It is categorically rude to dig up a writer’s college newspaper column from decades ago and parade it around for all to see. But when that writer is a folksy, polyglot presidential candidate who once pined for the simpler times when he could listen to Dave Matthews Band and not have to think about 9/11—well, it’s still rude, but at least it’s fair game.

Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is a rising political star. Buttigieg announced he’d entered into the Democratic presidential primary in January, just days after his 37th birthday. Along with his mayorship, which he’s held since 2012, Buttigieg’s résumé includes a B.A. from Harvard, an M.A. from Oxford’s Pembroke College, and the rank of lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Reserve. He speaks in the ballpark of eight languages.

He was also, sorry to say, a political columnist for his college paper. In November 2003, when Buttigieg was a senior at Harvard, his bi-weekly op-ed for the school’s newspaper The Crimson turned its eye toward the popular music of the day. In a column titled “Rock the Vote?,” Buttigieg wrote about the music heard around the Harvard campus for the past four years and reflected on the heady political times of the Bush administration, the September 11 attacks, and the pulse of the new millennium. (How 9/11 reframed Buttigieg’s life is a theme he comes back to often in his new book Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future.)

The column begins—as any good political column should—discussing Dave Matthews’ 2003 debut solo LP Some Devil and—as any adroit op-ed writer would do—compares it to Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief: