Kevin's Top 500 Favorite Albums

1: Nine Inch Nails – The Downward Spiral (1994)

 

Words will fail me here - especially after the triumphant concluding summarizing homerun that was the Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness post. But The Downward Spiral is the final piece to this 500-piece puzzle - and it’s the most important piece. It’s also the final piece of music, currently an emotional blur in my mind, that I need to pin down with writing like the other albums. Where to begin? The Downward Spiral. No album in my entire existence ever connected with me so immediately, created such a cathartic inner world, expressed my emotions so perfectly, and took my attitude about life as far as it could go. It’s an album that encompasses about a year from May 1994 to May 1995 but especially caught fire after the Nine Inch Nails Woodstock ‘94 performance in August 1994. I want to make an important point upfront that I’ve learned across the course of my life that separates me from nearly all music fans. During my almost 40 years on Earth, I’ve interacted with many people. People tend to listen to music as part of pop culture consumption, as stress relief, as motivating music, as connoisseurs and aficionados, as partiers, as background music, and - as I do for a lot of music - as an aesthetic pleasure. I envy these grounded people in many ways who can just chill out and enjoy music at this level and remain there. With the best music in my life, it goes WAY beyond any of those uses. And for my favorite albums, you’ve seen that the level of personal connection is more like an inner world or a place to mentally escape like a novel, fictional world, or parallel universe. The Downward Spiral is the epitome of that, and why I get REALLY REALLY REALLY annoyed at music consumers who seem to just taste test music like coffee or craft beer. I NEVER saw The Downward Spiral as music to put on in the background or critically appreciate. I NEVER saw The Downward Spiral as something to just put on and enjoy. In a boring, mundane, overly scripted, predictable world, The Downward Spiral spoke a truth, cut through the bullshit, and plugged into the meaning of something. It said things that no one else said, and it felt things that no one else allowed me to feel. It created a stark, Gothic, inner world where my repressed, bullied, and defeated self would roar one last time with dignity before it died or descended into some underworld, never to be heard from again. And at the time, I felt it articulated the final word to family, friends, peers, teachers, and adults who never understood me, never bothered to understand me, and would never be able to understand me even if they tried. Yes, it’s selfish, self-absorbed, and self-pitying - the kind of attitude most adults see as so limited in perspective in a world where people are fighting cancer, starvation, disease, poverty, and mental illness. Why didn’t a little self-absorbed shithead like me go volunteer somewhere or go to church or become entrepreneurial? Why didn’t I go see real people who suffered so that I got smacked upside the head into happiness? I would argue that my days spent with The Downward Spiral - completely paradoxically - were the best, healthiest, and most spiritually awakening experiences of my entire life. By severing myself from a desire to merge with social groups and become accepted, I forever separated myself from any need to rest my hope upon people. From The Downward Spiral onward, I followed my own path and wasn’t afraid to challenge, disagree, or show contempt for things my friends did or showed interest in. I began to rely on instinct and intuition to chart a course through my life, scoffing at the uptight adults and peers who gave bland advice about “career paths” or things you should do to be successful in life. When people worried about my future more than me, I laughed at them. I still laugh at them. After all, I’ve mentally been through The Downward Spiral on an emotional level that they can never understand. I explored the abyss - contemplating suicide, self-destruction, self-hate, self-loathing, and contempt that only The Downward Spiral can still evoke. I almost killed myself, folks. I lived each track of this album in painstaking detail. At times, this album was the only thing that spoke to me with any honesty or authenticity as a teenager. No one could touch me or keep up with me here. I’ve lived through that, and that’s why I find things like people’s obsessions with their houses or politics or business-y things or taking marketing seriously to be amusing at best, and tedious at worst. Other than for utilitarian purposes, who the fuck cares? Why do people get so worked up about such trivia? It’s like I came out of a Dantean hell full of awareness and insight, and people are yammering about condos and festivals and weddings. And yet, there are the people who understand - who have gone through experiences that give them the same or better perspectives. Facing death, in whatever form, changes you. And going through the William Jamesian arc of innocence, despair, and enlightenment changes you. Today, only God and following His will trump my experience with The Downward Spiral. It remains the most influential inner experience in my entire life. Paradoxically, it cleansed my soul of horrible thoughts, allowed me to take myself to brink of suicide and back, and gave me such a catharsis that I remain both separated from yet empathic toward other people to this day. In the strangest of ways, The Downward Spiral turned me into a real human being for the first time. But let’s unpack these thoughts and figure out why.

I remember listening to The Downward Spiral on cassette outside on Jason V’s patio in his backyard with Jason Z, Jon, and maybe some others there. They were playing with padded swords, really into the details of the game and fighting as usual, while I watched from the porch. Jason V had brought out his stereo so that I could listen to music - similar to amusing a kid while the adults talked. If I wanted to hang out with my friends, I had to accept this compromise. I had taped The Downward Spiral off of my friend Chris’s CD and was listening to it for the first time. It was spring 1994, late 11th grade, and I was about three months into the unleashing of my personality for the first time. I had just turned 17, that birthday mixed with the intoxication of my intelligence and humor finally being recognized by people who I had long admired from afar alongside the darkness I had lived in for so many years that cannot go away overnight. I also had a new crush that felt intense as a supernova (see the Mellon Collie post for a better description) – and simultaneously, with full hormones raging, I felt the utter joy of seeing someone so beautiful who talked to me while telling myself it was hopeless because I was a vile, worthless, human being who she could never like. These extremes, like fuses (not candles) burning at both ends, made life at this juncture full of the highest highs and lowest lows. Dirt worked in 1993 but became less effective in 1994 because my recent social success and love for this girl added an intensity that Dirt lacked. I needed music, if it existed, that could describe these new feelings to myself – such extremes, such joy, such pain, such anger, such rage, such self-hate, such self-loathing, such an urge to destroy.

That day, I really felt estranged from my friends. I increasingly viewed their activities such as live AD&D role playing as alien. They cared so much about the hit points of an orc or spent time talking about the intricacies of making padded swords or just sat for fucking hours around a fucking computer. So when I watched them arguing with each other about technicalities as they fought with padded swords, The Downward Spiral entered my ears for the first time. It was eerie. Even on that first listen, something almost supernatural happened. It was too right. Too on. Too relevant. Watching my friends and already feeling cynical and jaded about their activities, the music became like an all-seeing lens, and life became hyperclear. My eyes gleamed, thinking of all my feelings and experiences that I could not quite articulate. Suddenly, I understood – and realized no one else understood but me. From this point forward, I fully separated myself mentally from my friends. Forever. While I still hung out with groups of friends, The Downward Spiral forever severed a desire to merge with groups of people. Before The Downward Spiral, I still attempted and often desired that merging, trying to care about my friends playing AD&D, live role playing, and Magic: The Gathering. I enjoyed late night conversations about dreams, kindred spirits, and the astral plane - trying to push these conversations further. I may have felt a distance at times, but I kept trying to fit into my “core group.” Sometimes I felt that I could get through to Jason V, Jason Z, and Jon sometimes - pushing past the minutia. But when people like Sean, Greg, Frank, Mike, Ethan, and others were around, it was hopeless. They wanted to have a good time, talk about role-playing and computers, play intricate fantasy-related games, and laugh. If I was lucky, we had the common ground of making fun of high school and sometimes listened to music. But otherwise, I was a third or fifth wheel. After The Downward Spiral, years of frustration about these friends finally exploded to the surface. While I still hung out with them, I mentally severed myself from any connection to them or others - a severing that has lasted to this day. Ironically, as my social options expanded in 12th grade, The Downward Spiral still made me feel unique, alone, and unable to be understood by anyone despite sampling new people and groups of people - and even when these people seemed interested in me. In my head, I had a unique worldview that cut through the bullshit of life and I had little patience with the minutia that seemed to fixate my friends. I didn’t care about this shit. Instead, I cared about The Downward Spiral. About getting through to the TRUTH of something about life. Ideally, that would mean life-changing writing, reading, and conversation where my friends and I figured things out and got to know each other as people in the process - sharing our deepest, darkest, and most meaningful thoughts. In reality, socializing involved a lot of mundane, dead time spent obsessing over details related to hobbies and interests and a lot of emotional evasion. So, The Downward Spiral taught me that getting at the TRUTH often requires making some noise, throwing a chair across the room so to speak, and ultimately relying on self-destruction if none of the above worked. It’s a desire of mine that’s both a blessing and a curse to this day. In 2016, it’s why I have a lot of friends who have great conversations with me but why I don’t regularly hang out with a group of people or have a girlfriend. I’m too fucking heavy, all of the time. Although I’ve learned to lighten up (especially in my 30s) and my humor always serves as an ace in the hole, the intensity and lessons of The Downward Spiral remain in my blood and DNA. I’m too much if I’m around you too long, and I simply shut off if conversation remains too mundane or focused on minutia for too long. Sorry. And don’t worry. I pay the price every day for this aspect of my personality.

