My Life In 35 Songs, Track 9: “When Canyons Ruled the City”

It felt like an earthquake when she’d shout.

It’s August 1, 2006. I’m 15 years old. I’m on vacation with my family at a secluded, off-the-beaten path vacation spot on the shores of Lake Michigan. My brother, his best friend Frank, and I have tickets to see Butch Walker play a show this evening. We’ve got a three-hour drive straight across the state ahead of us before we can walk through the doors of a sweaty, rundown club right in the heart of downtown Detroit for some loud-as-fuck rock ‘n’ roll. Oh, and it’s the hottest damn day of the year.

Such is the setup for my first-ever concert experience.

Butch Walker isn’t a household name, though I’d wager that just about everyone with a pulse has heard a song he’s written or produced. In the broader context of the music world, Butch is best known as a collaborator, and for the role he’s played in songs and records by everyone from Avril Lavigne to Weezer to Fall Out Boy to Katy Perry. In the context of my musical journey, though, Butch might be the single most important figure of all. From the moment I heard his 2004 album Letters in the winter of my eighth-grade year, nothing was ever quite the same again. Butch had this singular ability to exude not-to-be-fucked-with attitude, approachable wisecracking wit, and heart-on-the-sleeve emotion, all at the same time. To my eyes and ears, he was the coolest guy in school and the soulful poet, a guy whose tatted-up arms and long hair made it all the more surprising when he hit you with a wrenching piano ballad or a smart, insightful breakup song. Letters changed my life because it showed me how versatile songwriting could be. The songs were funny, rousing, self-deprecating, heartbreaking, and 100 percent honest, and I loved them more immediately than I’d ever loved any other music in my life.

Letters was the closest I’d ever come to hearing someone turn their diary pages into music, and that authentic realness drew me to Butch and made me a fan for life. Soon, I was delving into Butch’s back pages. There was his previous record, 2002’s Left of Self-Centered, and its crunchy, sarcastic, ultra-melodic pop-punk-leaning songs. There was his former band, Marvelous 3, who’d made candy-colored power-pop songs in the ‘90s and then pivoted to skyscraping arena rock at the dawn of the new millennium. I even dug into his live albums and b-sides, devouring every scrap of music I could get my hands on. In particular, I loved This Is Me…Justified and Stripped, an acoustic live record he’d recorded in the leadup to Letters that made him sound like the most entertaining showman on the planet. I’d never been to a rock concert in my life, but I knew very early on that seeing a Butch Walker show had to be on my bucket list.

When that opportunity came along in the summer of 2006, it was even more special than I ever could have imagined. But to explain that part of the story, I have to rewind a bit.

Craig Manning 1 week ago

Turning to face what you’ve become, bury the ashes of someone…

I love the way it breaks the silence.

If you’ve never heard “Feeling a Moment” before, do yourself a favor and click play on that YouTube video down below, or go cue it up on your preferred streaming service. You’ll hear what I mean: a few seconds of something played backwards, and then a torrent of sound – an electric guitar strum and a wordless wail. For me, it is the sound of everything I was feeling at the start of my ninth-grade year: nerves, excitement, anticipation, self-belief and self-doubt in equal measure, and more than a little bit of fear.

Because what’s scarier than a totally new frontier? I’ve got the answer: being dropped into said new frontier in your early teens.

Craig Manning 2 weeks ago

You’re packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been.

I don’t like endings or goodbyes, but I love songs about them. That’s something that will become abundantly clear as this series continues, if it’s not clear already. And there are very few songs about endings or goodbyes that matter more to me more than “Walk On,” an utterly splendid highlight from U2’s 2000 comeback album, All That You Can’t Leave Behind.

Up until 2004, almost all the music I loved had been made in my lifetime. I was drawn to the music of right now, often finding older songs or records to sound dated. I remember listening to Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. at some point and thinking it sounded positively ancient. (Sorry, Boss!) All those ‘80s synthesizers struck me as plasticky and passe, and I struggled to appreciate the songs underneath. It wasn’t just ‘80s synths that made my no-fly list either: I checked out The Beatles’ Rubber Soul around that same time, and found it to sound hopelessly old-fashioned.

In 2004, U2 became the first band to break through that barrier for me. It didn’t hurt, of course, that they were still a relevant band of the moment. They’d had massive hits in 2000 and 2001 with “Beautiful Day” and “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of”; in 2002, they’d played a Super Bowl halftime show – for my money, the greatest one of all time, with apologies to Prince; and they were currently enjoying a new level of omnipresence thanks to a stylish iPod commercial, featuring their new single “Vertigo,” that got played on every single ad break of every single prime time television program for approximately 3-6 months.

Craig Manning 3 weeks ago

When you try your best, but you don’t succeed…

I don’t have any scientific way of proving this, but I’d wager that Coldplay’s “Fix You” is the most iconic and impactful stadium rock anthem of the 21st century.

Before it ever got played in a single stadium, though, “Fix You” was something else: my first-ever heartbreak song. And to get to that particular milestone in my life, we have to talk about a hilarious subject: romantic adolescent angst.

