My Life In 35 Songs, Track 3: “Hide” by Creed

Let’s leave, oh let’s get away, get lost in time/Where there’s no reason left to hide

The first CD I ever owned was Creed’s Human Clay. I got it for my 12th birthday. The second and third CDs I ever owned were Creed’s other two albums, My Own Prison and Weathered, which I got a month later for Christmas. I was not at all aware at the time that Creed were one of the most derided bands of their era, and I’m glad for that. One of the great things about loving music when you’re young is that you do so without pretense or insecurity. Those things come later. What comes first, at least from my experience, is a fierce connection to the words and the melodies and the way the songs make you feel. Such was the case, for me, with Creed, especially in the winter of 2002-03 when those three albums – Weathered in particular – became the soundtrack to a particularly fraught period in my young life.

Craig Manning 1 week ago

Desperate for changing, starving for truth/I’m closer to where I started, I’m chasing after you.

One thing to know about the way I consume music is that, by and large, I do not care about the charts. While knowing what songs have gone to number 1 over the years makes for fun trivia, it has little to no bearing on what music I love or find value in. But for one summer when I was 11 years old, I became obsessed with chart-watching, and this song was the reason why.

It’s been long enough since the summer of 2001 that I don’t really recall what initially inspired me to turn on the clock radio in my bedroom on some stray Sunday morning and tune in to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 countdown. As far as I can remember, that show kicked off at 8 in the morning and ran until lunchtime. It was not, in other words, the kind of thing you’d expect a preteen boy to find himself enmeshed in during the summertime, when more interesting engagements like sleeping in or playing video games were options. Plus, AT40 was loaded with commercial breaks and packed with songs that I, as someone who did not have much of a taste for the R&B-flavored pop that was dominant at the turn of the century, actively disliked. Why did I subject myself to four hours of this nonsense when I could have been doing literally anything else?

Craig Manning 2 weeks ago

If your life was a movie, what songs would make the soundtrack?

Earlier this year, I found myself trying to answer that question, all because I was looking for a project to get me excited about music writing again. A decade ago, I couldn’t wait to write up reviews of every new album I liked. Now, the thought of going through that process feels exhausting, and maybe meaningless. Does anyone care about album reviews in 2025? And if not, where does that leave those of us who love trying to articulate what it is about a certain piece of music that makes us think, or makes us weep, or gets our hearts racing a little faster?

I came up with the life soundtrack idea almost on a lark. It would be a fun challenge, I told myself, especially if there were limits and rules by which I had to abide. The first rule I gave myself was to theme this project around my forthcoming 35th birthday. In honor of that milestone, I decided, I’d have the space of just 35 songs to tell my life story.

I didn’t know how maddening this game would prove to be – or, ultimately, how emotionally fulfilling. I’m an old veteran when it comes to making lists, but this version of the music list was so much harder than anything else I’d ever attempted. Picking your all-time favorite albums is easy. Picking your favorite songs is harder, but still somewhat intuitive. Trying to boil down your entire life’s journey into what is essentially a two-CD compilation is an exercise guaranteed to result in constant hand-wringing, excessive second-guessing, and endless revising. There are currently 47,145 songs in my iTunes library. How was I supposed to be satisfied picking such a tiny percentage of that?

Craig Manning 3 months ago

Everything kind of felt like it was falling apart in 2024, and I’m not just saying that because we decided it was a good idea to send a self-proclaimed wannabe dictator back to the White House again. Genuinely, it felt like everywhere I turned this year, some piece of the society I was told would always hold fast was sputtering, whether it was social media outlets, or search engines, or mail services or, yes, the music industry.

While this year brought a whole slew of new pop stars to the table, it also deepened the divide between the industry haves and have-nots and started an insane conversation about the place artificial intelligence has in the creative process. The pop charts got stuck in boring holding patterns for months at a time, supporting my growing assumption that the 2020s will go down as a decade with startling few legitimately iconic hits. And of course, 2024 saw the album as an art form repeatedly pushed to its absolute breaking point. Seriously, how many big-deal releases from this year could have been A-grade statements if they’d only traded their bloat and interminable runtimes for something more manageable and streamlined?