This intensity results from The Downward Spiral articulating the premise of the Doors’s “Break on Through.” Few people break on through, but once you do your worldview is forever changed - even if your experience now isolates you from the rest of humanity. You might ask, “Why go on this journey?” Some of us are called, pulled, tugged in this direction. It’s hard to explain. During that moment on Jason V’s porch, I heard The Downward Spiral and knew deep down that I had found what I was looking for. I needed to go there. It’s a spiritual journey like Dante’s Divine Comedy. In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James explains that people all over the world who hold a variety of beliefs follow the same path to spiritual enlightenment. These people always go through innocence, despair, and enlightenment. The metaphor of the Garden of Eden applies here. The Bible may not be literal but the narrative arc maps onto the way we go through this enlightenment - from the Garden of Eden to the absence from God to the redemption of Jesus. The Downward Spiral articulates the despair stage of spiritual enlightenment. But more specifically, I needed The Downward Spiral to bust through the painful tedium of normalcy and the perceived limitations of how my friends dealt with life. I watched them gravitate to Frank Zappa, the Beastie Boys, or gangsta rap. That music used cleverness, silliness, and macho aggression to react to the world. However, I didn’t see life as something to disdain, mock, or just roll with in a humorous or clever way. That required emotional distance that felt like the Muppets in the balcony. Instead, I wanted - like Dante, like Hamlet, like William Blake, like William James, like Jim Morrison, like Henry Rollins - to break through some barrier and express myself to the absolute fullest. That meant delving into my tortured emotions, desires, and dreams with naked emotional vulnerability. That meant, deep down, that hope still remained despite my anger. I wanted to entirely express my pain, frustration, and despair about life in a melodramatic, theatrical, and self-destructive way. Heavy metal and grunge approximated that feeling from 1991 to 1994, with a few albums like Dirt, Bloody Kisses, and Ride the Lightning getting close to what I sought. But it was never good enough. But then The Downward Spiral finally nailed it. Utterly and completely. It nailed it.

Throughout the rest of 1994, The Downward Spiral was not just music. It was in my bloodstream. It was me. Every damn second of that entire album. To this day, I have never experienced the emotional catharsis that The Downward Spiral provided from any other piece of music, and I never felt so alive. In those days of 1994, I recall how my new severed attitude impacted everything. My friendships with Jason V, Jason Z, Jon, Todd, Mary Anne, Kim, Heather, Dan, Sean, and Frank. My delight at the inside jokes and alternate universes that included Kozak (our vice-principal), our physics teacher, and our health teacher. My rebellious defiant arguing with my 11th grade English teacher. Our Advanced Science class that was really “Advanced Study Hall” where we contemptuously didn’t do much work and just hung out in delight. Our 11th grade Darien Lake physics trip that turned into one of my favorite days of all time. The Colgate Seminars that I talked about in the Promised Land post. During those days, I think I was more alive than I ever will be again. My joy, my laughter, and my feelings of love were so intense and unabashed. And the pain, the rage, and the darkness - represented by The Downward Spiral - were equally unabashed – at times making me feel like Dirt was a happy album. Unfortunately The Downward Spiral also represents my darker side that I feel ashamed about today. For example, I got so frustrated one day in 12th grade a few days before Christmas when my friends Jason Z and Sean tied plastic bags of candy that I was selling for my senior trip so tightly to some lab equipment in Advanced Science that I could not untie them. With The Downward Spiral in my head, I got so angry that I just tore at the bags until I ripped them open, flung the candy everywhere on the floor, and walked out of the classroom. Everyone in the class stared at me in stunned silence. When I came back maybe 10 minutes later, Jason Z and Sean were walking on eggshells around me and helping me pick up the candy. I glorified in those rare moments when I felt that The Downward Spiral - the world in my head - broke through for a moment. “See?” I wanted to broadcast. “Don’t fuck with me, you fuckers! You don’t understand my pain!” It was a dangerous, unhealthy, self-absorbed, and unempathetic game I played in 12th grade. I used my moods for effect, to manipulate others, to get their attention, to open up emotional conversation by force, and to try to get at that TRUTH.

This could easily become an album where the track-by-track analysis grows lengthy, especially because I lived each song so thoroughly in my head. But this isn’t music appreciation - this is an essay about the album’s meaning in my life, so a few highlights will suffice to build upon previous points. First, I should note that a major ingredient in The Downward Spiral’s accessibility are the cold electronic pulses such as on the opening to “Heresy” or the Depeche Mode-like stoicness of the choruses to “Ruiner.” Only that cold electronic pulse mixed with the guitar-fueled rage could encapsulate the tension between my cold heart and hot rage, between spiritual deadness and unleashed anger. “Mr. Self Destruct” perfectly basks in this tension, feeling like my heart’s coldness interspersed with my attempts to shine a light on my anger in front of others. “Piggy” is menacing through its abrupt absence of noise, as if I’m exposing myself emotionally. The refrain of “nothing can stop me now” was the opening to this inner world. The gates had opened. There was no going back. I was entering uncharted territory. Reznor sings, “Nothing is turning out the way I planned” during an organ playing soothing chords. “Heresy”’s opening woke me up and I embraced the cold, electronic pulse as an alternative to heavy metal. At the time, I raged against God and just spit in the face of Christianity, and so I reveled in this rejection. “March of the Pigs” is the closest to fun on The Downward Spiral - just pure moshing destruction coated in that soothing electronic pulse between bursts of rage. Even a song like “Closer,” which apparently became a strip club favorite, to me was a song of self-hate and self-immolation. To me, “I want to fuck you like an animal” was a rare, naked moment of facing my own raging desires during the year I was 17. I felt both drawn to and ashamed about sex - hating my body and the way I looked, feeling no woman would ever want to be with me. After “Closer,” we were definitely getting somewhere. I had long left behind my friends and even albums like Dirt. “Ruiner” builds up the existing rage until we hit those Depeche Mode-like choruses where I felt my eyes open like a god. I felt I saw all clearly in those moments, seeing the fallen world for what it was - a cesspool. “The Becoming” is almost too emotional to write about. That early weird part feels like my ugly, emotionally exposed body and self as it walked through high school every day, a target for bullying and rejection like a pinata for all to hit. Suddenly, it goes acoustic and then...it explodes! It represented my becoming. Reznor whispers and screams about the noise inside his head on a level that I had never articulated up until that point. “Won’t give up, it wants me dead, goddamn this noise inside my head.” It was unprecedented and remains unprecedented. No single song has ever opened me up like that. “I Do Not Want This” feels like a comedown after “The Becoming,” but it fleshes out my feelings of romantic rejection in high school. We crank up to a frenzied, incoherent, suicidal rage until “Big Man and a Gun,” and then there’s the comedown. I had let out all of my rage. Now what? The last part of the album feels like a fall from grace, lying on the ground, crawling on my belly in shit, and finally just flushing myself down a hole – like I deserve. “A Warm Place,” an instrumental, feels like the peace I desired, bleeding into “Eraser.” “Eraser” articulated my desire to just erase myself from existence. If no one wanted me or loved me, then don’t worry. I’d erase myself. Hearing Reznor sing, “Kill me” over and over and over until it sounds like this throat had ruptured was one of the most dangerous things I’ve ever listened to. I was gone in those moments. “Reptile” represents a transformed me, a reptile of sorts so far gone that I’m just an embodied form of contempt slithering around the world. It’s the only song here that feels like I am in an alternate world somewhere full of machines and reptiles and slime. It feels Gothic and cyberpunk and fallen. The title track heightened the danger - which seems impossible. I’ll be blunt. It’s about suicide - the act, in detail. It’s the furthest I’ve stared into the abyss. The juxtaposition of the muffled screaming in the background along with Reznor’s completely apathetic description of shooting oneself in the head is probably the most horrifying moment I’ve ever experienced in music. But it doesn’t end there. We conclude with “Hurt,” made famous again later by Johnny Cash. It’s the song that – after the self-destruction – made me ask “What have I become?” And I truly asked that. How could the little happy boy who used to play with He-Mans and G.I. Joes and Nintendo, who once believed he could be a dentist or a rock star and have a girlfriend one day, get to this low of a point?

Art finally became life on my senior trip to Washington D.C. in April 1995, a few days before I turned 18. During those dangerous days after a year of livid inner rage and self-hate unmitigated by anything, The Downward Spiral was brought to life during the final two days of that four-day trip. Take all of my unresolved feelings, add sleep deprivation, throw me in with about 25 of my peers including the girl I liked and a few of my friends who I also felt secret envy and jealousy toward, a tight schedule, a motel floor to ourselves, a fantasy world away from home, a lack of structure, and the mystery of the night, and what you get is life lived in an intensity that I know will never happen again. The first two days were ecstasy and the last two days were hell. During the first two days, I was on with humor, conversation, and riffed off everything – even the plane ride, the bus ride, the subway ride, buying Doritos at a convenience store, watching Sandra Bullock interviewed on Letterman. Every moment was beautiful. But during those last two days, I socially isolated myself from everyone, brooded openly, snapped at people, and, in the lowest moment, dragged behind my friends at an amusement park - so bitter about Todd and Kim not paying attention to me and seeing others hover around them like sycophants, at times literally physically preventing me from getting near them - until I was alone. The Downward Spiral raged in my mind as I thought through the 13-song buildup, anger, comedown, crawling, and the flush – and now I could ask myself, removed from Sauquoit entirely, “What have I become?” People milled around me, strangers, in another state. No one cared about me. And everyone from Sauquoit, the fodder for my rage, was gone. I almost committed suicide in that moment – the ONLY time I ever contemplated it that seriously. And then, something inside told me to live. I knew, going forward, that I would never feel as alive from this point forward. Ironically, by choosing to live, something pure that had blossomed and raged for a year had just died inside me forever. For the first time in my life, I felt the long road ahead. But I had two choices. One – kill myself now, knowing I had already tasted life’s extreme joys and pains. Or two – live, knowing that while life may not ever be as intense, there might be something else around the corner that eventually is more delightful.