Look, I’m sure there are some people who meet their soulmates as kids or preteens and have super cute love stories from their “awkward years.” For the rest of us, though, that stretch from whenever you discover your hormones to whenever you get mature enough to handle them is an absolute cringefest. I say all this as someone who definitely thought he was “in love” in eighth grade, and who definitely made an absolute mockery out of himself in pursuit of this supposed “love story.” Better yet, it was a “love triangle,” with the girl who I had a crush on and another classmate who also swore their “love” for her.

The entire silly affair ultimately came to a conclusion on our eighth-grade class field trip, when she chose…well, not me. At the time, it felt like a massive blow: like my first real heartbreak. But as someone who’d spent that entire school year listening to songs about heartbreak, it also felt like I was joining some exclusive club. I now had the honor of knowing what all my favorite songs were talking about, and that felt important.

Craig Manning 4 weeks ago

I can’t help it baby, this is who I am; sorry, but I can’t just go turn off how I feel.

You can’t make me leave. You can’t, you can’t, you can’t.

In October of 2004, for two weeks that felt like a lifetime, my parents briefly entertained the notion of uprooting our family and moving us somewhere new. I know that’s something that a lot of kids have to deal with growing up, but it had never even been on my radar before that fall. I’d lived in the same town since I was three years old, and I’d been with the same group of classmates since first grade. I’d also watched my older siblings go through the local high school, and I already had a lot of ideas for how I wanted to follow (or diverge from) their footsteps when I got there. It never occurred to me that my immediate future might be spent anywhere other than this town.

There was also a girl – the first girl from school I’d ever developed a real, yearning, aching kind of crush for. I probably thought I was in love with her, because what else do you do with those kinds of feelings when you’re 13 years old and you’ve never experienced anything like them before? What’s love if not those fluttering butterflies you feel in your stomach every time you see that other person? I definitely wondered whether there could be some big, grand future in store for me and her, somewhere down the road.

Craig Manning 1 month ago

And if you never stop when you wave goodbye, you just might find if you give it time, you will wave hello again…

I was a man on a mission. I had about 20 minutes to myself in the local mall while my mom and sister went off to shop for something, and I knew I was going to need every one of them to accomplish my task.

Walking briskly, I dodged around families with young children and groups of lackadaisical teenagers, making my way across this crowded retail mecca to find my destination: FYE, with its rows and rows of pristinely shrink-wrapped CD and DVD cases. The album I was looking for had just dropped that week, so it was right there at the front of the shop, just waiting for me to pick it up off the shelf. Then, I made my way to one of the listening stations, where you could scan the barcode of the CD you were thinking about buying, put on a pair of communal over-the-ear headphones (in retrospect, eww!), and sample the tracks. A quick listen through various clips from the album confirmed that it had more to offer than the lead single I’d had stuck in my head for weeks. And so, convinced, I marched up to the checkout counter and handed the cashier $15 or so of my hard-earned cash. It was the first CD I’d ever bought with my own money.

The date was Sunday, September 14, 2003, and the album was Heavier Things, John Mayer’s sophomore follow-up to the 2001 smash Room for Squares. At most, I’ll say I’d been a casual fan of Squares: I liked most of the songs, but none of them had become obsessions in the year or two since my sister had gotten a copy of the CD for one of her birthdays. But “Bigger Than My Body,” the lead single from Heavier Things, had absolutely become an obsession since it had dropped on August 25. That song had a dynamite earworm chorus and some of the coolest guitarwork my 12-year-old ears had ever heard on a pop single, and I was tired of holding my breath and hoping I’d hear the on the radio or catch the video while flipping channels after school. I needed to be able to hear “Bigger Than My Body” whenever I wanted, and it led me to do something I’d never done before, but would do many, many, many times in the decades to follow; it led me to buy the album.

For the next two months, I listened to Heavier Things every single day when I got home from school. It was just part of the routine: get home, fire up my portable CD player, hear those opening piano strains of “Clarity,” and do my homework while the album played. I loved Heavier Things right away, but I came to develop an extremely meaningful bond with it over the course of that fall, as I listened over and over again. I was particularly taken with a pair of songs in the second half: “Split Screen Sadness” and “Wheel.” Both are ballads and both are songs about goodbyes – albeit, different kinds of goodbyes.

Craig Manning 1 month ago

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 2 months 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 months 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 4 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 Oct 25, 2024

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 Oct 19, 2024

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.

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 9: “When Canyons Ruled the City”

It felt like an earthquake when she’d shout.

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 8: “Feeling a Moment” by Feeder

Turning to face what you’ve become, bury the ashes of someone…

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 7: “Walk On” by U2

You’re packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been.

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 6: “Fix You” by Coldplay

When you try your best, but you don’t succeed…

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 5: “Kill” by Jimmy Eat World

I can’t help it baby, this is who I am; sorry, but I can’t just go turn off how I feel.

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 4: “Wheel” by John Mayer

And if you never stop when you wave goodbye, you just might find if you give it time, you will wave hello 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