Amidst the chaos – of the world and this industry – I found myself gravitating to albums that seemed like little shelters in the storm. My favorite album of the year, for instance, is a release that didn’t seem to generate even a modicum of discourse on social media, but I loved it in spite of that fact, or maybe because of it. A lot of the major artists represented on my list, meanwhile, are those who have been more or less left behind by mainstream tastemakers – the broken toys of an industry so obsessed with fetishizing youth and finding the “next big thing” that it routinely overlooks stellar mid-career and late-career work. While my list does make space for more than a few dominant artists of the moment, you can mostly find me out here with the misfits, the sideliners, and past-their-primers. This year, those were my people, and I’m excited to tell you why.

Craig Manning 6 months ago

Can it really be your “first documented, official pop album” if you’ve already released three of the biggest pop albums in recent memory? 10 years ago this weekend, Taylor Swift delivered the answer to that question, and the answer was a decisive, resounding “Yes.”

From the vantage point of 2024, it’s almost difficult to remember any version of Taylor Swift that wasn’t a world-conquering, stadium-tour-dominating pop star. The past two years of Taylormania have so thoroughly dwarfed any other pop star achievement in my lifetime that it’s even a little difficult to think back to pre-COVID times, when it seemed like the Taylor Swift machine was maybe starting to run out of gas. As mid-decade lists pour out from every music publication out there, I expect plenty of debates about what was the quote-unquote “best song” or “best album” of the decade. When it comes to discussing the artist of the decade so far, though, there is simply no debate: it’s Taylor, then it’s 93 million miles, and then it’s everyone else.

But it wasn’t always that way, and in the Taylor Swift story, it’s album number five, 2014’s 1989, that serves as arguably the most important inflection point between phase one Taylor and the force of nature we know today. Per the narrative, Taylor Swift before 2014 was a country star who had crossed over to pop music success but never fully left her Nashville roots behind. 1989, in being her “first documented, official pop album” – the weird phrasing she used to describe the LP when she officially announced it in August 2014 – was the album that made the crossover complete, and solidified Taylor’s status as the world’s biggest musical star in the process.

Craig Manning 6 months ago

It’s a sliding doors moment, the first time you hear a song that stops your heart. If you really think about it, any number of songs, at any number of moments in time, could be the one to change your life. For whatever reason, though, every music fan ends up with one: one song that, under the right mix of timing, circumstance, emotional clarity, and dumb luck, clicks onto your frequency and blows your whole fucking life apart. There will be other songs, after that one – many, many songs, if you’re lucky. But that one song – and that one band, and that one album – will always have a special place in your heart for what it did to kickstart something new inside of you.

I still remember the week that I heard Jimmy Eat World’s “Kill” for the first time. It was a rainy, gloomy October in northern Michigan, and I was an eighth-grade student slowly finding his way toward a deepening interest in music. In the preceding year, I’d even started finding songs that scratched some deep emotional itch in me – even if my not-so-evolved 13-year-old self couldn’t have expressed what it was about Snow Patrol’s “Run” or Nada Surf’s “Inside of Love” or Dashboard Confessional’s “Vindicated” that was making him ache. In other words, I liked music a whole lot, but I hadn’t yet opened myself up to the idea that it could take everything I was feeling deep down inside and set it to words and soundwaves.

The first time I heard “Kill” was on an episode of One Tree Hill, a not-so-well-written teenage soap that, at the time, was in its second season. Right away, I knew the song was special. It was one of those “stop what you’re doing, pay close attention and write down the lyrics so you can Google this later” kind of songs. (We didn’t have Shazam back then.) I just didn’t know how special it would prove to be.

Craig Manning Oct 3, 2024

In the Yellowcard discography, Lift a Sail is the oddity. It’s not a pop-punk album, for one thing – not really even close. There are arena rock songs on this record, and songs inspired by ‘90s alt-rock, and songs with a whole lot of electronic flourishes, and songs that are experimental and minimalist. There are arguably zero songs that sound like the Yellowcard of old: the band with big, bright choruses, and lyrics about summertime, and triumphant electric violin solos, and rapidfire, double-time drums. And speaking of those drums, this record marks Yellowcard’s first without drummer Longineu “LP” Parsons III, whose technical acumen behind the kit was always a strong selling point for many listeners.