Okay, I just took you through some dark territory. But I want to affirm and comfort here by reminding you that this is a journey seen throughout art and literature for millennia. The Downward Spiral reminds me of The Odyssey, Dante, Hamlet’s self-absorption, the Romantic poets, William James, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Hermann Hesse, Jim Morrison, and Henry Rollins’s mentality. I chose to live after this moment on my senior trip and after my full experience with every second of The Downward Spiral. It’s like you find positivity by default if you stick around after an experience like this - just as William James once meticulously documented. As dark as the experience I just described, it’s why I never liked alternate avenues such as Frank Zappa or other clever rather than emotional artists. By experiencing The Downward Spiral along with my life at the time, I eventually learned empathy for others who struggle with their own demons. These demons teach us a lot if we later help others through life’s shoals. That’s the connection between me as a teenager going through this depressed self-absorption and then later contributing to society consistently and happily. Telling someone to “get over it” or just volunteer or go to church or do something superficial to bootstrap your way out of depression misses the whole point of spiritual development. This isn’t my theory. Both Jesus and the Dalai Lama teach it. It’s a spiritual law, taught by your own Scriptures if you claim to be religious. First, understand your spiritual gifts. Second, contribute those spiritual gifts to the world. The word “understand” is the most important word here. If you don’t understand yourself, then you are not functioning fully. We can never completely understand ourselves, but we’ve got to try more than 0%. And part of understanding yourself is by getting to the root of your problems, issues, and identity. Zappa and similar clever detachment avoids this responsibility entirely. A journey with Zappa will be musically satisfying but eventually lead you to mock the world, laugh at people’s misfortunes, and think you know it all because your self-righteousness seems to accurately judge the world and put you in a superior position. You learn nothing that way. A path like The Downward Spiral is the way you learn. Because it’s the way that Odysseus learned. How Jesus learned. How Buddha learned. How Dante learned. How we learned through Hamlet, Jake Barnes, and Jay Gatsby. How Hermann Hesse learned. How recovering alcoholics and drug addicts learn. How Henry Rollins learned. And how many people I know and love learned. It’s the only way, and it involves debasement, despair, and naked emotional vulnerability that hurts so bad as you challenge the fabric of the world and everything you thought and knew to be true. It really hurts. But that’s why the insights gleaned feel true and universal rather than self-righteous and exclusive.

The Downward Spiral seems like a strange album now. When I listen to it, I time travel. I can’t really enjoy it for the music. It’s a time machine, and I can return to that state of mind no matter how old I get. When it’s playing, I can smell 1994 and early 1995. And then it returns to the present again when the album is over. When Promised Land became my healing album of choice after the senior trip, The Downward Spiral became irrelevant as an album, even as soon as graduation in June 1995. However, The Downward Spiral lives on as an encapsulation of a time when I was 17: young, impulsive, moody, black, depressed, despairing, in love, agonizing over love, hating myself, loathing myself, self-absorbed, extreme highs, extreme lows. It reminds me when I see high schoolers acting out and acting up that I cannot be above them. I was like them once, possibly even more extreme than they could ever imagine. And it reminds me of a time when I was 100% alive. I’d like to say I am now, but life does wear you down after a while. Responsibilities are necessary, but they dehumanize you. Your job and work become commodities that you supply to the world in exchange for a roof over your head. Many attempts to enjoy life and party and hang out with people often feel empty, devoid of real content and relationships and instead focused on minutia, trivia, and social obligation. It’s only in rare creative moments, or an occasional conversation, or an occasional flicker during the day, or sometimes during a celebration like a wedding, that even a glimmer of the life I felt during my Downward Spiral days emerges.

But that’s okay. Spiritual law also teaches that every day and every minute can’t be a party or the best experience ever. Instead, we must find a consistent, foundational joy as we mine our spiritual gifts and contribute them to the world while creating real relationships with people. For me, The Downward Spiral eventually led me to understand the works of William James, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and many others who urge that finding deep enlightenment is the only way to live a long, healthy, happy life. I love my life now for its simple joys, and I’m thankful for its blessings.

But I am not afraid to acknowledge for one final time in this Top 500 that a lifetime of joy will never, ever rival the all-seeing life I felt when I was 17 in 1994 and 1995. It took a long time for me to admit this fact to myself, but I finally accepted it. Once, in a way that is not sustainable, I saw all and lived all through The Downward Spiral. And while memories or reuniting with people who lived through this time with me may bring me back to these years, The Downward Spiral is the surest way to summon it back in full force and feel young again – with all its sweet joys and bitter pains. It’s odd to have a favorite album that hasn’t been relevant in my life since about June 1995. But its impact is that important, that startling, and that alive in my life. My philosophy, attitude, attention span, social life, mindshare, creative preoccupations, and life path all originate from The Downward Spiral. When I roam around places like Bonnaroo or networking events or hip city bars with craft beer, The Downward Spiral always lives in my head and remains a counter-philosophy and defining experience against which I navigate through my relationships with people and places. If I seem to grow bored in a social situation where people are discussing TV shows, movies, cars, or houses and you see me zone out, then my mind might have returned for a brief moment to my experience with The Downward Spiral more than 20 years ago. If seem to not take the wonders of business and marketing and ROI as seriously as I should, then I’m probably thinking about how only the joys of life matter after that day on my senior trip when I almost ended my existence. Working 80 hours a week to make capitalism more efficient and the rich richer just isn’t a main preoccupation of mine, despite some intellectually interesting elements related to that world. And if I don’t seem that interested in food or beers or sports or something on NPR or politics or whatever, then I’m probably mulling over something related to the lineage of spiritual thought that connects Jesus to Dante to The Downward Spiral to Henry Rollins. It’s not that the above things aren’t fun or important. It’s just that my preoccupations are different, having changed in 1994 and 1995 during the days of 12th grade and The Downward Spiral. I want to conclude on a purely nostalgic note. One time when I was moving in the 2000s, I stumbled upon a Details magazine that my friend Todd had bought me while he went on a bus trip to Syracuse. It was typical of Todd to go off on mysterious adventures and come back with some scrap from the bigger world outside high school. The magazine is dated April 1995. It features Trent Reznor on the cover and an interview with him inside called “The Art of Darkness.” I must have read that interview a zillion times and also loved his dark, evil look in the pictures. This interview embodied the entire mythology surrounding The Downward Spiral. But I also read about the wider world through that magazine, and Todd accidentally gave me something that formed a bridge between The Downward Spiral and the world that awaited me afterward in college, cities, and real life. Inside, there are stories about visiting Dublin, trekking through the Utah desert, and examining the dark side of New Orleans. There are tips about men’s fashion, alcohol, sex, and relationships. There are reviews of strange new movies and books, There are interviews with Liv Tyler and Moby. Because I had yet to emerge into the real world, this single magazine, anchored around that Trent Reznor interview during the time of The Downward Spiral, made it seem like this album was actually part of the wider world. I wasn’t alone in my feelings because Reznor talked about his depression in a cool magazine, surrounded by other cool things. This magazine issue was just so cool and exciting on so many levels, seeming to hold the promises of a rich, full life ahead after high school and during the then unimaginable days of college. There was so much to explore about life!!! Now, when I look at the magazine, I hurt with nostalgia. It’s 21 years ago now. The magazine freezes that moment in time as if in amber, April 1995, the month of the senior trip when I felt so alive. Everything made sense, even when it made no sense. In the 21 years since, it’s good that I can see those Downward Spiral days in the context of a spiritual journey articulated by Dante and William James. But I’m reminded that if I leave the despair behind, then magic still awaits around any corner. Sometimes it’s just an album that hits you right or a friend buying you a magazine or reading a new author or meeting a new friend or finding a new mentor that can awaken the magic all over again. Because my favorite album is enshrined at #1 like that Details magazine is enshrined in April 1995, this painful, vivid nostalgia tempts me to disparage 2016 in lieu of 1995. But instead I conclude this essay - and the entire Top 500 - by understanding that those magical moments in 1995 simply show me that magic is always around us, waiting to be accessed. The key? Opening myself up emotionally, truly, and sincerely to my feelings - only now enriched through perspective, experience, and spiritual joy so that I can more easily look for and create magic, rather than demand or expect it like my emotionally immature 17 year old self. And yes, maybe I will never find an album as magical as The Downward Spiral or a time as magical as April 1995. But I’m still alive, I’ve had some pretty incredible experiences since April 1995, and...what the hell...I might as well keep searching! You never know what’s around the corner. And as T.S. Eliot once wrote, endings are often beginnings.

