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My Life In 35 Songs, Track 13: “Someone Like You” by SafetySuit

My Life in 35 Songs
Craig Manning

Can you see me, holding you right in my arms?

Fast cars, loud music, and summertime: These are a few of my favorite things.

I have long been obsessed with the way a windows-down summer car ride can turn a song transcendent. Hearing the right song when you’re cruising down the road without a care in the world? In my opinion, there’s not much in the world that can make you feel more boundless. It’s something about the volume of the music in the car, the way it surrounds you, the reverberations you can feel coursing through the seats, the armrests, the steering wheel, your entire body. It’s something about the wind in your hair, and the sunshine, and the way the summer air smells. It’s definitely something about the freedom summertime brings, especially when you’re young, and especially when you’ve got wheels. Combine all these things with the right song, and it will sound as good as anything you have ever heard.

That’s what I learned at the outset of summer 2008, the first time I listened to the SafetySuit album Life Left to Go in the car. I’d gotten my driver’s license the previous summer, but this would be my first summer with my own car, and it wasn’t lost on me what that meant. That old cliché about wheels giving you wings might be overused, but it’s also accurate, because having a car unlocks so much when you’re a teenager. I didn’t know what the summer was going to bring, but I’d already made up my mind that I was going to make it count, and the freedom of having my own means of transportation was absolutely at the center of that pledge. All I needed was the right song to consecrate my vow. Enter SafetySuit.

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My Life In 35 Songs, Track 12: “Come Around” by Counting Crows

My Life in 35 Songs
Craig Manning

I have waited for tomorrow from December ‘til today, and I have started loving sorrow along the way.

“I’ll believe it exists when I’m holding it in my hands.”

For six months, I repeated those words to myself like they were a self-help mantra. I was talking about the supposedly brand-new album from Counting Crows, which was set to drop on March 25, 2008 after a long, long hiatus. The band had teased the LP the previous fall with the release of “Cowboys,” a loud, bitter, rip-roaring rocker that sounded like the reincarnated version of their 1996 cult classic Recovering the Satellites. I loved that sound and how energized it felt, but then again, I probably would have loved anything coming out of the Counting Crows camp at that point. In the moment, the band’s newest song was “Accidentally in Love,” the Oscar-nominated hit from 2004’s Shrek 2, and their newest album was 2002’s Hard Candy. They had, in other words, been away for a while.

I was convinced that I’d somehow cursed the Crows. As a kid, “Mr. Jones” was the first rock song I’d ever loved, and the band’s moody, melodic roots rock, for me, became synonymous with growing up. But I’d fallen head over heels in love with their music with the 2003 best-of collection Films About Ghosts, which recontextualized those ‘90s hits in exciting ways and unearthed a series of rich, remarkably written deep cuts – songs like the searching title track from Recovering the Satellites, the epic “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby” from 1999’s This Desert Life, or the simultaneously sad and funny “Holiday in Spain” from Hard Candy – that made me realize there was probably a lot more to this band than what got played on the radio.

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My Life In 35 Songs, Track 11: “Breaking Free” from High School Musical

My Life in 35 Songs
Craig Manning

You know the world can see us in a way that’s different than who we are…

Look, I know what you’re thinking, but let me explain! This is the one song that, for just a couple of weeks, made me feel like a pop star.

By day, I was just another 11th grade high school student. I rolled out of bed every morning at 6am to make it to school on time for my zero-hour AP Biology block, then muddled through the rest of my classes. Most aspects of my day-to-day life felt, at best, mundane.

But in the evenings, for two weeks in November 2007, I felt like a legitimate, big-deal famous person. The stage, the spotlight, the recognizable songs, the photo in the newspaper, the “sold out” stickers on the posters, the extremely loud cheers from the audience, the autographs, the flowers and other tokens of appreciation from fans. It all added up to this little taste of how it feels for everyone to adore you, and it was intoxicating.

“Breaking Free,” for those not familiar, is the climactic song and most famous moment from High School Musical, the 2006 Disney Channel Original Movie that somehow morphed from a Friday evening special aired in the middle of January to an absolute cultural phenomenon. There had been dozens of Disney Channel Original movies before, but none of them had ever broken containment like this one did. The High School Musical soundtrack album moved 3.7 million copies in 2006 alone, becoming that year’s top-selling album. For some perspective on how big that number is, no Taylor Swift album has never had a bigger calendar year sales tally in the United States than High School Musical did in 2006.

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My Life In 35 Songs, Track 10: “Truth Is” by Sister Hazel

My Life in 35 Songs
Craig Manning

I stole my first kiss underneath her summer sun, how can I leave?

It’s occurred to me in recent years that, had I been born just a couple years earlier, my music taste would likely have been entirely entirely different. Maybe I would have formed a connection with the grunge craze of the early ‘90s, or maybe I would have become infatuated with that decade’s budding indie rock scene. Instead, I came to music listening consciousness when the radio waves were ruled by brightly melodic pop-rock bands, and that has absolutely defined my musical value system ever since.

I broached this subject a little bit in the chapter about Creed, but there’s not much that’s as pure as loving music with absolutely no cynicism. I think that’s why, for most of us, the music we loved when we were young remains the defining music of our lives. As a child or a teenager, you come to songs and albums and artists with enthusiasm and curiosity, but maybe not a lot of knowledge or context. And as a result, you welcome that music into your heart, mind, and soul in a different way than you will in adulthood. I firmly believe that the greatest period in any person’s musical journey comes between “awakening” (the moment that makes you consider music more seriously and deeply than you did before) and “awareness” (the moment where you start letting other people’s opinions or narratives influence how you feel about something).

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

My Life in 35 Songs
Craig Manning

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.

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

My Life in 35 Songs
Craig Manning

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.

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

My Life in 35 Songs
Craig Manning

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.

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

My Life in 35 Songs
Craig Manning

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.

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

My Life in 35 Songs
Craig Manning

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.

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

My Life in 35 Songs
Craig Manning

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.

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

My Life in 35 Songs
Craig Manning

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.

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Record Store Day 2025 Countdown

CD, Record Store
Adam Grundy

This year’s Record Store Day occurs this Saturday, April 12th, 2025. Get your lists ready and prepare to dive into the key vinyl releases for this celebration of indie record stores. The Record Store Day “Ambassador” for ’25 is Post Malone, and he shared in a press release:

What an honor, I can’t believe I was chosen to be Record Store Day’s Ambassador for 2025. Record Store Day is so important and I really hope to do my part to keep it alive. We love hitting local shops when we’re on the road, seeing all the crazy artwork, the whole energy in a record store is just super inspiring. I feel at home. It’s really an unexplainable feeling to hit up a shop and dig through crates, just see what grabs your eye. You can be looking for something super specific and end up finding something totally different. It’s the best. Keep supporting y’all and let’s keep records and these local shops going strong. Happy Record Store Day everybody!”

In this article, I’ll be providing some tips & tricks for navigating this year’s Record Store Day observance, plus some early previews of some of the key titles. You can also check out my initial RSD ’25 preview here.

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