I Found All The Parts, By Laura Faeth

She learns to accept herself through her fandom of TBIF, listening to their music, and attending their concerts. You might laugh at a statement like, “I get reflected back to me the hidden parts of myself that I couldn’t see before,” but think about the joy you feel seeing a band you love in a live setting.

“My spirituality gets activated around other fans because the music triggers an almost religious feeling. . . ,” writes Faeth. “I’m more connected to my soul when the music is vibrating through my being.” Haven’t we all felt this ecstatic bliss at one time or another? Faeth wonders if this is why “so many fans [are] compelled to follow their favorite bands for several decades.”

Author Laura Faeth

The answer she proposes is not mystical, but psychological: Peak Experience. This was defined by Abraham Maslow, “father of humanistic psychology” as an experience “that takes you out of yourself, that makes you feel very tiny, or very large, and to some extent at one with life or nature or God.” Faeth pushes further still, wanting to go beyond this feeling, even describing several incidents where she became overwhelmingly sad after a great concert experience. She wonders if some fans “rely upon a band to provide them with that ‘music high’ to such a degree that we become co-dependent.”

Faeth quotes a statistic from her radio-research days which declared “the music that a person listens to between the ages of 15 to 20 is the music they will most likely listen to for the rest of their life.” Always wanting to know the why behind everything, she gets her eventual answer. An intuitive (clairvoyant) friend offers that, “If you are at a like vibration with a band, their energy, and their music, you become a fan. The fan may also grow in such a way that a band’s music no longer resonates with the new self.”

Eventually, Faeth does grow and change and realizes that she no longer needs TBIF to feel good about herself. The idea of self-actualization, or “the process of accepting who we are at all times, no matter who we are with or what we look like” is crucial to her process. Her words are poignant and inspirational:

“Having plunged the depths of my soul, my perspective had changed. I had changed.. . . I had discovered that all the missing parts of myself. . . were always within me. They simply had been hiding in the shadows of my fear.. . “

Although it seems too coincidental to be true, Faeth is Laura’s real name. She mentions that her family was never religious or spiritual, but that faith was something important to her personally. Whether she had some subconscious desire to have faith in spirituality because of her name or whether it was some cosmic synchronicity, we may never know.

I am grateful to Laura Faeth for writing this book. She addresses, with humor and humanity, many of the questions I have had throughout my life of music fandom. In her research, she says she could only find two books about rock music fans. I Found All The Parts makes three. Certainly more books should be written on this subject, so I call upon my fellow fans to add their voices to the choir.

I Found All The Parts is available directly from Laura Faeth’s website, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.

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