There’s a simple paradox which governs the lives of most, if not all music writers. It goes like this: I love music, therefore I want to write about it. I write about music, therefore I don’t love it.

I wrote about music constantly—sometimes every day, at least once a month—for almost seven years, until the demise of the magazine I worked on, RES, last fall. Since then, the torrent of promo CDs arriving in padded yellow envelopes has slowed to a trickle, and in the last year I’ve almost made a concerted effort not to know what the latest and greatest thing in music was, so friends used to going to me for tips have been getting lame offerings like, “Well, that new Animal Collective is pretty good.”

Over the past few months, I’ve started to feel the appetite returning. When Radiohead announced its pay-what-you-want plan for its new album In Rainbows, my curiosity was piqued enough to spend $5 on a download (which, apparently, was quite generous). Now, I hate to seem like one of those people who wishes Radiohead would keep making The Bends over and over again, but from Kid A on, I’d pretty much lost interest. One reason was that Thom Yorke’s yowl seemed increasingly affected, and thus, grating. I definitely respond poorly to certain voices; most people probably do. For instance, I admire Devendra, but can’t deal with the cracked tremolo for more than a few songs. Joanna Newsom’s become like that too—she’s great, but I can’t listen to her anymore without thinking of a lamb on the chopping block. And the high, sincere, over-enunciated thing that Ben Gibbard (Death Cab, and even worse, Postal Service) does, not to mention the trite, teenage lyrical sentiments, makes me feel positively suicidal.

But with Radiohead, although Thom’s wailing does sometimes feel like a shard of glass to the brain, I was responding to much more than a voice. I was responding to the band’s self-seriousness, and to the idea, seemingly shared by every critic and college student in the land, that the band’s skittery Warp-inspired electronic pretensions made them the saviors of popular music. I took to calling them the Pink Floyd of their generation, which I didn’t mean as a compliment (in my taxonomy, Pearl Jam was our era’s Bad Company). So I was pleasantly surprised to find the new record’s layers of dreamy ambiance quite lovely, and Thom’s voice, more subdued here, seemed well-suited to the material. In particular, “All I Need,” with its thick feeling of mournful romance and that sleepy low-end synth rhythm punctuated by small stabs of dissonance before a big symphonic climax, got its hooks into me and wouldn’t let go.

So how much has Radiohead changed, and how much have I? I do think that In Rainbows nicely resolves the band’s experimental tendencies with its desire to make accessible, song-based music. I do think In Rainbows is a better album than Hail to the Thief, at least. But it’s undeniably a Radiohead album, the logical fruition of what they’ve done so far. And I don’t think there’s much question that all of Radiohead’s albums are both pretentious and brilliant; it’s a matter of what you’re listening for. I think I’m the one who’s changed.

There’s a worn-out saying, usually attributed to Elvis Costello, that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. It’s worn out because it’s true: Writing about music doesn’t really make sense. It says something that some of the most legendary music critics, like Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus, are legends because they brought their own outsize personalities to their work. I really admire people like Sasha Frere-Jones and Kelefa Sanneh, who are able to do it well on a consistent basis. For myself, my status as a non-musician often made a difficult task seem that much more so. I sometimes felt like an impostor—what business did I have casting judgment on something so fundamentally ineffable, something I couldn’t even do myself? That’s not an insecurity I’ve felt writing on other media—film, for example—but music is its own beast. For now anyway, it’s gratifying to listen with fresh ears.