Terence Trent D'Arby
Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D'Arby

I was twelve years old and in the second year of middle school. Her name was Barbara, and she was, without exaggeration, wonderful. Perfect black bob, French nose, big doe eyes — the kind of beauty that at that age you don't even know how to look at without feeling like a poorly performed burp, too awkward to exist.

The day she invited me to her birthday party, I literally touched the sky with a finger. I spent whole days fantasizing about what, in my feverish preadolescent mind, would be an epochal event: intense glances, mischievous smiles, a slow dance pelvis-to-pelvis, and then, inevitably, the declaration of love.

Obviously, none of this happened.

The party was a massive pain in the ass, like many others at the time: soggy chips, lukewarm Coca Cola, long silences filled with hormonal embarrassment, idiotic games like "truth or dare," and a worrying amount of music tapes (it was the mid-80s!).

Yeah, the tapes.

And it was right there, among a poorly made compilation and a best of Vasco, that something happened. From the gray Grundig stereo came a strange, nasal voice, but deeply soulful. An irresistible groove, pop yet sophisticated, brazenly sensual. It was, as you might have already guessed, Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D’Arby.

That was love at first listen.
That voice, those melodies impossible to ignore... one beautiful track after another, a heart-stirring blow after another. The next day, I asked my dad for ten thousand lire and ran to buy the tape.

Barbara quickly faded, replaced by Elisa, then by Marcella, then by Lucia…
But that album never left me. It survived the discovery of heavy metal, then punk, then the sacred epiphany of the Doors and the Sixties en bloc.
It resisted everything.

Sure, at some point the tape ended up covered in dust, buried under piles of new musical obsessions, lost somewhere unknown. Later, after the period where you have to deny everything that isn't Indie and cursed, I recovered the CD and then the vinyl. Every now and then, I listen to it again, and suddenly, that insecure, beardless teenager comes back looking and gets excited again with Wishing Well, Dance Little Sister, Rain, Sign Your Name, or Seven More Days.

The truth, banal and obvious, is that music doesn't age (almost never), even if you do, dramatically.