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

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.

Craig Manning 4 months ago

I’ve never been more ready to move on.

I felt like I was escaping from prison.

In the car, fleeing campus at the end of my sophomore year of college, I got a legitimate adrenaline jolt, because a part of me couldn’t believe that this long, arduous year was finally drawing to a close. 12 months earlier, I’d pulled away from my freshman dorm feeling positive about college and extremely hopeful about the summer to come. Now, I wondered in the back of my mind whether I’d ever come back to this school again. Why had that one year made such a difference?

Fortunately, I still had a lot of hope for the summertime. For months, I’d had this day circled on the calendar, a mental “finish line” where everything that had been out of whack in my life would click back into place. I’d go back home; my girlfriend Jillian and I would be reunited; I’d go back to the summer job I loved, performing at the local dinner theater; winter would finally lose its oppressive hold on Michigan and I’d get to roll down the car windows and feel the wind blow back my hair as I blasted summertime songs on the stereo.

I even already had a summertime soundtrack picked out. On March 22, 2011, Yellowcard, one of the preeminent “summer soundtrack” bands of my youth, had released their first new album in four years. Called When You’re Through Thinking, Say Yes, the album was packed with big anthems that were begging for precisely the type of windows-down car rides I mentioned above. There’s even a song on that album, called “With You Around,” where the chorus goes “All I can think about is you and me driving with a Saves the Day record on/We were singing ’til our voices were gone.” I listened to that album on repeat during my final month of sophomore year, trying to will summertime to get here a little faster, because I’d never needed it more.

Craig Manning 4 months ago

Days like that should last and last and last…

I treat end-of-summer songs the way most people treat Christmas music.

There is an entire segment of the music industry that is built around the fact that, for at least a month at the end of every year, a significant percentage of the music-listening population only wants to hear holiday songs. It’s why Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” will have an annual stint atop of Billboard charts from now until the end of time, and why Spotify Wrapped cuts off streaming stats for its users around Halloween. The last six weeks of the year is holiday music season.

Well, for me, August is end-of-summer music season. I have an entire playlist of songs that I associate solely with the fading of Earth’s most glorious season. Most of those songs, just like Christmas carols, sound wildly out of place to me if I hear them at any other time of year. But play them for me in August, especially in those last two weeks before Labor Day, and my heart will ache with all the melancholy of watching another summer die.

No song on the planet captures the sweet, sad feeling of summer’s end better than Dashboard Confessional’s “Dusk and Summer,” and its perennial re-entry into my life has made it one of my most cherished songs of all time. To tell that story, I have to break with the typical mold of this essay series – most parts so far have focused in on one specific memory or period of time – and explain the evolution of my end-of-summer ritual, and how music came to be a core part of it.

Craig Manning 5 months ago

Photograph, remembering the summer…

I could feel it in my bones.

Driving home from college after successfully completing my freshman year, something told me that I was in for a banner summer. The calendar hadn’t even flipped over from April to May yet, but the air was warm and the sun was beating down and my car windows were open and the music was blaring. Getting off the highway, it felt like my hometown was welcoming me back with open arms. Somehow, I just knew I was about to live the greatest summer of my life.

I’m no great believer in clairvoyance, but my premonition that day is absolutely the closest I’ve ever come to predicting the future. Because, as it turned out, the summer of 2010 was the summer I fell in love with the girl I was going to marry.

There’s a special gravity to the albums and songs you hear for the first time right around the start of any new relationship, but that counts for double when it’s the relationship that’s going to last for the long haul. Such was the case for me with Black & White, the second album from Arizona rock band The Maine.

The Maine had come up as part of the “neon pop-punk” wave of the late-2000s, a micro-movement defined by uber-poppy, glossily-produced rock songs that sounded so bright you could almost hear the saturated colors in the music. Fast-forward to 2025 and The Maine have outlasted every other vestige of that movement, evolving into a widely-respected independent rock band whose music folds in influences ranging from Third Eye Blind to new wave to Americana. These days, they are one of my very favorite bands. Back in 2010, though, they were only barely on my radar.

Craig Manning 5 months ago

If I told you the reasons why, would you leave your life and ride?

“College sucks, but you’re also not trying.”

That quote comes from the 2020 film Shithouse, the directorial debut of indie filmmaker Cooper Raiff, and my favorite movie of the decade so far. The movie is about Alex’s struggles to find a place and make friends at college, and about the nagging homesickness that prevents him from fully throwing himself into his new environment. Along the way, he strikes up a romance with his RA, a girl named Maggie, and it breaks him out of his shell.

I didn’t see Shithouse until 2022, two years after it came out and more than 12 years after my own college freshman year. When I did, though, it absolutely leveled me. I cannot recall any movie I’ve ever seen that I related to more strongly. My journey wasn’t exactly like Alex’s, but I saw so much of myself and my own first-year-of-college loneliness in that character. It felt like Cooper Raiff had made a movie about my life.

For some people, freshman year of college is an awakening. It’s when they cut loose, let their guard down, shed their former self, make a ton of new friends, chase down a few romances, and have some of their life’s most unforgettable adventures.

I was not one of those people.

My first year of college was, bar none, the loneliest period of my life. Growing up, I always struggled with being shy and reserved, which made it hard, sometimes, to make friends. By the end of high school, I thought I’d successfully eliminated that side of myself. I’d become more outgoing, more approachable, more open to meeting new people, and the outcome had been a wonderful group of friends that made my senior year feel like one big, long party.

Adam Grundy 5 months ago

Recently, I was able to schedule some Zoom calls with Idobi Radio Summer School Tour artists Taylor Acorn, Charlotte Sands, and Arrows In Action to ask them about what they’re most looking forward to once the trek kicks off today (July 11th). In these full interviews with each artist, I asked each of them about their own “summer school” experiences as kids, the music they have been working on, and what to look forward to from each of them once the tour wraps up. Idobi Radio’s Summer School starts now, and there are still a few tickets available here.

Craig Manning 5 months ago

Go on and take a shot, go give it all you got.

I’m 30 miles from home and I’m crying my eyes out. For some reason, I didn’t expect to feel this way about leaving home and heading off to college for the first time. I’ve already said all my goodbyes to friends, and I know I’ll see most of them in just a few months when we all come home for Thanksgiving. My mom is in the car ahead of mine, accompanying me to Western Michigan University with a car load of stuff for my dorm room. The “family caravan” nature of this drive has kept the “leaving home” moment from feeling like too much of a clean break, at least for the next few hours. Plus, I know I’ll be back home in just a couple of days for a holiday weekend with family, before school starts. But I’m crying anyway, and it has everything to do with the song that’s coming through my speakers.

In case it hasn’t become abundantly clear, I am the type to obsessively soundtrack moments of my life that feel significant. The fact that I took pains to make sure a specific song got played at my eighth-grade graduation ceremony might be the most signature “me” moment of my entire life. I have very rarely left a milestone moment of my existence up to chance when it came to the music that was playing in the background. But that morning heading off to school is something of an exception, because an album I’d been waiting for all summer long had leaked on the internet literal minutes before I started packing my car. I’d downloaded it quickly before shutting down my computer and stowing it in my backpack for the drive, and the album in question is now playing at full volume through the stereo of my Honda Civic, courtesy of my iPod and an FM transmitter.

