My Life In 35 Songs, Track 35: “World Spins Madly On” by The Weepies

Woke up, and wished that I was dead.

It’s 3am on the morning of November 6, 2025, and I’m still at work. One of the less desirable things about being a local journalism professional is that, on election nights, you’re up until all the precincts in your area report out their numbers and you can start projecting winners for things like county board seats or township administrators. At this point in my career, I’ve pulled the election night graveyard shift four or five times, and I typically don’t mind it much. I usually just put on a movie around 10:30pm and wait until the numbers start rolling in and I can write up my report so that the results are there in our subscribers’ email inboxes the next morning. In this particular case, though, the election night shift is the stuff of nightmares, because it involves writing the following words as my lede:

“Former president Donald Trump looked likely to win the presidency as of 3am Wednesday morning, defeating Democratic challenger (and current vice president) Kamala Harris.”

I haven’t been shellshocked a whole lot of times in my adult life, but I was truly at a loss for words watching the results come in on election night last year. With every passing hour, I could feel my heart sink a few more inches, until I finally punched in that sentence at 3:00 in the morning, turned off my computer, and tried to get some sleep. There was no movie that night, nothing pleasant or fun to kill the time as I waited for the moment when I’d have enough information to write up my local election report. Instead, I spent the better part of five hours obsessively refreshing my election maps, social media feeds, and Chorus.fm forums, looking for some sign that the growing feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach was an overreaction.

Craig Manning 3 weeks ago

Brother, I think it’s time we talk; why do guys like us spend most our lives playing it tough?

I just kept replaying it.

On the morning of Saturday, November 23, 2024, as I ran circles around my neighborhood in the rain, I found myself double-tapping my AirPods every three and a half minutes to restart the song. I wanted – no, I needed – to hear it again. It was the one thing keeping me from spiraling out of control. For that run, and that day, and that weekend, this particular song was my force of gravity. If I just kept playing it, then I could keep the things I held dear from floating off into the ether.

I am not the type of person to replay songs ad nauseum. Even the songs I love most have rarely had me reaching for the replay button more than two or three times in a row. So why was it that, on that November morning, the only thing that felt appropriate was listening to a mostly-forgotten album track from country-soul singer Brett Eldredge 10 times in a row?

That morning, I’d woken up to the kind of text messages you never want to see on your phone screen. “I know you won’t see this until the morning but please give me a call whenever you can.” My sister-in-law had sent that text at 2:08 in the morning. Another message, from a mutual friend of my brother’s, said “PLEASE know I’m thinking about you and the family. I’m here for whatever you guys need.”

I have never popped out of bed faster.

Craig Manning 1 month ago

All my friends, all my friends are here

“All my friends are here.”

Those were the words pumping out of my AirPods as I took off from the start line of my second-ever marathon.

Wind back the clock a decade ago and show me the words I just wrote, and I would not believe they were genuine. Despite being a long-time distance runner, the idea of facing down the grueling task of running 26.2 miles without stopping didn’t just sound unpleasant – it sounded stupid! But the pandemic reoriented a lot of things for me, one of which was my dedication to distance running. And so, on May 27, 2023, I laced up my racing shoes and gave the marathon distance my second try, despite some excruciating memories that were still fresh in my brain from having run the same distance on the same course just one year earlier.

The running community has mixed feelings about racing with music, especially marathons. There’s this belief, in some circles, that music is a crutch, or even a distraction. Having tried racing a marathon since that second one without headphones in my ears, I can definitely understand the appeal of leaving yourself open to hear the world around you – conversation with other runners, cheers from the crowd, snippets of whatever songs spectators happen to have blaring out of their Bluetooth speakers as you run by – not to mention the sharp focus you can lock into when there’s nothing in your head but the miles. For my first five marathons, though, I did run with music, and during that second one, it helped carry me off to a level of serenity I had never achieved before and have never returned to since.

A lot of that, I think, had to do with the song I chose to kick off marathon attempt number 2.

The day before that race, Matchbox Twenty released Where the Light Goes, their fifth album as a band and their first one since 2012. Matchbox Twenty had been one of my favorite bands in the world growing up. Starting with their hit-filled debut album, Yourself or Someone Like You from 1996, this band and their angsty, melodic songs were a platonic ideal for me of what music could be. I still can’t hear tracks like “Real World,” “3AM,” or “Push” without flashing back to car rides to school when I was in first grade, my brother’s copy of the Matchbox Twenty debut spinning in the CD player. Later, as I started governing my own music listening, 2000’s Mad Season and 2002’s More Than You Think You Are were some of the first albums I truly fell in love with. The former was, for a time, my very favorite album ever.

