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It was cold out when Beach House’s Teen Dream was released (Jan­u­ary 26, 2010), and the music seemed to fit the mood. I was impressed, but not blown away. I rec­og­nized it as a very good album, maybe even great, but it didn’t excite me or cap­ture my imag­i­na­tion in quite the same way that, for exam­ple, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti’s Before Today or Fly­ing Lotus’s Cos­mo­gramma or Joanna Newsom’s Have One On Me did. It wasn’t highly antic­i­pated like Arcade Fire’s The Sub­urbs or Vam­pire Weekend’s Con­tra. It def­i­nitely did not gen­er­ate the buzz of Kanye West’s My Beau­ti­ful Dark Twisted Fan­tasy. Now it’s cold again, and after a year with Teen Dream, I have an appre­ci­a­tion for the album that I didn’t anticipate.

I’ve recently been fas­ci­nated with a pic­ture (below) that I saw on a web­site called [you_have_broken_the_internet]. The blog­ger, a man named Ryan, kept a piece of Hor­ween nat­ural chromex­cel leather in his back pocket for one year. With con­stant heat, fric­tion, and expo­sure to his hand’s nat­ural oils and his blue jeans’ indigo dyes, the leather’s appear­ance trans­formed from a raw look­ing tan color into a rich, deep, beau­ti­ful oxblood.

When some­one indi­cates that a piece of music, and espe­cially pop music (as opposed to clas­si­cal, and I would also set jazz apart for the sake of dis­cus­sion here), “rewards repeated lis­tens,” skep­ti­cism is rea­son­able. After all, “pop” is short for “pop­u­lar,” and it could also be under­stood in the sense of “pop­ulism.” The appre­ci­a­tion of pop music is basic, acces­si­ble to every­one, with no regard to train­ing, edu­ca­tion, or spe­cial­iza­tion. Ide­ally, I should be able to lis­ten to a song or album once and know, at the very least, whether or not I enjoy it.

With regard to Teen Dream, I’m going to use the phrase — it does reward repeated lis­tens — but I mean it dif­fer­ently than I might when dis­cussing “out­sider” music, or some­thing really off the wall. That type of music requires a lit­tle more from the lis­tener. Teen Dream is more like the afore­men­tioned scrap of leather. Here’s how Hor­ween describes their chromex­cel leather….

Chromex­cel is the orig­i­nal pull-up leather; using time hon­ored tech­niques and for­mu­las that were devel­oped nearly 100 years ago. Chromex­cel is still pro­duced in the United States using a bark retan­nage from a pro­pri­etary recipe, and then gen­uine hot stuffed with our secret blend of nat­ural oils and greases.

Chromex­cel is char­ac­ter­ized by a rich pull-up in full ani­line, hand rubbed fin­ishes. Made to this day with old world crafts­man­ship, mod­ern Chromex­cel car­ries on a long his­tory of supe­rior com­fort and durability.

Obvi­ously, all this was true of the raw look­ing scrap. It was lov­ingly, care­fully crafted by one of the finest leather com­pa­nies in the world using proven tech­niques. Its true beauty only became evi­dent, though, after a year of being touched and kept in a gentleman’s back pocket.

I feel like Teen Dream has been in my back pocket. Its songs have been ubiq­ui­tous in 2010, but never obtru­sive. I’ve never obsessed over Teen Dream, but I have often turned to it. Most impor­tantly, the album seems to have accu­mu­lated some­thing over the course of the year, just like that scrap of leather. And, just like that scrap of leather, every­thing that is beau­ti­ful to me about it now was really there all along.