When I Was 12: Is America Ready to Embrace Their Precocious Inner-Teen?

*cough* Hi… well, um, Twee is back, sorta.  You know?

Depending on which circles you hang around in, Twee is either hailed as “punker-than-punk“, or maligned as “music for bedwetters.”  Nevertheless, the most misunderstood pop genre continues to tout cuteness over coolness and has the market cornered on Growing Up Awkward.

Twee has always been the most unapologetically emasculate sect of “Indie”, but it always seems to hover, smirking, just on the outskirts of popular music.  It’s too catchy to ever be marginalized, but it’s just too fey for the trampy-or-macho American taste.  Pitchfork’s excellent essay of all things Indie Pop, “Twee as Fuck” said it well:

…”indie” and “alternative” became popular in precisely the hard-rocking, masculine, centralized form that indie pop usually shied away from. The mainstream honed in on the underground’s hard-rock side, and, acts like Superchunk and Modest Mouse would go on to become Important Bands; acts like Tiger Trap and Heavenly would, for good reasons and bad, fade into history. And there on the television, ironically, was the K-tattooed Cobain, still wearing his cardigans and covering songs by the Vaselines.

So there twee sits, like the kid not picked at recess, rewarding anyone willing to seek it out.

Maybe it’s because of the excellent Juno soundtrack, but twee artists seem to be on the rise again.  The playfull Architecture in Helsinki, sallow Vivian Girls, the spider-fearing Boy Least Likely To, and the self-referential spunk of Los Campesinos!, have all attracted the blogosphere masses in the past few years (and, oddly, a large number of television commercials to boot). Fast on their heels are artists like New Jersey’s When I Was 12 – producing the sonic equivalent of a painfully joyous (or joyously painful?) prolonged adolescence.

I ran across WIW12 searching a now-defunct music site and really enjoyed their aesthetic.  The endearing strum-hook-and-harmony style burrows deep into your head and doesn’t go away — like a library volunteer into Franny & Zooey.

Earlier this year their principle songwriter, Adrianne, was nice enough to swap a few Q&A emails with me before their first non-basement gig of her young career:

Brian B (BemBang): First things first… Who’s in the band, or is it a “swinging door” type thing where there’s a core and people come and add vocals and accompaniment etc?

Adrianne Gold (When I Was 12): First things first… When I Was 12 consists of two main members: Adrianne Gold and Camille Bayas. Then some other beautiful revolving members; our friend Brianne Evans did some harmonies on “Dear Eskimo” with her angelic voice, and my guitar teacher, Mike Yelle assisted with lead guitar. When we play live friends Jenn Diaz plays bass, and Will Samtur on drums. We are so lucky to know so many wonderful people.[ ...] It’s been a little hectic we’ve been getting offered shows and things lately!.

BB: Good to hear you’re busy… I hope things are going well. Is there some sort of tour in the works? When I hear the name “When I Was 12″, I immediately think of both the charming and awkward aspects of that transitional age… was that the aim?

AG: We still have two more months of high school so we’re not exactly planning a tour but we’ve been getting offered a lot of shows lately! I suppose so about the name, I mean we definitely try to be charming and I definitely am a bit awkward!

BB: Ha. Since there’s not much info about you guys online I couldn’t tell if you were in high school, or if you were just channeling your inner-highscooler to write the songs.

Your music, lyrics, production, etc seem very attuned to what I would consider classic indie-pop/twee. That is to say; sweet, clever, and fixated on youthful experiences… even when the person singing may be 30+ years old.

Ha. You’re the real deal, apparently.
What inspiration do you draw from … musically or otherwise?

AG: We are the real deal! We write about things on a high school level because it’s what we know! It’s what we are familiar with. But like I said only until June! We are so excited for summer and then of course for college! We are inspired by so many things.

Camille really likes bands such as: Los Campesinos! Beirut, The Submarines, and Seabear. I on the other hand am insanely inspired by Bright Eyes (of course, who isn’t!) Tilly and the Wall, Mates of State, and Saturday Looks Good to Me. We were actually just featured on an online mix CD, “Birdsongs, Beesongs - Eardrums Spring Compilation 2009″ and so was Saturday Looks Good to Me! So that was exciting to see!

Inspiration otherwise would of course include every boy i’ve ever known, even if only for five minutes. The boys who’s hearts I’ve broken, the boys who have broken my heart, and the boys who have yet to break my heart. Boys in bookstores, coffee shops, New Brunswick basements, and any other place you can imagine. However! I did write about my grandmother, “You Me & Symmetry” is about my grandmother, I love her. We still do arts and crafts together.

CHECK OUT THE REST OF THE INTERVIEW HERE

Three Boys I Loved: Lille’s Favorite Love Songs

1998

J and I fought all the time. It wasn’t that I didn’t love him, I did, but I knew I wasn’t in love with him. He was a rebound, a boy I met after my first true love knocked the wind out of me. When J and I met I was doing crazy things like dancing in typhoon rains and writing love songs in G-D-Em-Am chord progressions, for the boy who broke my 20-year-old heart.

J saved me, in a way: he taught me what a real relationship was. How the mundane, the annoying, and the sweet were all rolled up together, indivisible, as if you’d rolled up oatmeal and raisins in cookie dough. J would pick me up from work in a heavily guarded building in the middle of a busy business district. I was almost always late, but he’d drive around the block for 30 minutes until I appeared, breathless and running, by his door. I bought him a pug. I met his parents, we vacationed in Cebu with his family. Sometimes he would have lunch with my mom without me, they liked each other that much.

But the fights were always terrible — I always felt that he was holding me back, from someone, something, somehow. I remember a particularly bad one: we were eating at a pretty high-end restaurant, the kind with oysters on half-shells served with mignonettes and Lalique wine glasses. I told him I couldn’t eat while looking at his face in front of me, and could he please leave. He got up, stood outside the restaurant and waited for me to finish dinner, then brought me home.

Our relationship may have evolved out of my need for a lot less emotional intensity, but it taught me a lot about the push and pull of coupledom. I learned how to give of myself, I held my anger. However, the feeling of being trapped never left me– it contradicted the fact that I grew to love him exponentially the longer we were together. I didn’t understand it, and in the end we broke up after being together almost three years. I still consider him one of my dearest friends.

This was my song for J:

At one of those breaking up and getting back together moments, J told me this was his song for me.

2005

D played bass in a band that my (then) band gigged with fairly often; we’d bump into each other at random shows and eventually became each other’s band contacts. Setting up shows together evolved to watching shows of other bands together; he was always down to go to a concert and I always had a (+1). We were both music nerds; he knew everything there was to know about Brit-pop and LA bands, and he was constantly making me mix CDs. I was going through a crazy period in my life, though, and my feelings for him were constantly vacillating between fondness and love and friendship and nothing. He introduced me to Myspace, the Magic Numbers, and girls who stalked me and left me mean messages on the Internetz because they liked him.

“I never thought you wanted me to stay, so I left you with the girls that came your way”: I heard this Magic Numbers song and immediately related it to D.

One day, this song came on the radio. He said he felt this way about me: “Everybody wants to go forever/I just wanna burn up hard and bright/I just wanna be your firecracker/And maybe be your baby tonight.”

2009

I always thought this was the most beautiful love song written, and was so jealous of everything about it — Conor Oberst is such a poet, and he was lucky to have loved somebody else so much, he wrote this song, which inspired this video. I’d always tear up watching it, it was better than Oprah.

I always wanted to be one of the people in this video, and feel every uber-intense gooey seratonin-induced emotion that love gives you.  And now I am.

And I realize that I need you, and I wondered if I could come home.