My Life In 35 Songs, Track 14: “Crashin” by Jack’s Mannequin

Even if your voice comes back again, maybe there’ll be no one listening.

It was the only time in my life that I wanted summer to end.

As a kid, you wish summers could last forever. You survey the horizon from the vantage point of mid-June and it feels like you’ve got an entire lifetime’s worth of school-free days ahead of you. Days to be lazy. Days to hang out with friends. Days to spend at the beach, or cruising around your neighborhood on bikes, refusing to waste even a second of daylight. And frankly, as a kid, summers kind of do last forever, simply because two and a half months is still such a significant amount of time in the grand scheme of how long you’ve been alive. Relative to everything else, summer is endless.

As a teenager, you still wish summers could last forever, but you also have enough perspective on time to know that they’ll end up passing you by so much faster than you think. You’ll blink twice and suddenly it will be mid-August, and you’ll be left wondering where all those weeks went. As the onslaught of September and the first day of school approaches, you cling to the remaining 80-degree days and the dwindling summer sunsets like they’re oxygen, because the thought of losing that freedom again and going back to the cloistered halls of your high school feels all wrong.

Growing up, I certainly never thought I’d find myself wishing for summer to hasten its demise, but that’s exactly where I found myself in late August of 2008. For one thing, I didn’t think I could stand one more second working my shitty summer job. But the bigger factor at play was her, the girl I’d spent the summer chasing. At so many moments throughout that season, amidst so many flirtations and longing glances and intoxicated evenings where we got a bit closer than we should have, I thought we were only a matter of time. She’d break up with her boyfriend and choose me, and we’d spend the summer together, making every moment count. But she didn’t break up with her boyfriend, and she didn’t choose me, and before I knew it, we’d run out of time.

I remember her last night in town. She threw a party at her house and invited all our closest friends, giving us all one last hurrah before a bunch of them headed off to college. After we’d both had a few drinks, we slipped away to her backyard and had the most honest conversation we’d ever had. I felt like she’d strung me along for the entire summer, which she admitted was probably true. She felt like I’d put her in an impossible situation, which I admitted was also probably true. We apologized to one another, and she told me I was one of her best friends, and that she didn’t want us to lose that, no matter what. Then we embraced, and that was it: just a little bit of closure for a summer romance that never quite was.

The next day, she left town. A bunch of my other friends would follow as the week went on, hitting the highway toward their new respective college towns. I’d never realized it until that moment, but so many of my best friends the previous school year had been upperclassmen, and now I’d have to go through an entire year of high school without them. If I’d known then what I know now – that I would never be as close with most of them ever again – I might have despaired. Even as it was, I was overcome with melancholy that lingered for the rest of the summer. I still had the better part of two weeks before school started up again, but for me, that summer ended when all my friends packed up and left.

There’s a lot of randomness to the music that ends up meaning something to you over the course of your life. Such was the case for me as that summer drew to a close. The day after that girl left, The Glass Passenger, the sophomore album from Jack’s Mannequin, one of my favorite bands, leaked on the internet. It wasn’t due out for a full six weeks, but here it was, just waiting for me to download it and listen. And so I did.

Like many other fans, I came to Jack’s Mannequin by way of frontman Andrew McMahon’s first band, Something Corporate. I’d fallen in love with the two Something Corporate records, 2002’s Leaving Through the Window and 2003’s North, during the melancholy winter of my freshman year of high school. Those records were great for feeling a little blue in the midst of a cold, barren season. It was only after that winter that I discovered McMahon also had a new band, and that said band’s debut album, 2005’s Everything in Transit, was a rip-roaring, sunburned summer album for the ages. To this day, when June hits and the temperatures crack 80 for the first time, I know it’s not truly “summer” until I’ve given Everything in Transit the requisite season-welcoming listen in the car. It’s an album that, to me, evokes the freedom and possibility of summertime better than any other album ever recorded. “If you left it up to me, every day would be a holiday from real,” McMahon sings on the opening track. If there’s a better encapsulation of how summers feel when you’re young, I haven’t heard it.

The Glass Passenger was a completely different animal: moody, autumnal, a little bit broken. It jibed well with where I was emotionally as the summer of 2008 approached its conclusion. As you might imagine, few records sounded less appealing to me at the time than Everything in Transit. Why would I want to listen to this evocation of summer hope and idealism when my hopes for the summer had all ended up dashed upon the rocks? But McMahon had gone through a life-threatening battle with leukemia since finishing the first Jack’s Mannequin record, and he’d come out on the other side cancer-free and ready to tell the tale. The album he made because of that struggle could hardly be more different from the summertime utopia he’d created on Everything in Transit. And in the moment, “different” was just what I needed.

