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.

At first, my feeds were full of those reassurances – posts from pundits telling us that it was “still early” and that “the map had looked like this at 11pm in 2020, too.” I tried, hard, to let myself believe that those pundits knew better than I did, that they were making good points. But every time a new batch of votes rolled in, the map just looked worse. And I couldn’t believe it. Foolishly, I had really, truly let myself think that the American people would resist their worst impulses and decide against sending a fascist maniac back to the White House. At minimum, I figured the presidential race would spill over into the following day, if not the following weekend, and that I’d be spared a complete and total existential crisis during my graveyard shift. I didn’t even get that wish.

When I say I was “at work,” I mean that I was sitting in the guest room of my house, with one of my cats on my lap, while my wife slept in our room, still blissfully unaware of just how bad things had gotten in the hours since she’d set her phone aside and turned out the light. My text thread with my equally worried, equally liberal friends had long gone silent, because none of them were duty-bound to stay up through the wee small hours of the morning. It was a startlingly lonely way to watch the world fall apart. I have always hated the burden of knowing bad news before people I love, and it unsettled me to be awake with this knowledge now, knowing that so many people would wake up in the morning and be walloped by what I already knew.

I had three things linking me to sanity that night. The first was my coworker, who was also taking the graveyard shift and working on election coverage. As hope for a Kamala Harris victory evaporated, we commiserated over text about how apocalyptic it all felt. It was good to have at least one person awake who I could vent to.

The second thing that kept me sane was the music that was playing through my headphones. I’d turned to soothing, sad songs that met my mood but still felt like they might be able to ease the sense of dread that was building all throughout my body. That night, I opted for a pair of melancholy Canadians: Donovan Woods and Ken Yates. I think, deep down, it felt good to be hearing from non-Americans at that particular moment in time. The next day, I’d seek solace in old playlists of heartbreaking songs, which will get us to the Weepies song I’m technically writing about this week. More on that in a minute.

The third thing that kept me sane was my cat, Luna, who loves when I have to work late because then we get to have a slumber party in the guest room. Luna, typically, is not what you would describe as an “emotional support animal.” Tears definitely make her uncomfortable. But that night, as I finally shut down my computer, turned off the light, and tried to quiet my troubled mind enough to get something resembling sleep, Luna crawled up next to me and put her paws on my face, as if to try to tell me to keep my chin up and not despair.

Despair certainly dominated my mindset that night, though. Falling asleep seemed impossible, because all I could think about was what would happen now that the American people had willingly elected a person who didn’t even care to hide his tyrannical aspirations. All things being normal, I would have fretted about the vanishing hours of the night – about the morning coming and me not being well-rested enough to take on the day. I didn’t care about any of that on this occasion, though, because for the first time ever, I felt like the sun might not rise in the morning. And for the first time ever, I thought it might be for the best if it didn’t.

When I was getting started on this project, I thought this Weepies song would end up being a placeholder. How do you decide the grand finale of a “defining songs of my life so far” series nine months in advance? Surely something big would happen in my life in 2025 that would demand an audible, and I’d swap in a different song for this final slot to commemorate that occasion, whatever it was. And I hoped, truly, that this song and the sense of worn-out despair it exudes, wouldn’t feel as appropriate in November as it did in January. But here we are, on my 35th birthday, and I still can’t think of a song that would do better justice to what this last year of my life felt like than a song that begins with the line “Woke up, and wished that I was dead.”

The Weepies, for those unfamiliar, were an indie-folk duo from Massachusetts who came to prominence as part of the mid-2000s gold rush of television soundtracks. For a few years there, Weepies songs were popping up on seemingly every primetime drama series, from One Tree Hill to Grey’s Anatomy to Everwood to Kyle XY. The band’s music was animated by the real-life marriage between members Deb Talan and Steven Tannen, and most Weepies songs are sweet, aching duets about love. But the most famous Weepies song is this sad, despairing, resigned acoustic ballad from their 2006 album Say I Am You. On record, it’s a breakup song, sung from the perspective of a guy who fucked everything up in his relationship and is now regretting it. On the morning after Election Day, though, I heard the song as the purest encapsulation of the apocalyptic feeling I had in my tired bones and my aching head as I woke up from my dismal sleep hoping against hope that everything that had happened the night before had just been a bad, bad dream.