2: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness - The Smashing Pumpkins (1995)

Jane Austen once said that we form most of our tastes during our teenage years. Soon after its release, Billy Corgan said that Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness aimed to capture people’s lives between 14 and 24. In Corgan’s words from an October 1995 interview:

[Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness] will be totally misunderstood by plus-30-year-old rock critics. I'm not writing it for them, even though I'm on the edge of losing my connection to youth, as is anyone entering their late 20s, and you've got a house, you get married, and the things that are important in your life begin to change. But I wanted to communicate from the edge of it, an echo back to the generation that's coming, to sum up all the things I felt as a youth but was never able to voice articulately.

Seeing as Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is #2 because it perfectly captures my own adolescence from May 1990 to May 1997, it’s safe to say that I come to the conclusion of the Top 500 - at first reluctantly, with some shame, and now with acceptance - embracing adolescence itself as the most magical timespan of my life. It had the highest highs, and the lowest lows. I felt the most alive. According to my journals, it encompassed a time from my 13th birthday in May 1990 when I played Nintendo and received a plethora of baseball cards as presents while I finished out 7th grade as the last class in the old Chadwicks high school, to my 20th birthday in May 1997 when I finished out my sophomore year at Utica College and talked to Dr. Cartwright about officially changing my major from math to English. Literally, that decision to change my major defined the next 20 years of my life, putting an end to my teenage years as much as the shift from 19 to 20 did. But between the day I received those baseball cards in 7th grade and the day I changed my major as a sophomore in college, my identity grew, exploded, and evolved into the person I am today. I went from the dormant volcano of childhood to the exploding volcano of adolescence, the lava perhaps only cooling by the time I turned 25 in 2002 - long after adolescence. At times, I’ve run from adolescence, I’ve written about it through short stories and novels, I’ve criticized it, I’ve distanced myself from it, I’ve indulged in memories about it, and I’ve tried to ignore it. But it’s always there, like how people can never forget serving in the Army or spending time abroad or going off to college. And now, at #2, as a 39 year old who would better gain emotional maturity points from society if I focused instead on buying and maintaining a house, dating and eventually getting married, aesthetically sampling the smorgaboard of life through restaurants and travel, and talking about the most current pop culture, technology, and business trends, I instead take this moment to acknowledge, digest, and embrace this era of my life - this essential core part of me that I’ve tried to run from for too long. No amount of business networking, sampling fancy coffee in big cities, fastidiously listening to NPR-ish or Fast Company-ish media, or watching the latest greatest TV shows can allow me to run from or escape this core part of my identity anymore. It’s a part of me I must now own and embrace. Why? Why not just ignore it? Like most people?

The key to this puzzle (and yes, we’ll get to the Smashing Pumpkins in a moment) is a quote by W.H. Auden.

Between the ages of 20 and 40 we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology. When someone between 20 and 40 says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,'he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu', because, between 20 and 40, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After 40, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read.

I extend this quote beyond just writing and reading. It’s why I wrote this Top 500, although I didn’t know it when I started. Between 20 and 40, I set aside childish things and carved out a path for my adult life. I needed to do it. As my adolescent posts reveal, the antidote to self-destruction, self-absorption, and living life primarily by my moods meant learning about the world and how it ticked. I needed to meet new people, study in college, live in a major world city, network, travel, and open myself up to new experiences. To summarize my adventures from May 1997 to the present would take volumes and might make an exciting project someday. I needed to temper the world in my head, full of delusions and illusions (culminating in the Jenny Lewis meeting in August 2001), with reality, experience, and the love and support of other people. But, I find myself one year away from age 40 with a feeling that I’ve understood the architecture of the world to a sufficient degree. I kind of get the game and how it works - the patterns, the institutions, and the people. And I’ve acted the snob along the way many times as I rejected my adolescent past. Reading primarily classic literature. Studying rock history like I’m going to get a Ph.D in it. Enjoying heavy business networking in fancy places. Wearing job titles like “Editor” and “Director of Business Development” like I’m a rock star. Listening to new music based on the opinions of AllMusic and Pitchfork. Volunteering for organizations that make me look good and give me access to cool young professionals. Traveling to conferences where I feel like I’m on the cutting-edge of...something. Hanging around marketing agencies that feel like the coolest young people doing the coolest things in the coolest environment. But it all hit a wall at age 35 when I went on my road trip. I spent many years learning, absorbing, and soaking in the reality of a life that I needed to experience in order to grow as a person. But like any college degree, there’s a moment when you have to graduate and move on. And you can only learn, absorb, and soak in for so many years until a thinking person must ask, “What’s this all for? Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going?”

My favorite professor of all time, Scott MacDonald, a cutting-edge avant garde film scholar, once told me that his scholarship got blown wide open when he started to learn more about the past. In the late 1990s, he said that studying the 19th century baffled “hip” scholars but gave him incredible insight into the most contemporary avant garde film. It makes me wonder, why do we run from the past? Sure, we can envision a future and get creative about it. In fact, we need to do that. And sure, we can enjoy the present. Many Eastern and Western spiritual philosophies teach us how to do that. But our knowledge comes from the past - both historically and personally. By ignoring, abstracting, or only criticizing my adolescence, I pushed aside for many years the answers to many key questions about my life. What’s this all for? Well, what was it all for when I was a child or adolescent? To enjoy life. To love and be loved. That hasn’t changed. Who am I? My adolescence tells me. Clearly and unambiguously. It’s the template. It’s how I formed. Sure, I’ve upgraded and evolved the “software” ever since. But there’s a reason I was drawn to Lord of the Rings, Nintendo, fantasy novels, Stephen King, 94K Rock, Metallica, Dream Theater, Alice in Chains, Nine Inch Nails, writing Jimmy stories, Monty Python, writing satire, making endless jokes about conventions and bureaucratic authority, and enjoying odd things with no rational explanation like coffee or going out to breakfast. To this day, my soul always feels refreshed when I do similar things. It’s always creative writing, reading for pleasure, and listening to music. And also, the friendships. The friends of adolescence not only are unlike any other friends I have but they’ve also influenced how I formed later friendships. I forgot somewhere along the way (especially between 2005-2007, although my healing didn’t fully happen until probably 2013) that friendships needed to be open, real, and honest - with no bullshit. In adolescence, I just met people, liked them for whatever reason, and sought out their company. In the mid-2000s, I became more fixated on hanging out with people who had ambitious careers or projects going on, looked “successful,” and who didn’t remind me of my past in any “bad” way. Image management, learned from the best in Atlanta. But it became painful after a time. I know some friends from high school who surgically removed their adolescent friendships completely. And I’m enough of a realist to know you can’t keep them all. But today, many of my best friends are those who I reconnected with from adolescence. I won’t name names because I’ll leave someone out, but these people fully live with me in 2016 while sharing a rich history rooted in our adolescent experiences that is magical, loving, and warm. I simply love seeing and staying in touch with these people. And even more modern friendships with people who I’ve met during the last 10 years tend to follow this adolescent template more than an “adult” template. I’ve learned to just like people with the full instinct of my heart, forget status and outward success, and enjoy time with these people with unencumbered aesthetic delight.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that this acknowledgement and embracing of my adolescence has changed me over the last five years as I approach 40. Going back to the Auden quote, I feel an integration with my authentic self. My adolescence contained a lot of pain along with the joy. I wouldn’t want to relive all of it, but it’s the source of my authentic self. If I lose a connection to that, then I lose me. I’ve seen other people who have lost themselves. It’s not pretty. Perhaps inside the spirit carries on, but on the outside all I hear is chatter about endlessly fixing property, the next social thing they’re doing, the next travel plan, endless career/creative/social schemings, endless references to hip things going on in hip places with hip social sets, or endless generic conversation about pop culture references from TV shows and movies that have all of the soul of a cup of coffee made with reused coffee grounds. And then, there are people - from atheists to born again Christians - whose souls just sing. I don’t even need to figure it out. It’s just clear. They are positive wells of energy, experiencing life in some joyous way that I can easily detect. And I gravitate to them....like a child. Like an adolescent. And specifically, like to the friends that Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness brings to mind.

