Now this is more like it.

No more weird live versions or late-career tracks from a compilation that is clearly a cash grab.

This here is the real deal: the long-awaiting vinyl pressing of the seminal emo classic The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most, an album that has been equally revered and reviled—usually by the same people at different periods in their life.

But having long since past the point of shame, I can now embrace this album as wholly as I did when I was a shaggy haired, ripped-jean, cardigan-clad, square-frame-bespectacled emo kid.

Wait…I guess things haven’t changed that much…

On my fifteenth birthday, I was at a crossroads.

One road led to the same bouncing, skater-kid approved pop punk I had been listening to for years.

The other led to emo. It was rawer, realer, and more relevant to the complicated emotions I was dealing with (even The Ataris, who had been the soundtrack to my blossoming self actualization, had started sliding into the emosphere along with me).

For my birthday, my family took me to a music store while on vacation in Sarasota, Florida and let me pick out some CDs. I wrestled with the weight of this decision among the shelves. Would I buy the new Blink-182? Did I want Green Day’s debut? Or did I want to make the transition to a “more serious” genre?

I ended up buying the first two full lengths from The Juliana Theory and this.

And as I consumed those three CDs over that trip, I stopped spiking my hair and pushed it flat. I traded my over-the-knee shorts for slim fit jeans. I eschewed the pool at our resort, opting instead to brood in a hoodie in the condo with these three albums on repeat in my Discman (regular readers will remember a similar vacation listening to Hybrid Theory the year earlier. I maybe wasn’t great at vacations as a teenager).

But it was this album of the three that had the most lasting personal effect. Having gotten into music via heavy bands like Project 86 and Zao before transitioning to punk rock, acoustic guitars were decidedly wimpy. They were more appropriate for Maria Von Trapp than anything I wanted to spend time listening to.

But this was different. There were no electric guitars, but it was just as raw and real as anything with overdrive. There was as much passion packed into the sound of a guitar and a voice than a thousand full bands were able to pull off.

And for the next year or so, it completely changed the way I wrote. I dusted off my acoustic guitar that I had previously only used for when I couldn’t be loud and I tuned it to the same rattling open tunings that Chris used. I downloaded tab after tab after tab from the songs on this disc (and Swiss Army Romance) and added them to my personal repertoire. In fact, there are friends from church camp the following summer that still give me guff about how I would play these songs over and over again.

Of course, by the time I got into more “respectable” stuff like Sunny Day Real Estate, Fugazi, and even Chris’s previous band Further Seems Forever, this record became almost unbearably cringe-inducing. But that didn’t stop me from singing along with every word when I would listen to it “ironically.”

Part of adulthood is coming to grips with your childhood self. So now, well into my thirties, there is no irony here. I am still sincerely in love with this album—every brooding, strained-voiced, too-high, saccharine sweet, black-hair-dyed, hoodied-in-summertime moment of it. And now that it’s finally received the vinyl pressing it deserves, it will get plenty of airtime.