For all these reasons and more, Lift a Sail was a tough pill to swallow for a lot of Yellowcard fans when it arrived 10 years ago. I remember the AbsolutePunk.net forums in the days after the album came out, and the divide in the Yellowcard threads about whether it lived up to their legacy. Plenty of fans loved it, and found the departures the band made from their signature sound to be refreshing and invigorating. But another segment of listeners – if we’re being honest, a larger segment – was baffled by what they were hearing. The phrase “sell out” was definitely bandied about, as if no pop-punk band worth its salt could try on electropop flourishes without going artistically bankrupt. A lot of fans missed the pop-punk, missed the summertime vibes, missed the big choruses and the bigger drums. I definitely remember a few users saying that, if LP wasn’t going to be a part of the band’s universe anymore, then they didn’t want to be, either.

Craig Manning Sep 23, 2024

When was the last time it felt like a rock album took over the whole damn world?

For the most part, rock music has not been the defining music of the past two decades. There were exceptions along the way: The Suburbs winning the Grammy for Album of the Year felt like a coronation moment for indie rock. In Rainbows started a conversation around music commerce and distribution that helped shaped the industry we’re living in now…for better and for worse. Albums like Viva La Vida and Stadium Arcadium kept rock on mainstream pop radio and seemed legitimately inescapable for months and months.

But none of those albums hit every marker of a true-blue, world-conquering, era-defining blockbuster – the type of album rock ‘n’ roll used to serve up regularly, before hip-hop and R&B and big-tent pop took its crown. No rock album has checked all those boxes since 20 years ago this weekend. Since American Idiot.

Before this album even came out, it felt seismic – and “seismic” probably wasn’t what anyone was expecting from Green Day at the time. The band had followed a path of diminishing returns (commercially, at least) ever since they’d set the world on fire 10 years previous with Dookie. That album was a bedrock pop-punk classic, an album that laid the groundwork for a sound that became the go-to music in every teenager’s bedroom during the late ‘90s and early 2000s. But Green Day themselves weren’t really part of that turn-of-the-century dominance. While bands like Blink-182 and The Offspring were carving out household name status for themselves, Green Day were making increasingly commercially unviable records, like 1997’s all-over-the-place Nimrod, or 2000’s underrated folk-meets-pop-punk gem Warning. Depending on who you ask, the Green Day that existed at the outset of 2004 were already has-beens, coasting on past glories. They already had a greatest hits album out, after all, and arguably their most enduring song was an acoustic tearjerker that you couldn’t get through any graduation ceremony without hearing at least once. While other bands were carrying the torch Green Day had lit, the Berkeley punks were somehow already elder statesmen. It felt like their chapter of the story was over.

Craig Manning Aug 22, 2024

I think I’d been waiting for it.

Butch Walker released Letters, his second full-length album as a solo artist, on August 24, 2004, two weeks before I started eighth grade. At the time, I was right in the middle of a burgeoning obsession with soundtracking every moment of my life. Music had always mattered to me, but something had clicked during the previous school year and songs had taken on a different level of meaning for me since then. Before, I maybe just liked the way something sounded on the radio. Now, I was falling in love with the way those songs could encapsulate the rhythms of my days and nights. I figured: if movies and TV shows had soundtracks, why shouldn’t my life have one too? And so I’d spent months making mixes for everything: for the end of seventh grade, for my summer vacation, for my family’s annual summer road trip to visit my grandparents in New Hampshire, and for the impending end of the season and all the bittersweet emotions that made me feel.

What I hadn’t done yet was make a mix for a girl. I wasn’t too familiar with the concept of mixtapes – with what a collection of songs could mean when you picked the tracks and sequenced them and packaged them for someone you felt romantic feelings for. Surely, I would have found my way to the art of mixtape-ology no matter what, as all music fans do. How long can you obsess over using music to encapsulate your own internal life before you start thinking about how music can play the role of confessional love note? Probably not long. Before I could get there on my own, though, I found my Jedi Master on the subject of mixtapes, and it changed my entire life.

Craig Manning Aug 15, 2024

When an album breaks a band you love, it gets saddled with a lot of baggage. Most albums are just a chapter in a band’s existence; there were albums before and there will be albums after. But the elephant in the room that music fans like to ignore is that there will always, eventually, be a last album, and a lot of “last albums” aren’t conceived or built to serve that role. When careers cut short because of death, or petty disagreements, or a simple exhaustion of ideas, it’s not usually the poetic ride-off-into-the-sunset conclusion we’d hope for. And yet, despite the randomness that often plays into the endings of musical careers, us music fans obsess over the lore and mythology of our favorite artists so much that we end up conferring significance that isn’t there on albums that just so happen to come at the end of the story.