Yes, I told you I wouldn’t forget about the album. But I haven’t. Everything I’ve talked about so far relates to it. But let’s address it more directly. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness encapsulates the entirety of my adolescence and how it felt. More specifically, it evokes the friends who helped make it magical. Sure, my age, the context, and the experiences helped. But those days would have been nothing without the weird, bizarre, brilliant friends I made in Sauquoit. There must have been something in the water. These people, per capita, are still the most unique, amazing group of people I know. I still consider this group of folks as legendary in my life. Obviously, much of that is the glow of potential and expectation that surrounds us like an aura during those years. And I’ve been criticized for clinging onto friendships long beyond their shelf life and injecting them with meaning beyond their reality. Some of that criticism is fair. We’re only human after all - not superhuman. It’s impossible for any of us to live up to a legendary version of ourselves. Yet, I find that those friendships still contain magic that transcend their time, reminding me of who I am and where I came from. When they’re able to get sparked, it’s still magic. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness opens up with a piano that captures the entire magical feel of adolescence, summarized in one simple, sad refrain. I think of how my friend Todd used to spontaneously play piano in band, just playing one of the few random songs he knew in his small repertoire - as if we all had the ability to just sit down and play the piano like this. This title track feels like a magical entryway back into adolescence and also feels like the end of something. Something special, never to be seen again. As we roar into the orchestral, cinematic "Tonight, Tonight,” it begins. The evocation. I return to those days and how they felt. Tonight! I remember late night hangouts at Carmella’s or Babe’s with friends like Jason Z and Todd. Later, we might sit in someone’s backyard, look at the stars, and bask in the dark Upstate New York quiet night that felt full of possibility - driven purely by our imagination and conversation. On those nights, we felt immortal and unstoppable. We experienced the full bounty and love of the universe in one night. “The impossible is possible tonight,” as Corgan sings. The first few lines are startling:

Time is never time at all.
You can never ever leave without leaving a piece of youth.
And our lives are forever changed.
We will never be the same.
The more you change the less you feel.

That was the fear - the fear now realized. We wanted to hold onto the magic of those moments. To feel alive and young forever as we did during those moments. It’s safe to say that many times I did live an entire lifetime in one night, experiencing all that life had to offer distilled to just a few hours of friendship, coffee, and conversation into the wee hours with people I loved as the sleepy town of Sauquoit slept around us, seemingly unaware of the magic that existed so close to them.

After “Tonight, Tonight,” Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness begins to unfurl by capturing all of the nuances of adolescence like a meticulous autobiographer or documentarian. When the album was released, it was already October 24, 1995. I had graduated from high school and already had two months of college under my belt. Thus, there is an appropriate distance from the aggression I once experienced so vehemently - but it’s still there in songs like "Jellybelly" (where Corgan sings about feeling “nowhere”), "Zero,” "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" (where despite all my rage I was still just a rat in a cage), and "Fuck You (An Ode to No One)" (that mentioned “disconnection,” offering an accidental throwback to Promised Land). These aggressive songs showed that anger still roiled in me but it was on its last legs during my first two years of college. My hormones still raged and I dealt with baggage from high school, but it started to cleanse itself out of my system despite coursing through my veins in a still vital way. These songs feel like the last relevant bursts of adolescent rage before I left them behind forever. “Zero” deals with past baggage. The lyrics personally hinted at things to me, from Jenny Lewis (“enchanted kingdoms”) to Nine Inch Nails (“sinking ship”). But it’s the lazier, softer songs that begin to dig deeper and get more nostalgic about these days. For some reason, "Here Is No Why" makes me think of my exciting friendship with Todd that especially took off during 1994 and 1995. I remember his look (green Army jacket and often-dyed hair), charisma (so many girls liked him), and sense of adventure all throughout 12th grade. “Here Is No Why” even more specifically recalls a moment that perfectly captured these feelings. We were on our senior trip, hanging around the motel at night. Todd, Sean, and I walked out of sight of any teachers toward some balcony in the dark Washington D.C. night, hearing the city noise all around us. Todd then lit and started smoking a cigarette, which shocked me. But there we were - somewhere in that netherworld between complete high school chaperoning and complete freedom. I was 17 years old, going on 18. In that moment, I felt alive. There we were. At a hotel in the middle of a giant world-famous city. Todd, in all his glory, stood there smoking a cigarette - an act of defiance against so many things. I smelled the cigarette smoke and spring air. That single moment encapsulates much of the essence of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I swear I felt electricity coursing through my body that night - the universe’s energy entirely channeled and focused into that moment.

Of course, every moment couldn’t be like the senior trip - which was a rare event in our lives. Adolescence was also defined, brick by brick, by each mundane day we experienced throughout our middle school, high school, and early college lives. "To Forgive,” “Love,” and “Galapogos” feel like so many normal, daydream-filled, lazy days just trudging through our classes, homework, and socializing. When I hear these songs (especially “Love”), I feel the electricity of a normal 11th or 12th grade day like I’m time-traveling. “Galapogos” especially captures the bittersweet sadness of adolescence - especially how it kicks in during senior year that this high school experience will end. There’s a melodrama in some of those moments as you parade through talent shows, senior proms, band concerts, academic dinners, and graduation programs - living life in a supernova burst. I remember holding on tight, despite my moods and depression, and savoring these last bits. That philosophy even extended to our social hangouts during the summer after graduation. I look at my senior yearbook signings and recall the summer conversations - the promises, the plans, and the feeling that “Galapogos” states when Corgan sings, “...and if we died right now.” Perhaps we knew in some moments that if we died then, it would be tragic but that we perhaps might have already experienced the best of what life had to offer: the friendships, the adventure, and the love. The love. Let’s talk about that one final time.

Because some readers may not understand the purpose and function of memoir along with the capacity a writer needs to evoke specific moments to make writing crackle, it may seem like dwelling on adolescent crushes is unhealthy when written by a 39 year old with two extra decades of living since May 1997. It will especially seem unhealthy to the kinds of people who flee from their past, relentlessly focus on the future, and obsess about the need to always “move on” and forget. I want to state clearly at the outset that I’ve liked and dated quite a few women during the last 20 years, feeling strong feelings along the way and even meeting someone last week who I would have asked out if we lived in the same town. I’m certainly living in the present with respect to women! And the women I will talk about from high school remain platonic friends and acquaintances, each with husbands and families of their own. Despite the vivid recollections, this is ancient history. I’ve even discussed and settled the past with these folks, and now I’m simply using the Top 500 to recall it poetically and fondly while describing their impact on me during a crucial stage of my evolution as a person. All right? All right. "Cupid de Locke” and "Muzzle” are the first songs that bring love directly into the equation. Cupid indeed struck me four times during my adolescence. I had a lingering crush that started in 6th grade on a girl named Kelly that ended in 8th grade. I had a distant crush on Jenny Lewis, a child actor who I imagined as a character in many of my Final Fantasy II influenced fantasy stories. I had an intermittant crush on Mary Anne who befriended me out of nowhere and wrote to me the entire time she was in Australia during our senior year. And finally, I had a crush on Kim - my definitive adolescent crush and (along with Todd) the person most evoked by Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. There are three essential themes represented by friends who define my adolescence: rebellion (my “core group” of Jason V, Jason Z, and Jon), social expansion (Todd), and romance (Kim). That’s not to neglect other people in my life, but these themes and people get to the core of the most defining moments of adolescence. The rest of my daily life, adventures, and friends, with all due respect, were variations on these themes - although they were brilliant, colorful, and beautiful variations that accentuated the core of this rebellion, social expansion, and romance.

It’s tempting to quote all of “Muzzle,” but I’ll stick to a few choice bits. It’s a definitive song of adolescence. It addresses my fear of being ordinary. Instead, I wanted to be extraordinary. Jason V, Jason Z, Jon, Todd, and Kim made me feel extraordinary. Like a rock star. Others certainly helped, but by late 11th grade I felt these five people were essential to my life. It was a myopic view, and I hope it doesn’t hurt anyone to hear so many years later. But I wanted to feel extraordinary more than I wanted to be selfless, caring, empathetic, and open to other friendships. After feeling cut off from joy and socially isolated for so long, I wanted to feel like a rock star rather than necessarily care about others. I wanted to feel SPECIAL. These five people made me feel special. I had it all. Intellectuals who helped me show off my mind and humor. Todd who made life exciting. And Kim who made my heart catch in my throat just thinking about her. To me, those were all the elements I needed to live. “Muzzle” summarized the fears that went through my head as I realized high school had to end and the molecule would disperse. Corgan sings:

For everything I ever said
And everything I’ve ever done is gone and dead
As all things must surely have to end
And great loves will one day have to part

But, Corgan also sings, “I know that I am meant for this world.” It was a proclamation that if I felt these things then I must be human. Alive. Following some destiny or fate that unfurled before me. And in those moments…

...I knew exactly where I was
And I knew the meaning of it all
And I knew the distance to the sun
And I knew the echo that is love

As if understanding my chronology, Corgan eerily completes side one by replicating the moment I developed my crush on Kim - a very real crush - as I transitioned away from my fantasy crush on Jenny Lewis that sustained me during my bleak years of social isolation during 9th and 10th grade. “Muzzle” seems to introduce Kim into an album that until then featured Jason V, Jason Z, Jon, and Todd, but I interpret "Porcelina of the Vast Oceans” and "Take Me Down" as a farewell to Jenny Lewis. She had her place in my mythology, and I didn’t need her anymore. By the end of side one, her fictional character takes it place among the stars - to be remembered with nostalgia and fondness, her fictional character perhaps saying goodbye with James Iha’s words, “When you sleep, when you dream, I’ll be there if you need me…”

