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?