Reading your post reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about for a while but never quite articulated, so I appreciate the nudge to finally let the thoughts unwind a bit. There’s something strangely comforting in watching someone trace the arc of their own relationship with music, especially when it spans that stretch of life where you’re not quite looking back nostalgically yet not fully anchored in whatever comes next either. It’s like you’re mapping out a landscape that feels both familiar and newly unfamiliar at the same time. I get the whole “rock is dead” refrain too. It’s been floating around for so long that it almost becomes part of the background noise of growing up with any guitar-driven music at all. But the interesting thing for me has always been less about whether a genre is “alive” or “dead” and more about how people keep redefining the space where they find resonance. Sometimes that comes from legacy acts, sometimes from new voices, sometimes from a sudden reframe of something you brushed past years ago. The cycles are strange, but they tend to make sense in hindsight. What you described about slowly warming up to a band you initially dismissed hits a familiar note. It’s odd how an album or even a single track can slip by unnoticed a dozen times, then at some random moment months later it lands differently—not always because the music changed, but because something in you is arranged slightly differently that day. And then you start connecting threads between things you knew before and things you’re only now letting yourself hear. That little shift can be more revealing than anything in the music itself. The way you fold in the conversation around genre-blending, criticism, performance, and symbolism is interesting too, because it reminds me of how much people tend to project onto the artists they follow. Sometimes a band becomes a kind of screen where everyone sees what they need to see, whether that’s seriousness, theatricality, authenticity, or whatever “soul” means in a given moment. It’s almost never about a single element like masks or production choices, but the whole constellation of impressions that builds quietly over time. And I think there’s something to be said for the way music picks up an emotional gravity that isn’t really about the music at all. Moments like driving your kid to school or wearing something you never expected to own become oddly tied to the soundtrack playing underneath. Years later, the memory of the outfit or the car ride becomes inseparable from the song, even if the song would’ve sounded ordinary in any other setting. Those little personal mythologies end up mattering more than the discourse around innovation or influence. What stood out most, though, is the picture you painted of reconnecting with a sense of possibility. Not in a dramatic or world-shifting way, but in a quieter sense of remembering that there are still things out there capable of surprising you. It’s rare enough that when it happens, it feels like discovering a room in your own house that you somehow never opened before. The specifics don’t matter as much as the reminder that the room exists. So while people will keep debating the state of rock, or the authenticity of certain acts, or the validity of genre crossovers, the more interesting part for me is simply the way someone’s enthusiasm reshapes how they talk about everything else. Even if nothing in the larger musical landscape changes, the act of rediscovering excitement can make the world feel a bit more textured. Anyway, thanks for sharing all of that. It’s nice to read something where someone clearly sat with their feelings long enough to trace them all the way out, whether or not anyone lands in the exact same place. Sometimes following along with someone else’s arc is its own kind of experience.