The second album, Twilight to Starlight, concludes the business of adolescence. For real. Whenever I’ve listened to it, I always feel like it’s the grand conclusion of an era, giving me one last ride on the adolescent roller coaster. But it’s soon to be over. No ifs, ands, or buts. "Where Boys Fear to Tread" begins almost mundane, as if the normalness will hide the fact that this show is ending. It seems to hint at the brooding darkness still lingering in my life even after high school, as seen on albums such as Alice in Chains, The Process, and October Rust. It feels like I’m numbing myself a bit before I’m going to hit some heavy emotional territory. "Bodies" lets out the agonies of unrequited love, the feeling that “love is suicide” and dealing with the rush of feelings it evokes. I often wondered if I should love at all. Was the joy worth the pain? The buzzing rush of “Bodies” captures this emotional mind rush perfectly. The lyrics of "Thirty-Three" evokes the feelings I often had during my first two years of college when I felt my transition from high school into an adult. Pulling my collar up and facing the cold during my walks on the much lonelier, anonymous Utica College campus. Corgan sings, “I’ve journeyed here and there and back again, but in the same old haunts I still find my friends.” Despite still living through my late teens, I already sensed the frustration of going on new adventures that taught me new things, and then going back to old friends, talking about the same old shit, and not progressing while in each other’s company. By this point, I felt in a rut with Jason V, Jason Z, and Jon, almost ruined my friendship with Todd after he went off to college (and never quite clicked in the same way with him again), and indeed ruined my crush on Kim so badly and awkwardly that I pretty much ruined the friendship too for the rest of the 1990s. The magic all came crashing down as I approached age 20, not realizing that a whole new magical era waited around the corner. "In the Arms of Sleep" reminds me of sleepless nights thinking about my crush and my friends and all of the drama that kept me awake during my teens that seems so fleeting and ephemeral now. "1979" reminded me of 1989, my pre-adolescent, pre-teen years that set me up for adolescence. Playing with the neighborhood kids (that included Jason V) on Butler Road. Hanging out at my friend Todd’s house for the first time while I got to see his pond and play weird Nintendo games. Playing baseball outside with my dad and sister while my dog ran around. And in those moments, not realizing we lived in a microcosm of the universe while we dreamed of a universe outside the microcosm. And even as teenagers we already started to pine for those more innocent days that seemed like ancient history when we were 17, 18, or 19. "Tales of a Scorched Earth" gives a nod to my Metallica, Pantera, and Nine Inch Nails days by letting out some final moshing and screaming. "Thru the Eyes of Ruby" begins to acknowledge the reality underneath the adolescent illusions. While my crush on Kim always seemed on the verge of becoming reality in my head, life ultimately showed that it was simply a crush. Both Kim and I were wonderful but troubled people, not psychologically equipped to ever have a relationship with each other. We clicked on some level with humor and conversation, but it would never have worked romantically. Corgan sings, “You may find your love is gone and is not quite what it seemed.” That’s the sadness of adolescent dreams beginning to dispel like mist. We learn that what we imagine often doesn’t come to fruition, but we can become addicted to the delusion or illusion. I learned that the hard way, and so my crush on Kim began to disperse after about a year of college. Just another aspect of adolescence that time claimed, collecting back the chips of yet another dream.

"Stumbleine" seems bitter about something, so I end up relating to the music rather than the lyrics. It’s a sad, acoustic ode to loss that fits into how this album concludes. But...one last burst of aggression. One last ode to my Nine Inch Nails rage. While Promised Land had long helped me deal with the aftermath of high school, "X.Y.U." gives me one last thrashy fit of self-absorbed rage. And it really was the last time like this. After this song, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness concludes for real. I feel it. Adolescence is soon over. The time is ticking. It’s almost easy to miss, but "We Only Come Out at Night" samples Doom, a computer video game that hinted at our computer-heavy, internet-based future. But the song itself romanticizes those adolescent days when responsibility was so light that I could only come out at night. That’s when I really lived. At night. Days were for high school, reading, and errands. Night was for conversation, laughter, adventure, coffee, and late night breakfasts. I miss those late late nights - the kind that rarely happen anymore when my peers have jobs, careers, and family. The next two songs, "Beautiful" and “Lily (My One and Only)," serve as one last farewell to my high school crush. I remember listening to this album on my final day of being 19. I was already looking forward to meeting a mysterious new person named Aurora who would be visiting my friend Jon in May 1997, but even on this night these two songs brought back the narrative of my crush on Kim for one final time. There’s something about a first crush like that. Something in the blood, in the DNA, in the reptilian mind, that is hardwired and mixes with feelings of love, contemplation, and a desire for a magical, extraordinary life somehow different than anyone else’s. In those days, I quite simply thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world. Making her laugh felt like God smiling. Those feelings exclude everything else, and you can’t necessarily control those feelings. They are pure, unthought, and unplanned. In 1994 and 1995, I experienced moments of such love, fondness, and joy that they helped complete the masterpiece that became my adolescence. But they formed part of a romanticized vision of possibility, similar to what I talked about in my Dirt post with “Would?” And that’s the important point here. Kim - along with Todd, Jason V, Jason Z, and Jon - all represented possibility. Adolescence, by definition, represents possibility. That’s why it’s magic, that’s why I now feel unashamed to return to it, and that’s why I feel I can learn from it. In my 20 years since, I’ve learned that possibility must become reality. Adolescence is inspiring because it teaches us as adults to continue believing in possibility. But we can’t live or dwell only in a world of possibility. God (or the concept of God) teaches us that we must be co-creators of His universe. That means we need to get our hands dirty, leave the adolescent Garden of Eden, and get to work. Kim, in reality, is still a friend. But Kim, in adolescence, represented the possibility of love within me. That’s an important point. It’s why I think of Kim, Mary Anne, Jenny Lewis, Kelly, and friends like Todd, Jason V, Jason Z, and Jon as both real people today AND as possibilities from adolescence. I take liberty with "By Starlight" to sense this point coming through. The song feels like life if I clung onto dead dreams long past their expiration date. By May 1997, Kim had moved on with her life. Mary Anne had moved on. Todd had moved on. And I had moved on. The inevitable had happened. The perfect molecule of high school was done. Completed. The next era awaited. That’s how life evolves. Period.

But ideally, I like the idea of mourning something special that has died. And so we come to "Farewell and Goodnight,” a song that decimated me when I listened to it during my final night as a teenager. Sure, I was excited about becoming an English major, meeting Aurora and hanging out with new friends that summer, and exploding open my new friendships with people like Dusty, Adam, Mike, Kim (another Kim), and Tracy. But I had to say goodbye to my adolescence. I wept so hard that night listening to this final song. I remembered everything in a rush. How I used to look forward to my Nintendo Power coming in the mail during 8th grade. Reading The Gunslinger for the first time after borrowing it from Jason V’s dad in 9th grade. Mary Anne telling me how much she liked my Hemingway satire in 10th grade - the first pretty girl who ever complimented me like that. Falling so hard for Kim in 11th grade and remembering when she sat in the aisle on the bus during a high school band trip late at night, talking to Todd and I, and I just couldn’t believe she was there! Those nights at the hotel during my senior trip hanging out with Todd as he smoked, staring off into the distance at Washington D.C. and talking about our plans after high school - dreaming of our futures. Early morning breakfasts and coffee at greasy spoon diners with my friends Frank and Vinnie during my freshman year of college after we watched Pulp Fiction and thought it was so cool and badass to talk about awesome things so early in the morning over bacon, eggs, and coffee. Philosophy classes with my friend Mike where our minds lit up with knowledge, debate, and issues that we’d never grappled with before - continuing our conversations with unhinged glee over Green Mountain coffee in the Pioneer Cafe on a lazy afternoon at Utica College. I said “farewell and goodnight” to it all. I realized, perhaps too late, that it had all been beautiful. Not because it lacked pain or despair. There was plenty of that. It was beautiful because it was LIFE - good and bad - served up in a way that I would never, ever experience again in the lifespan of this universe.

So that night, I acknowledged these feelings. And again, in June 2016, I acknowledge these feelings after almost 20 extra years of living. And I’m crying again as I type these words. And it’s okay. For a seven year period that formed my identity so crucially, I’m glad these years ring true decades later. They are a special part of my life, never replicated but certainly built upon in the years since. By writing this essay - my 499th of this project - I hope I never run from my past again. And instead of frustration about the few friends and acquaintances who have resisted or mocked these efforts, I now feel empathy and pity toward them. We all have pasts full of pain and joy. But fleeing from those pasts is as much of a loss as avoiding the creation of one’s future. It’s a yin-yang, folks. To become whole, you need to understand where you came from in order to understand where to go. Going back to that W.H. Auden quote, I’m glad I now better understand who I was as an adolescent during that important time before the ambitious exploration that started in 1997 took over. Those years are important too, but I lost a certain magic as I clawed my way through Utica College, Kent State University, TechLINKS, Sophicity, Nebo, Content Science, and my current content development business. It’s an irony that we, as adolescents, wanted to escape our world so badly. To become adults and get rid of the shackles. It’s necessary and inevitable, like birds hatching out of an egg. But after we leave the nest, we start to appreciate the magic of those now-dead days much better and more fully. In that same interview I mentioned earlier, Corgan says, "I'm waving goodbye to me in the rearview mirror. Tying a knot around my youth and putting it under the bed." One more post, and I’ll be doing the same thing. Not fleeing from it. Not escaping it. Not “moving on.” But simply putting it under the bed. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and this post - with the hundreds of other posts as ancillary support - forever capture the magic of those 1990-1997 days, and this is the proper time to reflect and pause before I turn the corner at 40. But I must pause only for this brief moment. After all, as I’ve learned since 1997, there are new things to create, gifts I must contribute to the world, and people to meet and continue befriending. The only difference is that the magic of my adolescent days now lies a little closer to my heart again...right where it should be.