The album is Love Drunk, the sophomore LP from Massachusetts-hailing pop-punk band Boys Like Girls. If you’ll recall, I’ve already mentioned Boys Like Girls once in this series, as one of the two opening acts that warmed up the stage for Butch Walker when I first saw him in 2006. The band’s self-titled debut album came out a few months after that show and blew them up to mainstream success, courtesy of big, beating-heart anthems like “The Great Escape” and “Thunder,” both of which sound like youthful summer idealism. Boys Like Girls were such a big deal by the time 2009 rolled around that they had a certain pop-country sensation named Taylor Swift crossing over and duetting on their new album’s track-four acoustic ballad, called “Two Is Better Than One.” At the time, though, I didn’t care much about Taylor Swift (blasphemy, I know); I just cared that the title track lead single from Love Drunk was one of the most massive-sounding pop-rock songs I’d ever heard.

Jason Tate 5 months ago

I am starting to feel like these “time to rank things” lists pop back up on me quicker and quicker each year. We are once again halfway through the year, and that means it’s time to reflect on the best albums of the year (so far). Below, you will find both our combined staff top 30, as well as individual lists from our contributors and moderators. We hope you’ll find something new to love.

Note: You can share your own list in our music forum.

Craig Manning 5 months ago

Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night

Saturday, May 30, 2009: that was the last night I ever performed on my high school stage. By that point, I’d set foot on that stage countless times: for musicals and choir concerts, for performances in front of school district administrators, for so many hours of rehearsals and practices. It got to be the kind of thing that you experience so many times you start to take it for granted. And then, suddenly, that story was over, and I was trying to wrap my head around how the place that had made me into a musician was about to be in my rearview.

“It’s a town full of losers, I’m pulling out of here to win.”

Those were the last words I ever sang on that stage by myself. There were other words that I shared, singing in harmony with fellow classmates. But that line, the iconic sign-off of Bruce Springsteen’s greatest song, became my sign-off, at least for my musical journey at that school and, really, for my entire high school experience.

On paper, it’s an appropriate line for a big coming-of-age moment. Sequenced at the very top of 1975’s Born to Run, “Thunder Road” is the Boss’s bold, brash invitation for a girl to run away with him. “My car’s out back if you’re ready to take that long walk/From your front porch to my front seat,” he sings at one point. Later, as the song barrels into its final verse, Springsteen ups the stakes: this town is crawling with ghosts, and if you stay here, the promise of your youth will be spent; “Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet.” So get in the car, baby, and let’s drive. Let’s drive so fast and so far that they can’t possibly follow us. Let’s get out of this town and never, ever look back.

Jason Tate 5 months ago

Sun’s out, newsletter’s out. This week’s supporter Q&A post can be found here.

If you’d like this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week (it’s free and available to everyone), you can sign up here.

Adam Grundy 5 months ago

I have to admit that I rolled my eyes a bit at the thought of remixing/remastering what I consider to be one of the most sonically dynamic records this scene has ever had the privilege of calling our own: My Chemical Romance’s Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge. How exactly do you make any improvements to a classic recording? The answer was found out quickly when I first put my ears around the 2025 remix/remaster of Three Cheers. Instead of just making it louder, the original mixer of the record (Rich Costey) used the original source files that were carefully stored away by veteran producer Howard Benson to fully revamp the overall sound that comes out of the speakers when you hit “play.” This article will not be so much of a review per se of the Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge record, as I originally did the retrospective review a few years back, as much as it is a deep dive into the overall package that is presented here in 2025.

Craig Manning 5 months ago

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.

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.

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 20: “The Sound of You and Me” by Yellowcard

I’ve never been more ready to move on.

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 19: “Dusk and Summer” by Dashboard Confessional

Days like that should last and last and last…

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 18: “Growing Up” by The Maine

Photograph, remembering the summer…

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 17: “Ride” by Cary Brothers

If I told you the reasons why, would you leave your life and ride?

Interview: Idobi Radio Summer School Tour Preview

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 16: “Go” by Boys Like Girls

Go on and take a shot, go give it all you got.

The Best Albums of 2025 (So Far)

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 15: “Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen

Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night

Liner Notes (June 28th, 2025)

Thank You For The (New) Venom: An Analysis of My Chemical Romance’s 2025 ‘Three Cheers’ Remix

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.