I'm 39. I graduated from high school in 2003, and I guess I could have. I mean, I could have

grown up here, but my mom was born here, but her family emigrated to America. So instead,

I grew up in the American Midwest where in the late 90s, early 2000s, it was kind of grim. I mean,

you had like what you might call the sort of Allison Shane's backwash bands like three doors

down and stained and disturbed you had Creed I mean I remember the last semester before I got my

driver's license having to listen to ride the school bus and listen to fucking Creed's higher

every 30 minutes at a minimum because like that would just a song and rotation like that

they were in a sort of just Jason Statenk crank situation if I don't need to take me

eye by creed in the next 30 minutes I was excited about the second Eve 6 album which in

retrospect is terrible and so if you were disappointed by that I mean yeah it's weird I went back

to listen to it and there's one or two songs where musically I'm like I'm like, I kind of like this, but the lyrics are, it's embarrassing.

Not only was I so excited about it, I found a leaked copy on Napster and downloaded it with

ISDN and thought it was fast as hell because it was like seven kilobytes a second. So that's my late experience in America. And then like, and then I, you know, I discovered MP3 forums and found out

about like Interpol and my brother made me listen to the Smiths and stuff like that. But, I mean,

at the time, what was popular was pretty bad. And what wasn't bad was very much like college

radio relegated to you. You could only get it in indie record stores. I remember encountering

the new pornographers and asking the clerk

at the, because I heard the song, and he's like, yeah, this is this band, but their album is only

available as an import from Canada. Like, no American label has released it yet, and you couldn't get it

off Amazon. So, like, stuff was still hard to get. Music being too gay for general USA. You have to smuggle it in from Canada. I mean, people forget how hard it was to get stuff if it wasn't released by a major label

or if a label had just decided to not distribute it enough.

And so I bring that in his preface that like, yeah, if this was a thing that was happening

...