3: Dirt - Alice in Chains (1992)

Back when I talked about III Sides to Every Story (#62), I mentioned the slightly more positive side of a high school band trip to New York City and the hope that could possibly arise from such a dark moment. I hinted that Dirt told the other important but bleaker half of the story. Here is that bleaker half - but with some unexpected beauty at the end.

In ninth grade, I was in hell every day but had no way to articulate my feelings – not through words or music. The closest I got to revealing my feelings in ninth grade was by writing a story about a character named Jimmy - a projection of the worst aspects of myself that I wanted to kill off. I wrote this story in a burst of rage that also paralleled my attraction to darker heavy metal such as Metallica, Countdown to Extinction, and Vulgar Display of Power. 10th grade remained dark although I solidified friendships with my “core group” of friends (Jason V, Jason Z, and Jon) and solidified my allegiance to heavy metal as a form of armor against the daily bullshit of high school. Every day, I chafed and fought against a social system where I desired, deep down, to at least sort of belong. But in class after class (unlike 11th and 12th grade), I had no words or comebacks. Every day, my fellow students made fun of my silence, my deep voice, and the few awkward reactions I’d let out – which were always the wrong thing to say or do. There were a few girls who I would have chopped off an arm to befriend, but every day they seemed to see me as a fool compared to the other students who delighted them with confidence and wit. My comebacks were always great in my head or with my friends but never when I had to socially perform. I guess, even in April 1993, I still had a little bit of hope that one day I might impress these folks. And then, reality hit fully and depressingly on April 17, 1993 - ending that dream forever.

As I went on a high school band trip to New York City that day, an all day bus trip that involved walking around New York City and seeing a Broadway play, I watched socially successful people – many holding hands with their significant others – thoroughly enjoy the day together. Despite feeling outcast and excluded, I had the fool-headed notion that maybe I could break through some barriers and finally become liked by a few others outside of the few friends who hung out with me that day. But on the long bus ride back, the honors students in my grade sat in the back and relentlessly picked on me. They weren’t particularly vicious but they weren’t kind either. Distilled in that moment was everyone – sitting in a clump in the back – who I wanted to like me. And they were all thoroughly enjoying themselves, and thoroughly enjoying making fun of me as part of their good times. At the time, I did have a friend, Todd, who I hung out with that day but he was a social butterfly and gravitated to other friends with a higher energy level than me. Clearly, he wasn’t going to see to my needs for the entire bus ride. I also sat with a friend, Frank, who I did not click with well at the time and would end up befriending later. He was an awesome person but the timing wasn’t right for us to bond yet. And I did have another friend, John, who didn’t pick on me. We talked music and joked around, but he was volatile and a social butterfly in his own way. So, I wasn’t able to just sit with a group of two or three people and converse the entire way.

I know it’s weird to quote myself, but the III Sides to Every Story post provides the perfect setting. So let me repeat myself for just one moment and then further elaborate.

It was one thing to get picked on by older students or known shitty people. It was another thing to get picked on by the popular honors students who I had classes with every day. At times in the past, I had tried to respond in a few ways. I ignored them, trembling inside. I tried to be sarcastic, which rarely worked. I pleaded with them to stop, even wondering why they did it. Oh man, that made it worse. On this bus trip late at night as we drove up Interstate 87 out of the New York City metro area, I suddenly felt my heart snap. Instead of my previous failed responses, I did something I had never done before. I accepted the abuse. I put on headphones and listened to Dirt and III Sides to Every Story on a level that I had never listened to music before. In this moment as the honors students - including a stunningly beautiful girl who I liked from 6th to 8th grade and still idealized who was complicit in the taunting - all made fun of my voice, my silence, and my mannerisms, I slumped into my bus seat, put on my headphones, and felt another level of depression that I had never reached before. In this moment, my attitude shifted from Metallica to Dirt. There was an odd moment for the honors students when they kept trying to get a reaction out of me. I was silent, but in a new way. Just completely unresponsive. I think at one point, I yelled at them that they were absolutely right in everything they were saying or something to that effect, and then just put the headphones back on. Ironically, I think someone later asked me if I was okay.

In the III Sides to Every Story post, I make a left turn here to talk about the hope that transcended the despair. But now, it’s time to talk about the despair. But first, let’s rewind just a little bit. Because Alice in Chains was already a major part of my life before I heard all of Dirt.

By late 1992, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Metallica, Megadeth, Stone Temple Pilots, and Pantera all began to offer songs that coalesced into a stew of radio, mixtape, and cassette songs to which I gravitated - now fully purging most Top 40 music from my life. I was angry and bitter, reacting against the world of high school. But strangely, that music still offered hope. It was aggressive, authentic, and sincere, but it asserted itself - matching the way I wanted to assert myself into the high school social life that existed beyond my outcast friends. If only I took the attitude of “Evenflow,” “Enter Sandman,” or “Plush” and make everyone see that I could hang with the big kids, then I could maybe wear the popular kids down and finally get accepted. But one day, I heard and became addicted to a song on 94K Rock and Headbanger’s Ball called “Them Bones.” For a while, I didn’t know if the band was called Them Bones, Dirt, or Alice in Chains. Finally, I nailed it down. Alice in Chains. The song was called “Them Bones.” The album was called Dirt. The song itself felt unlike any song I had heard until that point. It smacked me upside the head immediately with that initial scream from Layne Staley, never seemed to settle down during the odd, almost progressive chords, and caught my soul with those tuneless, despairing harmonies as Staley and Jerry Cantrell articulated the horrifying lyrics. And then...the song abruptly ended after barely two and a half minutes. While I continued listening to other bands, something started to obsess me about Alice in Chains. Every other band I liked (except for perhaps Dream Theater) felt like others had appropriated it before me. But Alice in Chains felt like MY band. And they felt new and completely of the moment. Even the name thrilled me - a strange evocation of...something. On their videos, the band projected an air of badass mystery. No girls, no overt male aggression, no headbanging, no moshing antics, and no affectation. Alice in Chains just delivered direct, blunt, head-on despair with dignity and stoicism. And no one embodied the band’s atmosphere and vibe better than Layne Staley.

Like Peter Steele, Layne Staley helped define my adolescence, and it’s sad that he’s also gone. First, Staley just looked cool. I remember seeing him on the inside cover of the cassette (and later CD) art. Unlike even the other cool band members, Staley just had a different look about him. The paisley shirt, the short hair, and the goatee. And that young yet “I’ve seen it all” look that he wore. And then...his voice. He sang with a dead, nasal despair like he saw through life’s bullshit and only found misery. Yet, he seemed to accept it with stoicism, dignity, and latent anger always simmering under the surface. With “Them Bones,” Alice in Chains accepted death with resignation and defiance. Yep, we’re going to die. Doesn’t that suck. Whatever. Fuck you. That’s the message. As an adult, that sounds horrifying. As a 15 year old, it confronts the horror of death with an unprecedented level of acceptance. Hearing the song on 94K Rock or seeing it on Headbanger’s Ball always gave me a great thrill, especially because the song began and ended so fast. It quickly became one of my favorite songs of late 1992 and I couldn’t get enough of it. But not even “Them Bones” could prepare me for “Angry Chair.” In early 1993, “Angry Chair” wasn’t just a favorite song. It was an identity-defining song, paving the way for Dirt to take me over on that April 1993 bus trip. Blowing me away completely, “Angry Chair” begins with Sean Kinney’s menacing drum beat and dark guitar until the riff roars in. At this moment, it felt like my simmering anger in 9th and 10th grade finally boiled over. It was the first song - better than “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Enter Sandman,” or “Jeremy” - that articulated my new self. I was NOT the Top 40, Nintendo Power, and Paul-from-The Wonder Years kid from 1991 anymore. I was NOT someone who accepted how people pigeonholed me into a quiet nerd archetype. I was ANGRY. And the lyrics of “Angry Chair” articulate my anger, social isolation, and despair perfectly. Staley sings of “angry chairs” and “angry walls that steal the air” that seemed to describe high school. Yet, there is also that stoic resignation again in those choruses of “I don’t mind” that sounds more positive and upbeat, as if they represented those moments during a day when I had to put on a pretty face and get through another school day. But toward the end of the song, I heard Staley sing the truest lyrics I had heard in my life up until that point.