Craig Manning 1 month ago

Hey December, guess I’m feeling unmoored; can’t remember what I used to fight for

In competitive running, they call it hitting the wall: the moment near the end of a race, usually a long, arduous one, where all the fight goes out of you. Your legs feel like lead, your heart is hammering on overdrive, your lungs are screaming at you to stop, and your mind is sounding every alarm bell it knows how to hit, all in a desperate attempt to override any motivation, goals, or positive self-talk you have left. Suddenly, everything inside of you is screaming the same word at maximum volume: quit, quit, QUIT.

When Taylor Swift released evermore, her second surprise album of 2020, on Friday the 13th of that December, I felt like a man who had hit the wall – not in my ability to run a race, but in my ability to weather a particularly fraught chapter in human history. When the sun rose that morning, it marked nine months to the day since the year’s other Friday the 13th – the March day when the world had turned upside down in the face of the incoming COVID-19 pandemic. And, for my part, I wasn’t sure if I could take any more months.

Writing about evermore on my favorite albums of 2020 list (it came in at number 3), I wrote that it “dropped on a chilly December Friday that just so happened to be the end of one of the worst weeks of my life.” At the time, I did not elaborate. I felt like everyone’s lives were in disarray, and I thought the sentiment would be more relatable if I didn’t tell my full story of why Taylor Swift’s saddest album came to mean so much to me as 2020 drew to its (merciful) conclusion. After all, who couldn’t relate to feeling down about a Christmas season where the very things that make the holidays special – namely, the warmth of togetherness with family and friends – were going to be all but impossible?

Five years later, I’m ready to share what happened that week, and that year, and how it tore my family apart, changed my entire life, and reframed my whole damn worldview. And I’m ready to tell that story because every time I listen to evermore, particularly the beautifully, exhaustedly sad title track, I can’t help but flash back to where I was the first time I heard it.

Craig Manning 1 month ago

There are things that drift away, like our endless numbered days

“What song would you want to have played at your own funeral?”

Back in 2011, a friend and I decided to work through a 30-day song challenge on Facebook together, each of us posting one song per day in response to the same prompts. I have to chuckle in retrospect, realizing that the challenge bore more than a little resemblance to this series that I have spent the past seven months making my raison d’etre. That exercise was colder and more simplistic in its approach, though. Most days were less about deep emotional exorcism and more about the most rudimentary questions you could ask about someone’s music taste. “A song that reminds you of someone” was one prompt. “A song that you listen to when you’re sad” was another. But the overall idea of the project – essentially, selecting songs that for one reason or another were part of your life soundtrack – was the same as the driving force behind “My Life In 35 Songs.” And it stands to reason, when you’re making a soundtrack for your life, that you might flash-forward and try to imagine the song that would roll over your end credits, whenever they happen to arrive.

Craig Manning 2 months ago

Instead of counting up the days, I just want to make ‘em count

In books and movies, it’s easy to spot the foreshadowing – the little details in the narrative that hint at something bad coming around the corner. In real life, you often only spot those warning signs in retrospect, when you’re looking back after some catastrophe transpires and wondering whether you could have known what was coming. Such is the case when I look back on the music that was dominating my life in 2019, right before the world went into a tailspin. And it is especially true about “The Days,” an achingly wistful summer song by country singer-songwriter Hailey Whitters, about making every good moment count lest they run dry a whole lot sooner than you expect.

In the moment, the good times seemed to be in endless supply in 2019, at least in my life. By the time that summer rolled around, I felt like I’d reached a state of total contentment. I was 28 years old and things were finally falling into place with my career. As a runner, I was getting back into racing after having not run competitively since high school, and my training had me feeling like I was in the best shape of my life. Most importantly, by moving back to our hometown, my wife and I had reignited our social life, which had mostly fallen by the wayside since our college years. We reconnected with old friends, made new ones, and spent a lot of time with family that we’d seen too little of in our years away. Everything felt just about perfect.

Craig Manning 2 months ago

We got the street lights, we got it all right, we got this whole night, carry me home

There’s this stretch of roadway just south of my hometown that I’ve always loved, where you go around a bend and suddenly find yourself surrounded on both sides by towering pine trees. The road gradually climbs from there, taking you out of this beautiful, tranquil valley. But the feel of that short passage – the indescribable power of those trees and the many, many years they’ve been there – lingers for the rest of the drive.