The Glass Passenger is an album that means the world to me because of when it came to me and what it had to say. Had I heard the album six weeks later, as McMahon and his label intended, I’m sure I still would have loved it, but I doubt it would have felt nearly as vital to me as it did in those dying summer days. But because of the randomness of the universe, The Glass Passenger hit me on the very day I was feeling my lowest, and it served as the life raft that got me to the end of summer – and beyond.

It was The Glass Passenger that was playing on my first day of school, as I fired up my car and drove myself toward a new beginning. It felt weird to be going back. So many of my memories of that school were tied up in people who weren’t going to be there any more – not just that girl, but all my old classmates who’d gone off to bigger and better things. A big part of me felt like I should be gone too. But I also just felt like I’d been shattered by that summer, and that everyone would be able to see the papered-over cracks in my façade when I finally walked back through the doors of that place. Have you ever hurt yourself really badly and then tried to play it cool, only for everyone to look at you like you’re a crazy person because you’re covered in blood? That’s kind of how I felt that first morning.

Luckily, McMahon had the words I needed to hear: “Even if your voice comes back again/Maybe there’ll be no one listening/And even if I find the strength to stand/That doesn’t mean I won’t go missing.” So goes the chorus of “Crashin,” the very first song on The Glass Passenger. McMahon was singing them from the perspective of a man who’d beaten cancer and who was taking the first tentative steps past that soul-shaking battle to whatever brave new world was out there for him now. He sings them with the energy and passion of a person who has a new lease on life, but also with all the fears and doubts that nag at your mind after something shows you how vulnerable you really are.

You can probably imagine how hearing that chorus on that particular day felt to me. I hadn’t gone through anything close to what McMahon had gone through, but I did sense I’d lost the forcefield of perceived invincibility you often carry when you’re young. Going back to school for senior year, I felt a bit like a knight walking out onto the battlefield without his armor, and it was both exhilarating and terrifying. On the one hand, it was good to be getting back out there after I’d spent the final two weeks of summer keeping mostly to myself and wallowing over a girl who left. A part of me felt unencumbered and weightless in a way I hadn’t in ages, just to be breaking that cycle of grayscale loneliness. On the other hand, I was cognizant, suddenly, of the world’s willingness to take a swing at me. What if getting back out there led to another heartbreak, perhaps even a bigger one?

The coming year definitely had heartbreaks. I went through all the “lasts” of high school – my last musical, my last prom, my last choir concert, my last day with my classmates – and some of those goodbyes were truly wrenching. I spent the winter crisscrossing the state of Michigan, auditioning for music programs that mostly rejected me – a reality check that showed me my best wasn’t always going to be good enough. And gradually, that girl drifted away from me, not just as a romantic prospect, but as a friend. I still see her every few years, but we don’t stay in touch, and every time we meet, I’m reminded of a lyric from a different song by a different band: “How’s it going to be/When you don’t know me anymore?”

But senior year also ended up being the best year of my high school experience. My vow from the previous spring, to put myself out there more, carried forth into the school year, and I ended up getting a lot of wonderful memories out of it. I’d never gone to football games, for example, but I started tagging along with friends and spent a few incredible nights under the Friday night lights – and even got quoted in the newspaper as a die-hard “fan” after my school’s victorious homecoming game, an occurrence my mom found utterly hilarious. Simply by saying “yes” a lot more than I said “no,” I had a year full of adventures like that – raucous parties, and nights that led in all sorts of unexpected directions, and even a spring break week where my friends and I mainlined a dozen different movies at the local theater over the course of four days. By the time the year drew to a close, I felt close to so many of my classmates, because I’d shared unforgettable moments with literally dozens of them. It was gratifying to walk across the stage on graduation day feeling like I’d at least gotten the last year of my high school experience just right.

There are two songs that really define that year of my life, and “Crashin” is one of them. (The other, incidentally, is the single most important song in the world to me, but we’ll get there next week.) On that first day of school, I gravitated toward “Crashin” because it seemed to express all the doubts I was carrying around on my shoulders. To my ears, every reservation I had about myself and my ability to carry on was there in the chorus. As the year went on, though, I started hearing my experience more in a different part of the song: verse 3, where McMahon sings, “I wanna hear some music/I have been waiting down here for so long/Trying to write this big music/With your breath on my face/But now you’re gone.”

The girl was gone, but the world kept spinning, and the music played on, and everything that was beautiful before became beautiful again. I’d thought, maybe, that my first real heartbreak would derail me. Instead, it opened my eyes and let me experience more of the colors of the world.