Such was the case, for years, with Get Hurt, the fifth LP from New Jersey rock band The Gaslight Anthem. Released in August 2014, Get Hurt had the distinction for nearly a decade of being the final album that The Gaslight Anthem ever made. And for me at least, it collected all the baggage, lore, and extra fascination such a distinction entails. A part of me hated the album for breaking up a band I loved, for wasting the boundless potential I’d heard in their music just two years earlier. Another part of me loved it for the mystique of it all – the question of what it was about this particular set of songs that drove these four guys to the brink and forced them to pull the ripcord. To this day, when I listen to Get Hurt, those two parts of me are still in the room together, coexisting – even though, now, the album has been freed from most of the weight it was once tasked with carrying.

Craig Manning Jun 4, 2024

Die-hard Bruce Springsteen fans love to deride Born in the U.S.A. It’s their way of telling you they’re “real” fans, not those jumping on the bandwagon as Bruce blew up. On the contrary, they’re “cultured” enough to prefer the stark landscapes of Nebraska to the dated, synth-blasted ‘80s sound of U.S.A. They use words like “overplayed” and “overproduced” to describe the famed songwriter’s biggest record, while perhaps praising something more obscure like The Ghost of Tom Joad. And they’re probably tired of explaining to their friends that “Born in the U.S.A.,” the song, is not a jingoistic piece of macho rock, but actually a critique of pointless wars.

In general, I don’t get along with these people.

To be fair, Born in the U.S.A. is not Springsteen’s best record. I don’t think I’ve ever met a fan who prefers it to Born to Run, which is my favorite Boss record and my favorite record, period. It also seems pretty universally accepted that U.S.A. is inferior to the records that immediately followed Born to Run: Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River. Those three albums certainly function as the thematic core of Springsteen’s catalog in a way that his later material can’t compete with. But Born in the U.S.A. is also a lot deeper, more nuanced, and more complex than most people make it out to be.

Craig Manning May 6, 2024

There was something in the water in 2004. Not every year delivers even one classic debut album; 2004 was serving them up like it was going out of style. Hot Fuss; Franz Ferdinand; Funeral; Bows + Arrows; The College Dropout. Not all of those albums have aged well, but they all left an indelible mark on music, and most of them delivered at least one iconic hit – the kind of deathless single that will live on forever and ever on wedding dancefloor playlists or supermarket sound systems. I have, at one time or another, loved all of those albums. But in 2004 proper, if you’d have asked me which brand-new artist I was most excited to follow over the course of their career, I would have answered Keane, and I’d have done it without hesitation.

Keane were never going to be cool. They were pitched as the heirs apparent to Coldplay, which is probably a pretty big “strike one” for most tastemakers. They also made big, grandiose soft rock that wore its heart on its sleeve; there was no wit or irony here, just uber-emotional songs about unrequited love and the pains of growing up. Probably fair to call that strike two. And perhaps least cool of all, Keane were a rock band with no guitars. Even Coldplay, as wussy as their reputation would suggest they were, still had songs with Big Ass Guitars. Keane were a three-piece with a singer, a drummer, and a keyboardist, and the pianos were front and center in every single song. Do I even need to say it? Strike three; get outta here!

Craig Manning Apr 5, 2024

What do you do when all the things you thought you could count on betray you? Your religion, your family, your significant other, your society, your own mind? On Mantras, Katie Pruitt finds herself grappling with precisely that question. It’s an album about trying to find a new way to exist and thrive – or maybe just cope – in a world that repeatedly insists on ripping the rug out from under you. It is provocative and relevant and unflinching and so very human. And it is the first genuine masterpiece of 2024.

Pruitt arrived on the scene four years ago with her debut album Expectations, a sublime disc about self-discovery, coming-of-age, and reckoning with a world that is a whole lot darker and crueler than you thought it would be when you were young. Pruitt, who is openly gay and making music adjacent to the infamously conservative and old-fashioned country music industry, wrote candidly on that album about her sexuality and how she’d navigated years of fear, guilt, and yearning for acceptance. Expectations ultimately seemed to sketch out a happy ending to that turmoil: Of the last three songs, one was about her parents accepting her for who she was and the other two were earnest love songs for the woman she was sharing her life with.