Throughout my life, that spot on the road has always been the checkpoint – the spot where, when I pass through it, I know I’m home again. I came to feel that way during college, when I drove that road literally hundreds of times to get back to my parents’ house – for weekends, or Christmases, or summer vacations. I kept feeling that way after I graduated, when the visits home became less frequent, and therefore, that much more precious. I still feel that way today, when I come back into town after a vacation, or even after a quick jaunt downstate for a concert. No matter how many times I pass into that forest of pines, I always feel the same way about it, like I’ve just entered the gravitational pull of the place I love most, and can lay whatever burdens I’ve been carrying down. “Rest easy child,” those trees seem to whisper; “everything will be alright. You’re safe here.”

“You’re home.”

Craig Manning 2 months ago

If you got a Friday night free and a shotgun seat/I’m just saying I ain’t got nowhere to be

Sometimes, in life, it’s nice just to stop for a minute and take a breath.

That’s how I felt in the spring of 2015. For the preceding two years, everything in my life had been moving at the speed of sound. Graduating from college in April 2013 and moving in with my girlfriend; trying and failing to find a full-time job; striking up a career in freelance writing; proposing to my girlfriend; planning a wedding and juggling all the festivities that come with it – from showers to bachelor/bachelorette parties; actually getting married.

I thought things might ease into a slower pace after the wedding and the honeymoon, but they didn’t. A month after that, my wife was interviewing for a new job, and we ended the summer of 2014 by turning in the keys of our Illinois apartment and moving to Grand Rapids, Michigan to start another new chapter. And shortly after that, my grandpa passed away, throwing my whole extended family into a tailspin that lasted through the holidays.

The whirlwind of changes kept going into the New Year. On the first day of 2015, my wife and I adopted a tiny kitten, the first pet we’d ever shared together. She was (and is) a beautiful little troublemaker and she stole my heart immediately. And then, that winter, we got so sick of living in a cramped apartment that we found a realtor and started shopping the housing market. We closed on our first house in March of that year, and moved in the next month, right as Michigan was bursting into springtime bloom.

Craig Manning 2 months ago

“Everybody knows you in a speed trap town.”

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a songwriter.

I have this vivid memory of when I was 6 or 7 years old, getting ready for bedtime and humming melodies to myself, making up my own songs. A little later, it was me and my brother and sister in the basement, trying to be a “band,” even though all we had was an extremely loud drum set, a dinky 41-key keyboard with no amplification, and a homemade guitar built out of 2x4s and fishing line. And then, eventually, it was me in eighth grade, scrawling “lyrics” in my journal.

Despite many attempts, though, songwriting remained, for years, the most elusive skill I ever tried my hand at. It was harder than singing, harder than running, harder than what I was learning in my math or English classes at school. Maybe the problem was that I had nothing to say. Or maybe I was just so immersed in music that every attempt I made to write something of my own just came out sounding like a pale imitation of one of my influences. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t until the mid-2010s that I wrote a song I was legitimately proud of, and I don’t know if that ever would have happened had it not been for Jason Isbell.

Isbell had already had a whirlwind career by the time I caught up with him. He’d gotten his start in 2001, joining the southern rock band Drive-By Truckers for a tour in support of their appropriately titled LP Southern Rock Opera, and then sticking around as a guitar player and occasional songwriter and singer for the next three albums. But I’d never heard a Drive-By Truckers song before, so I had no reason to have heard of Isbell through that channel. He’d also flown under my radar for his first three solo LPs, recorded between 2007 and 2011, which I don’t recall ever hearing or reading a single word about when they were actually current concerns in the music world.

Craig Manning 3 months ago

Now I don’t lightly use words like ‘forever,’ but I will love you ‘til the end of today…

Do teenagers today still make mixtapes?

I’m using that term loosely, mind you. I know there can’t be more than a few living souls on the planet who still go through the painstaking steps of cobbling together handmade cassette tape compilations to tell their crushes how they feel. Hell, I can’t even say that I’ve ever made a true mixtape, in that classic analog sense. But I came of age long enough before the streaming era that I still experienced the sensation of trading music in physical formats – usually on burned CDs, though occasionally via USB thumb drives, and sometimes even by way of data DVDs.

Does the mixtape live on in any form today? Is it a Spotify link? A YouTube playlist? A collection of TikTok videos? I ask because “Song for the Road” by David Ford is a classic, all-timer mixtape song, and I wonder if classic, all-timer mixtape songs can even still exist anymore.

