Growing up is dumb. Okay, okay, so it has its rewards too: wisdom, accumulating authority, stabilizing emotions and all that junk. Whether that’s due compensation for the virtually inevitable dissipation of passion and energy is a matter of debate. Perhaps nothing crystallizes the supremacy of youth quite like the realm ruled in benevolent partnership by rock ‘n’ roll and pop music. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a great song about yard upkeep or renegotiating mortgages rates, but first kisses and tragic, heated love affairs certainly fit snugly into a three-and-a-half-minute single. That’s one of the reason that teenage interlopers to the pop charts such as Tiffany and Debbie Gibson (or, to be more current, Justin Bieber and Rebecca Black) are defended by those who posit, admittedly often with a tinge of facetiousness, that kids are the only ones who should be making snappy songs for the radio. Certainly Bieber wailing “Baby” over and over again makes more sense than sixty-something bazillionaire Mick Jagger ambling off of his grandiose estate to strut across a stage snarling about his inability to get any satisfaction.

Despite all this, I’ll admit that I had to clear a few mental hurdles in my mid-twenties when I started really connecting with the efforts of a singer-songwriter who was behind me in age by almost a decade. It wasn’t quite as devastating a marker of growing older as the discovery documented in a Too Much Joy song that “the Playboy centerfold is younger than me,” but it came surprisingly close. Ben Lee first garnered attention with his band Noise Addict with the single “I Wish I Was Him,” written about Evan Dando at a point when the Lemonheads frontman’s notoriety was significant enough to land him in People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People” issue. Lee was barely into his teens at that point. The whiff of novelty to that song earned it modest college radio airplay and ample attention from the cooler kids in the music industry, Mike Diamond from the Beastie Boys chief among them, but it also somewhat obscured Lee’s broader cleverness as a songwriter. I don’t know he he ever fully lived down the mild gimmickry of his debut.

Lee has already released his solo debut, the excellent Grandpaw Would when Noise Addict reconvened for what would be their final album. Meet the Real You is a little scattershot, but it has terrific peaks, mostly with songs that could have fit in nicely with Lee’s solo efforts around that time. “Boyfriendship” was a major favorite of mine, infused with the wistful defeated romanticism that rang all too true to me at the time. He may have been expressing sentiments that were meant for moody conversations by the high school lockers, but many of them were still markedly pertinent to the singledom of young adulthood. By now, I’ve (thankfully) grown out of most of those moody feelings, but I still remember them well enough to offer testimony that, yes, the song still sounds like the truth.

Noise Addict, “Boyfriendship”

(Disclaimer: As far as I can tell, Meet the Real You is entirely out of print, even as a MP3 download, I do believe. Even if it can be purchased digitally from some sneaky corner of the interweb, I’m fairly confident that you can’t wander into your favorite local, independently-owned record store and offer currency in exchange for a physical copy of the release. The song is offered here with that understanding. Should I be wrong or should anyone with a reasonable claim on the copyright of the track contact me demanding its removal for any reason whatsoever, I will gladly and promptly comply.)