Yesterday, I told the story about how Imogen Heap turned me into a poptimist. And while that narrative informed much of the narrative for that post, this record actually deserves most of the credit for that.
Because if we’re going linearly (rather than alphabetically), the moment that shattered my aversion for all things pop was when I logged onto MySpace and listened to the featured track of the week: a mournful, vocoder-only ballad called “Hide and Seek.”
In the fall of 2005, I started my freshman year of college. I was a certified scene kid: I wore girl pants and band t-shirts, painted my nails black. Almost everything I listened to was guitar-based.