If I were to fire up my time-traveling DeLorean and go tell my 17-year-old self that one day he would more-or-less willingly attend a Depeche Mode concert, I can only imagine the poor kid would sit up sleepless at night wondering when the early-onset dementia was going to hit. Depeche Mode? Really? But… but they’re a New Wave band!

You see, back in the days when the kind of music you listened to actually mattered, I self-identified as a rocker. Not a metalhead, mind you — my tastes were never that extreme — but the stuff that most strongly resonated with me was almost exclusively guitar-based, and mostly of that simple, feel-good variety that’s all about cars and summer nights and breaking free of whatever’s holding you down, about illicit adventures and giving the finger to authority, and, most of all, it was about sex. It was rebellious and restless; it vibrated its way into your bones and affected you at a gut level… or, in the case of the really good stuff, a bit south of there. To this day, a good rock song can for three minutes and a few odd seconds make me feel mean, or masculine, or sexy, or simply like I want to mash the accelerator down a little harder and feel my car surge forward like nothing can stop us.

New Wave never did any of that for me.

Okay, so I’m overgeneralizing a bit. Looking back, I did like some New Wave or Wave-influenced music. It was the ’80s, after all, so the sound of synthisizers was pretty much inescapable. But aside from the occasional catchy pop tune, I never really loved the synth-based stuff. The bands that fell most squarely into the New Wave definition — the ones they played on the original KJQ, for my local contemporaries — tended to leave me cold. The sound of the music was too slick and artificial to my ear, like audio plastic compared to the woodgrain tones of classic rock.

Now that I really think about it, though, it wasn’t the synthesizers I disliked so much; a lot of bands I would classify as New Wave didn’t even use one. What really bugged me was the vocal style employed by most of the New Wave singers. I don’t have the musical vocabulary to fully describe what I mean, but so many of the artists my classmates were into sang in this weirdly dispassionate way, as if the lead singer was heavily medicated or something. The Wavers may have been singing about their emotions, but I never believed they were feeling them. Compare, for example, New Order’s version of “Blue Monday” to Orgy’s cover from 15 years later, and tell me which of those guys sounds like he’s actually been dumped.

There were cultural considerations, too. I remember being highly annoyed by KJQ fans labeling their stuff “modern music,” implying that the music I liked was, well, old. A lot of it was, to be honest, but a lot of it wasn’t — it just didn’t have that “new” sound. I recall someone actually calling one my bands “dinosaurs,” and I resented the hell out of that criticism. (Apparently, I’ve been struggling with feelings of obsolescence for a very long time.) And then there was the New Wave look. I didn’t like the weird haircuts or the weird clothes (hell, some of the Waver bands actually wore suits; how uncool was that?), or… well, I’ve made my point. I guess our early musical tastes ultimately come down to pretty irrational things, our personal definitions of that ever-elusive concept known as “cool,” and, bottom-line, to the instantaneous visceral response you get from one sound as opposed to another. I’ve always felt instantly at home with rock ‘n’ roll. New Wave and all its various sub-categories — synthpop, alternative, punk, postpunk, electronica, etc. — has most often alienated me.

So then why the hell did I go see Depeche Mode when they stopped in Utah last week? Because life is funny and karma is a bitch. Because I’ve grown up a lot and come to appreciate a wider range of music. But mostly because, somehow, this aging rocker ended up falling for a New Wave girl. And sometimes I need to return all the favors she lavishes on me.

For the record, this wasn’t the first time I’ve taken her to see the Mode. My introduction to the Bizarro-World of the New Wave concert came a couple years ago, when we saw both Erasure and Depeche Mode in the same month. Now, I’ve seen a lot of concerts, everything from the classic 1970s-style arena-rock shows to the outdoor Bacchanal of a Jimmy Buffett tour, to blues acts in intimate club settings, and even the occasional country-star hoe-down. But the one-two punch of Erasure and Depeche Mode frankly baffled me. All my usual paradigms for concert-going just didn’t seem to apply. First of all, I didn’t know any of the songs, which naturally doesn’t help you to forge a connection with the band or the crowd around you. Then the mood of both shows was, to be honest, pretty gloomy. I’m accustomed to concerts being a big party, an electric, transcendant, cathartic experience that leaves you feeling pumped up afterward. I don’t know, maybe fans of these bands felt that way afterward, but I sure didn’t. And the bands themselves were… weird. The lead singer of Erasure performed wearing nothing but a pair of leather short-shorts. The lead guitarist of Depeche Mode was also barechested and wearing shorts, but with an additional touch: a pair of black Victoria’s Secret angel wings. Now what the hell was that all about? You’d never catch Sammy Hagar wearing frickin’ angel wings! Everything about these shows seemed to whisper in my ear, “This is not your scene… you are in the wrong place…”

So it was with a certain sense of loving obligation that I prepared myself for another Depeche Mode show. We came close to not going. Anne didn’t care much for DM’s latest album, and she was worried I was going to have a miserable time, especially given the knowledge that one of my bands, Def Leppard, was playing the same night only a few miles away. But I reminded her that (a) no matter what their pretensions about artistic integrity and wanting to move forward, these older bands always play songs from their back catalog, and (b) she’s always going to places, movies, and performances that I want to see, so I was determined to do the same for her. Even if I ended up thinking for two hours that I’d rather be in a dentist’s chair.

But you know what? It wasn’t so bad this time.

Oh, it still wasn’t my scene — not even close — but overall it was a much more comfortable experience for me. I’ve come to recognize a few DM songs, and the crowd’s enthusiasm was far more contagious this time around. Part of the stage show included a video of bare-breasted lesbian toe-sucking, and Anne and I had a laugh at how that must be going over with the more conservative members of the audience. Martin was wearing long pants and a shirt this time; the lack of angel wings did wonders for setting me at ease. Hell, I even saw a few Bic lighters flare up during the ballads — actual golden firelight like it was back in the day, not that chemical blue glow of cell phones that seems to have replaced the lighter ritual even in my dino-rock shows. That made me happy.

But the most joyful part of the night was the impromptu high-school reunions that Anne and I both experienced. The first came when an old classmate I’ve recently reconnected with on Facebook let me know the day of the show that he’d scored a last-minute pair of tickets and we ought to meet up for dinner beforehand. His date was another classmate, who also happens to be the ex-wife of one of Anne’s oldest friends; we haven’t seen her since the divorce, so it was good to catch up. Then Anne encountered an acquaintance inside the arena. The real capper, though, occurred after the opening act when the lights came up and the occupants of the seats alongside me finally arrived. I glanced at them briefly as they were sitting down, as one does automatically when someone moves into their peripheral vision. Then I took another quick look, thinking vaguely that there was something familiar about these two women… then on my triple-take I made eye-contact with my old friend Debi, who promptly burst into a huge smile and high-fived me. We laughed, chatted a little — the great thing about Debi is that it never seems like two years have passed since the last time we bumped into each other — and when DM took the stage, we even kind-of/sort-of danced together. Well, as much as you can when you’re standing next to each other between rows of stadium seats.

Anne was happy when we left the arena that night, and honestly so was I, happy that I’d done something for her that she enjoyed. And that made listening to New Wave music for two hours worth all the torment.

But I still couldn’t wait to find some Boston on the car radio during our drive home.