I’ve always been drawn to the idea of the mixtape. In a lot of ways, this entire series is just an ambitious, life-spanning, 35-song mixtape. It doesn’t hurt that three of my four favorite artists of all time – Butch Walker, Andrew McMahon, and Jimmy Eat World – have all written songs about mixtapes. “You gave me the best mixtape I have” Butch sings in his, before adding “And even all the bad songs ain’t so bad.” “This is my mixed tape for her; it’s like I wrote every note with my own fingers,” goes the punchline of “The Mixed Tape,” the first-ever single from Andrew McMahon’s Jack’s Mannequin project; and in the Jimmy Eat World song, the note is pure regret: “Maybe we could put your tape back on/Rewind until the moment we went wrong.”

Craig Manning 3 months ago

This is where days feel more complete, living here with you.

I was a failure.

That’s what I found myself thinking in late June 2013, two months removed from my college graduation. It turns out that landing a good job right out of school is hard, especially when you graduate in the middle of an epic economic recession. Heck, I didn’t even need it to be a good job: I was sending out dozens of resumes and cover letters a day, and most of the jobs I was applying for sounded like soul-sucking nightmares that would have quickly squeezed my zest for life out of my body like I was a tube of toothpaste. But I was desperate, and I was demoralized, and I was starting to panic, and I would have taken damn near any life preserver thrown my way.

I didn’t want to feel this way (understatement), especially not at the dawn of a new summer (historically, my favorite time of year), and especially not with a brand-new album from my favorite band of the moment (The Dangerous Summer) burning a hole in my laptop’s hard drive. During two of the most consequential summers of my life – 2009, between my high school graduation and my first semester of college; and 2011, when I needed to reboot after a dreadful sophomore year – The Dangerous Summer had been there to provide the soundtrack. Those summers had both proved glorious, and having this band’s music in near-constant rotation was a big part of the reason why. With The Dangerous Summer set to release a new album, called Golden Record, in the summer of 2013, I hoped I’d be all set for another glorious season.

Golden Record wasn’t due out until August 6, but I got my hands on an advance stream around mid-June. The first single, opening track “Catholic Girls,” had blown the roof off my brain when it dropped early that month, and I couldn’t wait to hear what The Dangerous Summer had in store for album number 3. On their first two albums, 2009’s Reach for the Sun and 2011’s War Paint, this pop-punk band from Baltimore had delivered quintessential coming-of-age music, full of romantic yearning, aching nostalgia, twentysomething malaise, and ambitious optimism for the future. Their music was catchy enough to be ideal for windows-down summer drives, but emotional enough to deliver deep, meaningful catharsis when I needed it most. It’s another understatement to say that I hold both of those albums near and dear to my heart.

Craig Manning 3 months ago

It’s a lifeless life, with no fixed address to give/But you’re not mine to die for anymore, so I must live.

“Last Call at 301.” That’s what my college roommates and I called the final party we threw at our apartment, one week before we graduated.

Over the course of our junior and senior years, the place my roommates and I shared had become something of a de-facto hangout spot among our friend group. That was partially because of our habit for hosting Super Smash Bros battles on weeknights, but mostly because my roommate Danny would just invite people over for impromptu dinner parties all the time, or study sessions, or movie nights, or cocktail hours. On any night of the week, there was a good chance of finding 2-6 guests in our living room. And so, while we had college bars that we loved – special shoutout to the Kalamazoo Beer Exchange, the coolest beer bar I ever frequented – it ultimately made the most sense for us to have our last big college hurrah at our place: Apartment 301.

My big responsibility for that party, other than chipping in for booze, was putting together the perfect party playlist for our big sendoff. I was absolutely up to the task. In a lot of ways, I’d been training for this moment my whole life. As this series attests, I have a habit for very carefully and deliberately soundtracking the big, climactic moments of my life, and this party was surely going to be one such moment. And while I knew most of the songs on the playlist had to be shared touchstones – tracks that would get a group full of college kids laughing, vibing, dancing, reminiscing, and singing along – I made sure to save one slot on the playlist just for me, so that I could play the Japandroids song “The House That Heaven Built” as loud as fucking possible in a room full of elated drunk people.

Craig Manning 3 months ago

I’m finding it hard leaving your love behind me

It was the one time in my life where I could reasonably describe myself as a “working professional musician.”

I’ve made passing mention of it a few times in this series, but during my college years, for three consecutive summers, my primary job was working at the local dinner theater in my hometown. The space was an old movie theater that had been converted into a wedding and event center. A catering company operated out of a building on the same property, and they’d struck up a deal with a local entertainer to put on three shows per week at the venue to help bring in customers and sell a shit ton of food and alcohol. Most of our customers were in or nearing the retirement age bracket, and most of the songs we performed were hits from yesteryear, to make sure we were appealing to that demographic. We switched up the show theme and the setlist frequently across those three years, and songs fell in and out of rotation. But the one song I sang at almost every show we ever did was “Can’t Smile without You,” a ‘70s pop hit made famous by Barry Manilow.