“Woke up and wished that I was dead.” I’d loved this song for 18 years at that point, and had heard that line many, many times, but I’d never related to it in the way I did as I tried to find the motivation just to get out of bed. What was the point in carrying on when my country had just chosen hate and fear and stupidity and narrow-mindedness over progress and empathy and sanity?

It reminded me of September 11, when the very thought of doing normal things in the aftermath of that epically tragic historic event seemed ludicrous. I was only in fifth grade when the towers went down, and even I felt the strangeness of going about the usual routine of waking up and going to school of September 12. I can only imagine how it felt to be a working adult and to be expected to care about any of the mundane job responsibilities you’d cared about just 24 hours before.

November 7, 2025 felt similar to me, but actually less hopeful. In the immediate wake of September 11, Americans were still telling themselves the lie that this adversity would unite us. In reality, it bred massive levels of weaponized patriotism and self-righteous xenophobia – two of the core ingredients that led to Trumpism, and ultimately, fascism. On September 12, 2001, my naïve 10-year-old self still believed in the promise of America; on November 7, 2025, I buried the very last vestiges of that belief.

How do you find a way to carry on when your hope for a brighter future is a smoldering wreckage? How do you pick yourself up off the floor when all precedents have been shattered, and when your fellow citizens have handed your country over into the hands of a dictator? How do you learn to find light and beauty in the world again, when it feels like darkness has covered everything?

“At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall.”

Those words were written by Karl Paulnack, the former director of the music division at Boston Conservatory, in a speech he once gave to the parents of incoming music students. Paulnack was trying to explain to nervous moms and dads why their children’s decisions to go after a life in music weren’t mistakes. He was trying to convey why music matters to the fabric of the world, and why the choice to pursue it professionally is noble, if not downright heroic. And to explain, he called upon his own memories of living in New York City on September 11.

He continues:

“The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses. People sang ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Lots of people sang ‘America the Beautiful.’ The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The U.S. Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.”

I tend to think of those words a lot in trying times. I referenced Paulnack’s address five years ago, when I wrote a piece called “Why Music Still Matters” in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. I definitely thought of it the day after Donald Trump won his second presidency, when I felt like I was ready to give up completely on the rest of humankind. As has usually been the case in my life, it was music that seemed to get the world spinning again for me that day. In the afternoon, I bowed out of work early – appropriate, I think, given that I’d been up working until 3am – and collapsed into bed for a nap. Another one of my cats, Koshka, came and crawled onto my chest, lulling me to sleep with her purrs, and I turned on a playlist of soothing acoustic songs to slow my heartbeat and my mind. And those songs – even when they were sad, like “World Spins Madly On” – reminded me that, while humans are capable of extreme folly, they are also still capable of creating some of the most beautiful things imaginable.

That night, my wife and I got together with our friends, and we talked and drank and listened to music and laughed and held each other close, and it felt like maybe things could still be OK. If we all stayed true to each other, and continued to fight injustice and hate and ignorance in our own small ways, maybe we could be a part of building a better tomorrow, even in one of our nation’s darkest moments. Maybe there could still be beauty in the world, and in our lives. Maybe.

The year since has done plenty to extinguish the flame of rebellious hope I felt that night, but it’s also done a lot to remind me that the world we live in is worth fighting for. My brother survived a life-threatening medical emergency, by the grace of whatever power or force you want to thank for miracles. My sister gave birth to a beautiful baby boy, and he’s happy and healthy despite a premature arrival. My wife sold her first novel to a major publisher, a major dream come true for her after years and years of hard work and hard heartbreak. And then there are the things that seem small but really aren’t – like the nights out with friends that heal my soul for another day in the trenches, or the new albums and concerts that remind me why I fell in love with music in the first place, or the glimpses of kindness out in the world that keep me, in their own small way, from giving up.

