My most recent vinyl purchase—triple album “as originally intended,” including those unreleased tracks I bootlegged on Bearshare or BitTorrent over the years.

Kid A and Amnesiac were released my freshman year in college, and listening to these albums is probably the closest I’ve ever come to religious worship.

I have this memory walking home to my dorm room alone late one night, headphones on while “How to Disappear Completely” played from my beat-up Discman (mercifully, a skip-proof one). A light snow was falling in my face, the kind with tiny flakes that just might accumulate enough to be pretty by morning.

I struggled my freshman year in college. I would spend the next few years finding my people, but it was a slow process for me and I was deeply lonely that first year. I didn’t trust myself: did I know how to initiate and sustain a conversation? And how much of myself could I reveal? What parts of me will scare people away? Or, maybe worse, make them laugh in hushed gossip?

At the same time, I was genuinely free for the first time—out of my father’s household, free of the intense scrutiny and prescribed behavior that had brewed all that doubt within me. So as lonely as I was, I was also busy expanding into this new world.

Music a safe space to expand: I felt like got it, and there was so much of it to discover. I wasn’t quite ready to know and be myself yet, but I was willing to immerse myself in someone else’s universe, to try and know them behind a wall of sound and lyrics. Those flashes of recognition were also reassuring: I was like other people in the ways that matter.

Sure, I was also a bit pretentious about all of it, but can’t we let an eighteen-year-old indulge in some of that?

Of course, here we are twenty years on, and this album still makes me want to write pretentious little paragraphs in a journal (of a sort). Plus ça change, etc etc.