No. 101 - Belle & Sebastian’s “The State I Am In” changed my life

Ingrid Bohnenkamp was a compliant kid, until a girl with a hot Karen haircut handed her a CD

Aug 01, 2025

🎁 Quick note: There’s still time to enter the record-store giveaway!

TSCML just passed the two-year, 100-essay mark. Yay! To celebrate, I’m giving one of you a $50 digital gift card to Darkside Records. Wanna win it?

Become a paid subscriber at any level by August 11th
All paid subscribers will be automatically entered to win (details here)

Enter to win <3

This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

BELLE & SEBASTIAN - Tiger Milk - Amazon.com Music

• 4 min read •

I am a 90s kid and, as such, there is a short list of things I will always hold dear in my grungy little heart. Grunge, for one. Bootcut jeans. The mild anal leakage of Frito-Lay’s Olestra chips. Riot Grrrls. The Cranberries. My youthful aesthetic was all over the place. It was the 90s, a more nuanced, less Trump-y world in which two opposing concepts could be true at the same time: Tracy Chapman was cool AND Green Day was cool.

Not that I knew anything about cool.

I was meek and dorky, a people pleaser — worse, a grown-up pleaser. The type of kid who might, as we snuck out of someone’s bedroom window to pass around a bottle of Peach Schnapps with boys from high school, point out (retainer clacking, nose fully plugged by seasonal allergies), “Um, I don’t know about this, guys, your parents said to tell them if we went anywhere!”

My own parents were staunch Beatles people and we were a Beatles household. Don’t mistake me, I love The Beatles and they are very cool. It’s just that, with the exception of the mainstream 90s radio stalwarts mentioned above, The Beatles were the ONLY band we listened to at home. The Beatles and the rest of the British Invasion. I was a teenager who could tell you who sang “Ferry Cross the Mersey” (Gerry and the Pacemakers) but had no idea what my peers were referring to when they went, “Ooh ah ah ah ah!” (I have since learned that this is from “Down with the Sickness,” by Disturbed).

As you can imagine, I was a hit at adult dinner parties but no one wanted to take me to Homecoming.

Fast forward to my freshman year of college (“Fast Forward” was a button you pressed on your Sony Walkman to jump forward in the song, kids). There I sat in my early morning Intro to Lit class, more or less the same person I’d ever been, an extension of my parents, just a 52-year-old in an 18-year-old’s body, daydreaming about, I don’t know, a young Eric Burdon, when a girl I recognized as a barista from the very hip coffee shop downtown sat in the empty seat next to me. Her haircut was amazing (amazing for 2002: it was basically what is now known as a Karen cut, but you have to understand that back then it was hot, okay?).

Incredibly, she started talking with me, and we became friends, and one day she changed my life by handing me a CD. The picture on the front was a topless woman nursing a… stuffed tiger?

“What’s this?” I said, my brain already forming new pathways. “Is this the alternate Russian release of The Beatles’ Meet the Beatles? I don’t recognize the cover.”

“This is Tigermilk by Belle and Sebastian,” Indie Karen explained. “You gotta hear this one song — it'll change your life; I swear.”

(Or maybe that’s what Natalie Portman said to Zach Braff about The Shins in Garden State? Like many of my age, I often mix up the events of my youth with the events of that film.)

Later, alone at my tiny studio apartment, I stuck the pastel blue disc into my stereo and pressed play.

“I was surprised, I was happy for a day in 1975…”

Stuart Murdoch’s voice was quavery and wistful, boldly un-macho. The song said everything I was feeling. What’s a pocket novel? What’s Marks & Spencer? I had no idea, but yes! YES! Pocket novels! Marks & Spencer! “The State I Am In” spoke to a loneliness I hadn’t even realized I’d been suffering from.

Best of all, I was sure my mom would hate it.

Ingrid and friends getting ready to go see *Garden State* in 2004

In that moment, my childhood ended and my life as my own person officially began. I realized there was a whole world of music out there. Music my parents didn’t listen to. Music my parents didn’t even know about. For the first time in my compliant little life, I had secrets. I was existing in a sphere that was separate from the grownups I’d spent my life so desperately trying to please.

From Belle and Sebastian, it was a short jump to Yo La Tengo, which lived just down the street from the Velvet Underground (about whom I may or may not have said, “Wow, who’s this? They’re totally ripping off Yo La Tengo!”) and other older bands who I’d missed because they were not The Beatles, and pretty soon my ears were devouring The Decemberists and Wilco and Modest Mouse and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the whole indie music scene and I was wearing Peter Pan collars and dyeing my hair henna red and waiting tables and writing short fiction and not calling my parents very often.

I’m not saying “The State I Am In” changed my life because it made me cool (I have never been cool and now, as a 40-something parent, it’s just not going to happen), but it did provide me with a template for a new identity.

It gave me the bump I needed to sever from my overbearing parents and envision a new, experimental version of myself. ◆