Three versions, one song

Dear Mr. Stevens

I have never considered myself hipster. I was an A-student, in the marching band, graduated in 2001 a year early. I thought being cool or popular was lame. My husband is 12 years older and an ex–football player who is still about being cool. We couldn’t be happier. We got together in 2006, had our first child in 2010, our second in 2013 (after we were told we couldn’t have children), and married in October of 2015. Our seven-year-old daughter got into Hannah Montana less than a year ago. Long story short, we adults fell in love with the 2007 song, “One in a Million.” After a decade of monogamy, we love a ten-year-old love song written by a teenager. Is that hipster-ish? What does this make us?

— Nikki, East County

Short story long, I think this “makes you” the happily married parents of two normal American kids. Liking pop music, even ten-year-old pop music, is about as mainstream as it gets. It would be a little hipster to have liked Hannah Montana, especially if you don’t particularly care for “Wrecking Ball”–era Miley, but you would have to have been “into it before it was cool,” or, perhaps more accurately, “before she went off the deep end.”

Not that this helps your predicament, but the song in question was actually written by German producer Toby Gad for German pop star Sandy. The Hannah Montana version you love so much is naught but a cover! You’ve never heard of Sandy, but she must be pretty cool, since there’s a YouTube video of her singing a freakishly crystal-clear live cover of “Don’t Speak” to a German audience in 2012.