Music Writer vs Music Fan: The Song I Can't Just Listen To Anymore

Image from Sir Hotels

By Conner Tighe

I have been trying to write this essay in my head for almost ten years, and it still won't sit still long enough for me to finish it.

It started, as far as I can trace it, with Thriller. Not the song. The whole record. I don't remember the exact moment, but at some point in my early twenties I stopped hearing "Beat It" the way I heard it as a kid, as a Halloween costume, as a thing that shows up in every retro movie soundtrack because it's cultural shorthand for a decade, and started hearing it as a decision. Someone chose that guitar tone. Someone fought for Eddie Van Halen to be on a Michael Jackson record. Someone in a room somewhere argued about the length of the intro. Once I noticed the work, I could not stop noticing it. Not just on that record. On everything.

That's the whole essay, really. But it took me a decade to say it in one sentence, so let me take the long way there.

Being a Music Writer vs a Music Fan: When Fan Language Stopped Being Enough

AI Image

For most of my life, my relationship to a song was simple: it either got me, or it didn't. That was the entire critical apparatus. A song was good if it did something to my chest. I didn't need more vocabulary than that, and honestly, I didn't want more. This is really the whole tension of being a music writer vs a music fan, distilled to its smallest form: one side of me just wants the feeling, the other side wants to explain it.

Then I started writing about music professionally, and the problem is that "it got me" is not an article. Nobody wants to read four hundred words of a guy saying a song made him feel something. You have to say why. You have to find the language for the guitar tone, for the vocal choice, for the thing the bridge is doing that the verse wasn't. So I built that vocabulary, piece by piece, assignment by assignment, because the job demanded it.

What I didn't expect is that the vocabulary doesn't stay at work. It follows you home. It's in the car. It's in the kitchen. I hear a song now, and some part of my brain is already drafting the pull-quote before the chorus even hits. I used to just listen. Now I listen and narrate at the same time, whether I'm getting paid to or not.

How the Vocabulary Crept In

Image from Wix

The strange part is that I can't point to the assignment that did this to me. It wasn't the Adam Faler interview, even though that was the first time I sat across from an artist and asked him to explain his own choices out loud, which changes how you hear an album forever. It wasn't the Sombr piece, even though writing about "My Body Isn't Ready" meant sitting with a song long enough to notice things a casual listen never would have surfaced. It wasn't any single celebrity news blurb, even the ones on people like Troye Sivan, where you're mostly reporting rather than critiquing.

It was all of it, a little at a time, over years, until one day I realized I didn't know how to turn it off. There was no line I crossed. There was just a slow accumulation of asking "why does this work" until asking why became the default setting instead of a special mode I switched into for the job.

What I Gained by Losing Instinct

Image from Wix

Here's the part I resist admitting, because it sounds like I'm making peace with something I'm not fully at peace with: I think I understand music better now than I did before any of this started. When I hear Thriller now, I don't just feel it; I can feel it and also see the architecture underneath the feeling at the same time. I know why the count-off on "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" works. I know what a nine-minute-plus title track sequenced as track five is doing structurally to an album that could have played it safe. That knowledge didn't replace the chest-feeling. It sits next to it now, and most days, I think it actually deepens it. Loving something and understanding how it was built are not opposites. I used to think they might be.

So no, I didn't lose the love. If anything, professionalizing my ear gave me a second way into the same room.

The Part That Still Doesn't Sit Right

Image from Wix

And yet.

There is something I miss, and I'm not going to pretend the trade was clean. What I miss isn't a song. It's a state. The state of hearing something and just being flattened by it, with no analytical layer running underneath, no part of me already thinking about H2s and focus keywords. I miss being a person who could just react. Now even my reactions come pre-narrated, and there are nights I catch myself doing it, mid-song, and feel a small, specific grief about it. Not because the appreciation isn't real. Because the innocence isn't coming back, and almost a decade of work has moved me permanently to the other side of something I can't undo.

I don't think this resolves. I've tried to write an ending where it resolves, and every version felt dishonest.

Fan and Writer, Still Arguing With Each Other

Image from Visit Jeju

So here's where I've landed, for now, which is the only kind of landing this essay can honestly offer: I am both of these people, permanently, and they don't fully agree with each other, and I've stopped expecting them to. The fan in me still wants to just get flattened by a song and not think about why. The writer in me can't stop asking why, and has started to believe the why is its own kind of love. Some nights the fan wins. Some nights the writer does. Most nights, weirdly, they just sit in the same room together and argue quietly, and I let them.

I still don't know what I'd tell nineteen-year-old me about this. Maybe just that the day you start noticing the work behind the thing you love isn't the day you stop loving it. It's just the day loving it gets more complicated. Ten years later, I'm still writing my way through what that means, one album at a time.