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.