GOOD Pictures: Jaimie Warren Wants You to Feel Better

In fifth-grade parent-teacher conferences, I would have been unanimously labeled a "good kid": straight As, lots of friends, zero troublemaking. But I already felt a creeping anxiety, a sense of dread and general displacement—from my conservative small town town, from even my own family—that I couldn’t properly diagnose at age 10. I felt…weird, but I didn’t know why. Music became the escape hatch: the classic rock emerging from my parents’ tape deck (The Beatles, The Doors, Yes), the alternative rock soaked in via MTV and my older brothers’ CD collection (Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer, Stone Temple Pilots). But the most profound breakthrough— the moment that instantly made me feel, "A-ha, I’m not alone out here, and there’s a lot of magical weirdness in the world of adults"—was first encountering Radiohead’s "Paranoid Android" one ordinary weeknight on our rec-room TV.

It wasn’t even the song’s darkly comedic, NSFW animated video. It was the music itself—a thunderstorm of an arrangement that careened wildly between sweet falsetto and bratty punk snarl, between a steady 4/4 time and a jolting 7/8, between quiet acoustic picking and triple-guitar chaos and choral-rock splendor. As a sponge-like pre-teen with still-malleable taste, the game was over—I’d never heard anything like this. Decades later, I still haven’t. Back then, soon after that first encounter, armed with recently acquired birthday cash, I excitedly ventured to my local Walmart and bought a copy of the full album, 1997’s OK Computer. Back home, I popped the CD into my portable player, closed my bedroom door, and strapped on my massive headphones. In what became my marquee "important album" ritual—even through my adulthood as a music critic—I turned off the lights, closed my eyes, and pressed play. I’ve been chasing the thrill of that first listen ever since.