Craig Manning Jan 8, 2024

Sometimes, the things you love leave you. Sometimes, those things come back.

Musically, 2023 for me was a year defined by the things I got back. Six of the 30 albums listed below were made by artists or bands I thought would never release music again. All six were artists who played key roles in extremely formative moments of my life; then they all went dormant for extended periods of time. Three of the six had been out of action for a decade or longer; one’s been gone for 23 years. Getting all six back – plus a few other long-awaited returns not represented on this list – felt like a little gift from the music gods, and made 2023 feel so special. There’s a Dawes song I love that goes, “May all your favorite bands stay together.” 2023’s blessing, for me, was more like “May all your favorite bands get back together.”

2023 was also the year that I wandered back out into the live music world, after being extremely hesitant about doing so in 2021 and 2022. While that post-pandemic return to normal didn’t come without its costs – I definitely contracted COVID-19 at a Taylor Swift concert – it felt so wonderful and so life affirming to be a part of a deafeningly-loud audience again. Getting that sensation back in 2023 – and having a couple of my very favorite concert experiences ever along the way – was a gift of its own.

So, here’s to getting things back, whether that’s the bands you love or the kinds of communal live music experiences you weren’t sure you’d ever have again. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the past five years, it’s to never, ever take anything for granted, and I tried to instill that spirit into the making of this list. To quote yet another Dawes lyric, “Most people don’t talk enough about how lucky they are.” Most people also don’t talk enough about why they love the music they love, so here’s 30 albums from 2023 that I love – and more importantly, the “why.”

Craig Manning Sep 14, 2023

What’s the first song you ever loved? If we’re being really honest, the answer for most of us is probably something like “Happy Birthday,” or “Jingle Bells,” or a lullaby our parents sang us when we were young. Maybe it’s something we heard in our favorite childhood TV show or Disney movie, or a nursery rhyme song, or some silly novelty ditty we learned from the other kids at daycare. Me, though? I can’t really remember ever caring about music in any fashion until I heard “Mr. Jones.”

Counting Crows are the closest I can come to saying I’ve loved a band for my entire life. Their debut album, 1993’s August & Everything After, came out 30 years ago today, a few months before my third birthday. At some point, a copy of it came into my family’s possession – and more importantly, into our Ford Expedition. In the backseat, headed home from some family day trip, I watched as my brother slid the album into the CD player and skipped to track 3.

In retrospect, “Mr. Jones” doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that would appeal to a young child’s brain. It’s verbose and meandering and takes forever to get to the chorus. Adam Duritz sings a lot of words that didn’t register any meaning to me at the time: things like “New Amsterdam” and “flamenco dancer” and “Bob Dylan.” And boy, I remember being baffled – truly baffled – by this man’s claim that grey was his favorite color. Surely, he was a liar, or maybe even crazy.

But for as bewildering and strange as I found “Mr. Jones” to be, when the song finally wound around to the hook, it enraptured me. “Mr. Jones and me/Tell each other fairytales/And we stare at the beautiful women/She’s looking at you/Oh, no no, she’s looking at me.” The melody was warm and golden and welcoming, and I fell in love with it right away. Soon, every time I was in that car, I wanted nothing more than to get the CD with the yellow cover out of the center console, skip to track 3, and take that ride again.

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 3: “Hide” by Creed

Let’s leave, oh let’s get away, get lost in time/Where there’s no reason left to hide

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 2: “Hanging By A Moment” by Lifehouse

Desperate for changing, starving for truth/I’m closer to where I started, I’m chasing after you.

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 1: “One Headlight” by The Wallflowers

Craig Manning’s Top Albums of 2024

Review: Taylor Swift – 1989

Review: Jimmy Eat World – Futures

Review: Yellowcard – Lift a Sail

Review: Green Day – American Idiot

Review: Butch Walker – Letters

Review: The Gaslight Anthem – Get Hurt

Review: Bruce Springsteen – Born In The U.S.A.

Review: Keane – Hopes & Fears

Review: Katie Pruitt – Mantras

Craig Manning’s Top Albums of 2023

Review: Counting Crows – August & Everything After