Craig Manning 4 months ago

Here in the dark, I cherish the moonlight/I’m in love with the way you’re in love with the night.

It got warm early that spring. I remember that much vividly.

There’s a night from April 2012 that sticks in my head, where my college roommates and I got drunk off beer and long island iced teas and sat out on the deck of our apartment until the wee hours of the morning, so amped up by the alcohol and the unseasonable warmth of the night that we were almost howling at the moon. It felt like summer, and we were absolutely acting like it was, even though it was a Wednesday night and we all had early classes the next morning.

I hadn’t heard a note of The Gaslight Anthem’s Handwritten when that night happened, but for whatever reason, when I think of this album, that’s the night I remember. Maybe it’s because I was already anticipating Handwritten with as much fervor as I’d ever anticipated any album before. Or maybe it was just because that night felt like a Gaslight Anthem song: the friends, the instant nostalgia, the magic in the night. Whatever the reason, I’ve always thought it was funny that my most vivid memory of one of my favorite albums is from a night before that album even existed out in the world.

Craig Manning 4 months ago

At once I knew: I was not magnificent.

If you want a cheat code for making every piece of art you see or hear suddenly seem incredibly moving and profound, might I suggest suffering the most crushing failure of your life?

Justin Vernon knows a thing or two about heartbreak and failure. For years and years, the singer-songwriter behind the Bon Iver project was perhaps the person in the indie rock world most synonymous with sadness. Bon Iver’s debut, 2007’s For Emma, Forever Ago, was famously the outcome of Vernon retreating to a remote Wisconsin cabin to nurse a broken heart. The follow-up, 2011’s Bon Iver, Bon Iver, was far more sonically audacious, but often circled back to the same kind of tender pain as its predecessor – especially on “Holocene,” my favorite Bon Iver song, and one of those songs that will always, always put a lump in my throat.

For Emma, Forever Ago is one of my go-to wintertime albums. I fell in love with it during the December of my senior year of high school, listening to those delicate, beautiful songs over and over while driving to school on cold, snowy mornings. A choir kid in high school, I loved how Bon Iver songs felt almost choral in their composition, with Vernon frequently layering his falsetto vocals on top of one another in songs like “Lump Sum.”

Bon Iver, Bon Iver felt different. A summertime release that I listened to for the first time in the midst of a mighty northern Michigan rainstorm, that album came to evoke for me, so clearly, the feel of muggy summer nights. Where For Emma, Forever Ago had essentially become Christmas music to my ears, the follow-up was a go-to driving soundtrack for late, late nights that summer. I especially loved how the closer, the ‘80s-washed power ballad “Beth/Rest,” sounded against the backdrop of pitch-dark roads.

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 35: “World Spins Madly On” by The Weepies

Woke up, and wished that I was dead.

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 34: “Brother” by Brett Eldredge

Brother, I think it’s time we talk; why do guys like us spend most our lives playing it tough?

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 33: “Friends” by Matchbox Twenty

All my friends, all my friends are here

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 32: “evermore” by Taylor Swift

Hey December, guess I’m feeling unmoored; can’t remember what I used to fight for

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 31: “Passing Afternoon” by Iron & Wine

There are things that drift away, like our endless numbered days

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 30: “The Days” by Hailey Whitters

Instead of counting up the days, I just want to make ‘em count

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 29: “Carry Me Home” by The Alternate Routes

We got the street lights, we got it all right, we got this whole night, carry me home

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 28: “Dibs” by Kelsea Ballerini

If you got a Friday night free and a shotgun seat/I’m just saying I ain’t got nowhere to be

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 27: “Speed Trap Town” by Jason Isbell

“Everybody knows you in a speed trap town.”

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 26: “Song for the Road” by David Ford

Now I don’t lightly use words like ‘forever,’ but I will love you ‘til the end of today…

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 25: “Miles Apart” by The Dangerous Summer

This is where days feel more complete, living here with you.

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 24: “The House That Heaven Built” by Japandroids

It’s a lifeless life, with no fixed address to give/But you’re not mine to die for anymore, so I must live.

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 23: “Can’t Smile Without You” by Barry Manilow

I’m finding it hard leaving your love behind me

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 22: “Handwritten” by The Gaslight Anthem

Here in the dark, I cherish the moonlight/I’m in love with the way you’re in love with the night.

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 21: “Holocene” by Bon Iver

At once I knew: I was not magnificent.