I wish I had a happier end to this series than this. I wish I could exchange some of the existential dread of this moment for some of the unbridled hope I felt when I was young and just discovering music for the first time. One of the bizarre things about writing these essays has been realizing, with each passing week, how much more complex things get when you grow up. That seems basic and obvious on paper, but when you’re young, the world seems so big and technicolor and explosively emotional, to the point where you can’t imagine anything ever hurting as much, or feeling as good, or being as real. So many of my formative music moments came in my teen years, and I expected that the essays focused on those years would be the heart of this story I’ve told over the past 35 weeks. In reality, though, the essays just got longer, and deeper, and thornier, to reflect a life that was getting longer, and deeper, and thornier.

There’s a line from the TV show The Good Place about how human beings are “all a little bit sad, all the time,” because we are aware of the eventuality of death. I think I’m a little bit sad all the time not just because of the impermanence of all of this, but also because of the fragility of it, and the ease with which it could all be broken. These days, I can’t help but feel like we as a species have broken or are in the process of breaking a lot of things, from the way we communicate with one another and share space in a society, to the very planet we call home. There is a terrible weight to living in 2025, and it just seems to get heavier and heavier. It’s maddening, and heartbreaking, and scary, and it’s not a dream we get to wake up from.

But I guess it’s telling that I’ve still found the strength to get up out of bed every day since that terrible night last November. And life in the past year hasn’t been good, or bad, or anything absolute. Instead, life has just been – a series of cascading moments where I could find myself in absolute triumphant joy one moment and total existential dread the next.

If you’d have told me 20 years ago that life at 35 would be so kaleidoscopic and bizarre, I think I’d have been deeply discouraged by that. Growing up, we all hope that we’re eventually going to reach that utopian ideal where everything is comfortable and easy and beautiful all the time. That we’re going to “get to that place where we really want to go, and we’ll walk in the sun,” as Bruce Springsteen sings in “Born to Run.” And maybe, if Donald Trump had never won the White House, that’s how things would be. I don’t know, because a whole other life I might have lived vanished in November 2016, and then vanished again in November 2024. I’ll never get to know what those versions of my existence would have looked like.

But as a marathoner, I’m good and used to putting one foot in front of the other – even when it sucks, even when it hurts, even when I’m tired and sore and broken down and screaming with every fiber of my being to give the fuck up. I know how to fight back against that voice in my head – to endure, to overcome, to fight until I get to that finish line where the joy will flood back into me again. And so, I’ll keep putting one foot in front of the other, and I’ll keep fighting, and I’ll keep not giving up. And I’ll keep the living the best life that I know how to live…

Even as the world spins madly on.

The post-script:

I just wanted to say a small thank you to anyone who has read a single word of this series, let alone those of you who have all 73,000-plus words of it. Writing these essays has been the most emotionally fulfilling creative project I have ever undertaken. I started this whole thing with the goal of showing how profound music can be for those of us who allow ourselves to love it with every fiber of who we are. In an era where so many people treat music as window dressing – as something to be enjoyed passingly, in the background – I wanted to try to capture how thoroughly my existence has been shaped and enriched by letting songs take up residence in my life as living, breathing things.

It was an ambitious task, and this project has proved so much harder than I ever would have thought, because it involved putting into words both the most transcendently joyful moments of my life and the most painfully sad ones. But every single time I felt nervous about sharing something because it felt too personal, I got a reminder that I was on the right track. So many people have told me they related deeply to different parts of my story. I’ve reconnected with old friends by sharing essays that recounted the things we experienced together years and years ago. Thanks to one of these essays, the dinner theater crew I worked with in college is even reuniting for a string of Christmas shows this holiday season. I could write a whole bonus essay, just about all the positive things this writing project has brought into my life.

Certainly, there are plenty more songs I could write deeply personal things about, and so many artists I loved who didn’t get a track on this particular mixtape: to name a few, Matt Nathanson, Third Eye Blind, Kacey Musgraves, The Killers, Billy Joel, Chad Perrone, Oasis, Keane, Lori McKenna, Green Day, Dawes, Death Cab for Cutie, Katie Pruitt, and R.E.M. A few weeks ago, one reader suggest that I “run this series back with the next 35 songs.” Maybe someday I’ll do something like that. For now, though, I feel immensely proud to close the book and call this project complete.

Until the next time, and the next song…

Past Installments: