Brian. I’m not even sure how we got there or how the conversation started, but somehow the subject of Kelly came up, and he said, quite matter-of-factly and with a hint of disbelief/disgust in his voice, “She likes you, you know.” And in that moment, I finally, fully understood why it was called a crush.

Brian wasn’t a problem much longer. After middle school he went off to prep school to chase his hoop dreams, and it was good riddance as far as I was concerned. As for Kelly, over the summer I decided, in the interest of self-preservation, to write her out of my life when we got to high school, and it ended up being easy to do. We didn’t have any classes together, and anyway, all the Kellys and Candices left us in the dust in ninth grade, disappearing into the arms of upperclassmen with driver’s licenses and letterman jackets. Soon enough, they faded fully into the backdrop, and we found other girls who actually wanted our company and weren’t afraid to admit it. I don’t even know if Candice graduated with us. It’s possible she moved, but when and where, I haven’t the faintest clue. Being back here where I grew up, it’s tempting to play the Where Are They Now? game, but then again, not so much. I’ll admit I Googled Brian, but he’s not on Facebook and he barely registers a blip on the Internet. Kelly, meanwhile, is right there in my friend feed every day. She has lived out of state for years, is married to one of our classmates and appears quite happy. And I’m happy about that, especially after being so cruel to her the last time I saw her in my early 20s. I was home on summer break from college, spending most of my time kicking around Kent State with Andrew, and we happened to run into Kelly at a bar. We started hanging out with her on a semi-regular basis for about a month or so, all good cheer and laughs with old friends, until one night Andrew and I got really drunk and found ourselves ganging up on her about middle school and Brian and ghosting me and anything else we could pile on the popular girl as we pressed the release valve on our pent-up past. Andrew and I deserved every wincing moment of the next morning’s hangover, and I woke up thinking, What were we thinking? We weren’t, of course, and the guilt lingered long after my head stopped hurting – years, in fact. Nine years ago, after starting my yoga practice and working through past transgressions and other karmic corrections, I sent Kelly a Facebook message and finally apologized – for being a “supreme dick,” as I wrote, on that glassy-eyed night in Kent; for giving her the cold shoulder at the end of eighth grade; for ghosting her all through high school out of spite. She responded, and very sweetly, that she barely remembered that night, that there were no hard feelings, and whenever she thought of me, she always remembered me making her laugh.

My daughter, Magnolia, is heading into eighth grade in the fall. Whatever shape heartbreak takes for her in the next few years, I know it will hurt in the moment and it will hurt us to watch her go through it, and no matter how hard her mother and I try, there will be no convincing Magnolia that it will stop hurting, or that it likely won’t matter in the long run, or that eventually, after years of trial and error, she will find the right person in the right way. And when I found mine, I realized that, all along, Erica was my Candice, my Kelly, she was every girl in every song I ever wanted by my side. And when the time came for us to be together, when we merged our belongings after moving into our first apartment, among the tangible and intangible treasures Erica brought into my life was a box of cassettes from her teenage years. One of which, naturally, was Bandwagonesque.

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