Loneliness is not a phase
Field of pain is where I graze
Serenity is far away

Saw my reflection and cried
So little hope that I died

I hated myself. I thought I was the ugliest person in the world, inside and outside. In a way, I did die. The child in me died, killed by the world. I used to be optimistic, hopeful, and desiring to belong. “Angry Chair” represented the death of that hope. The song concludes after everything else drops out except Kinney’s drum beat which began the song - leaving me feeling stark, alone, and unwanted - that all-too-brief catharsis not enough to overcome the black feeling in my heart.

While “Rooster” got overplayed and did not end up as one of my favorite songs on Dirt, it’s still defines its time well. I even remember the video debut on Headbanger’s Ball in March 1993 and the excitement of hearing this new song. It feels like late 10th grade and encapsulates those days when I escaped to fantasy novels by David Eddings, Raymond Feist, Roger Zelazny, and Joel Rosenberg. I trudged through my high school days, hung out with my “core group” of friends as we attacked the world from a distance, and wrote occasional Jimmy stories on the side. Despite the song’s subject matter, I related to a few lines such as “Ain’t found a way to kill me yet” and “Seems every path leads me to nowhere.” The song itself is definitive grunge, representing the sound at its purest along with “Plush” and “Heart-Shaped Box.” “Rooster” was the most recently released Alice in Chains song as I rode on that bus, helping popularize Dirt similar to how “Plush” popularized Core, and so the song also viscerally brings me back to that day when it was still fresh and new.

Okay, so we’re back to the bus ride. I’ve mentioned the honors students picking on me. I felt so awful and miserable, but my friend John let me listen to Dirt on cassette. No person in my life’s history (with one possible exception) ever let me borrow an album that had more impact on my future life trajectory. First, I listened to Dirt and cranked up the volume just to drown out my peers. I knew a few of the songs and liked Alice in Chains. But the album soon became something else entirely. It was like somebody playing around with my brain and exposing me to a world of feelings I never had before. As song accrued upon song – “Them Bones,” “Dam That River,” “Rain When I Die,” “Down in a Hole,” “Sickman,” “Dirt,” “Hate to Feel,” and “Angry Chair” – I discovered myself for the first time and finally understood. It was hopeless. To turn around and try to engage with the people behind me was hopeless. I was not them. And since they all agreed – throughout 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th grade – that I was stupid, worthless, ugly, awkward, such an utter joke that they could tease me every single fucking day without their energy flagging, even when I ignored them – then that means what they said was true. Who was I kidding? And on that day, a burden of sorts lifted. I finally gave in to the darkness. Alice in Chains soothed. I listened to Dirt in its entirety about three times, staring out of the bus window into the darkness, thinking of the personal, emotional dungeon I’d found myself in. Dirt was me. And there was a moment, maybe during my second listen, when I heard the others trying to goad me again, yelling humiliating names, hearing the attractive girls laughing so dismissively. They didn’t know it, but the years of trying – especially from 6th grade to 10th grade – had just slipped away forever, like Atlas giving up the world. I had slipped away into the darkness, and hearing their goading just simply confirmed the “obvious.” I was ugly, I was worthless, I was nothing. And, with as much integrity as I could summon as a 16 year old going on 17, as the bus hurtled back to Sauquoit, New York, I listened to Dirt and embraced that mantra, accepting with dignity the nothing that I was, and wept a few tears that it took me so long to understand.

To this day, listening to these songs brings those ghosts back, making me shiver in remembrance. The sugar high of “Dam That River” as I both gave up and gloried in my new attitude. The slow dark ecstasy of “Rain When I Die.” The off-kilter mental chaos of “Hate to Feel” as it felt like I’d lost touch with my emotions. Even the drug songs impacted me. I’ve never used a drug in my life, but I related to the feelings expressed on “Sickman,” “Junkhead,” and “Dirt.” It says a lot that my feelings of depression and social ostracization paralleled Staley’s most horrific tales of heroin use. It hurts deeply to feel unwanted, ugly, and unloved. We all just want a few friends, a girlfriend, and a feeling that life has meaning. When you feel removed from those things, it’s like the absence of God to a teenager. The resignation during certain moments of “Junkhead” is definitive, especially on the “What’s my drug of choice?” choruses. During that chorus, I’m on that bus again at night riding back to Sauquoit from New York City, headphones on, trying to drown out the taunts and my own inner demons. And “Dirt” forms a precursor to The Downward Spiral with its logical conclusion. If I felt this way about my life, if I had gotten to this dark, bleak point, then…

I have never felt such frustration
Or lack of self control
I want you to kill me
And dig me under, I wanna live no more

One who doesn’t care is one who shouldn’t be
I’ve tried to hide myself from what is
Wrong for me, for me

I want to taste dirty, a stinging pistol
In my mouth, on my tongue
I want you to scrape me from the walls
And go crazy like you’ve made me

You, you are so special
You have the talent to make me feel like dirt
And you, you use your talent to dig me under
And cover me with dirt

That was it. Thoughts of suicide. Thoughts of emotional revenge. Thoughts about how these were the people who did me in. Horrible, dark, bleak thoughts. But that was going through my head when from another person’s point of view they simply saw a 15 year old 10th grader, a socially awkward “nerd,” just sitting by himself listening to the latest grunge music on headphones. Nothing to worry about. Teenagers will be teenagers, right?

From that day forward, I embraced this double-edged sword. If I didn’t care, then I felt liberated about my sense of humor, contempt, and creativity. Yet, I had also given up. No hope of girlfriends, dances, or new friends outside of outcasts. I was a pariah, and Dirt helped me accept it. I grew into this identity over the summer although even I have to admit that the lack of high school for three months combined with endless “core group” hangouts cheered me up a bit. I was still angry, still exploding open my metal identity, and still fixated on Dirt’s philosophy, but I got a reprieve. I have fond memories of watching a Headbanger’s Ball that summer during which Alice in Chains and Riki Rachtman hung out at a water park. That influenced my enjoyment of a day spent with the “core group” in August 1993 at Enchanted Forest. Every detail of that day - from Jason V’s dad throwing a boomerang and accidentally hitting something in a neighbor’s yard before we left to the endless inside jokes as the four of us roamed Enchanted Forest all day - was perfect. Later, I based my third Jimmy story around this day, throwing Alice in Chains, Riki Rachtman, Denis Leary, and Rob Halford into my story along with me, my friends, and my Jimmy character. As 11th grade began, things still sucked but I had consolidated a lot of my strengths through time, some maturity, and growing more senior in high school. Although I’d known of the song for a long time, it still seemed appropriate that “Down in a Hole” became the final single from Dirt in August 1993. It opened up 11th grade with the softer side of my stoic recognition. It feels like my depression on a mundane high school day. It’s autumn, the leaves looking beautiful on the trees outside. I smell the new 11th grade classes, see the new teachers, and feel the new notebooks in my hand, ready to give another year a shot. And this time, I anticipate any social rejection by doing it to myself first. “Down in a Hole” summarized it best…

I’d like to fly but my wings have been so denied.

While The Downward Spiral was more frenzied and definitive, no album in my life captured the darkness I felt in high school better than Dirt. It was an album of its time. It never made much sense after 1994, but during 1993 and 1994 it was the only album that truly expressed my feelings. If I listen to it in the dark with headphones, it accurately captures my life as a 10th and 11th grader and takes me back immediately to those days. And no, I didn’t ignore “Would?” You would think that with definitive songs like “Them Bones,” “Down in a Hole,” and “Angry Chair” that Alice in Chains couldn’t top themselves yet again. And yet they do. “Would?” remains my second favorite song of all time (after “Nutshell,” also by Alice in Chains). It’s so hard to capture the feeling of “Would?” in words, but I have to give it a shot. It’s not like the other songs, and it’s not indicative of the depression I described. It simply captures life - like freezing a specific moment in time so well that you can relive not only the activity but also the emotions. When I hear “Would?” it’s some vague time maybe in early 1993. I imagine myself in high school, wearing my flannel shirt, glowering as I walk through the hallways, seeing beautiful girls who were as approachable as Mount Everest, and carrying my giant book bag so that I rarely had to go to my locker and get hassled by bullies. “Would?” always felt like the potential of life somewhere out there, maybe in some imaginary ideal Seattle college life full of really cool people who understood me. I felt trapped at Sauquoit, knowing that a wider life existed out there. And I got tastes of that on trips to New York City or on TV. Yet, I also wanted to capture these beautiful moments in early 1993 as my identity shifted into something uglier yet purer and newer than anything that came before. While depressed, I was also the most alive I ever felt. In that moment, I felt the future potential of the entire rest of my life, like I could see the blank canvas appear before me. The lyrics are vague, but Staley sings, “So I made a big mistake, try to see it once my way.” It feels like the first major juncture when you realize your current philosophy will alter your entire life - mistakes and all - but it hasn’t happened yet. That makes “Would?” also painfully nostalgic - bringing me back to a moment I want to freeze in time forever when everything felt right and made sense. It sounds weird, but there was a beauty in this darkness. Those dark high school hallways were full of terror but also full of raw potential and mystery, like the aftermath of a star’s death that also helps forge new life. “Would?” feels like those moments when I sensed the ingredients of creation around me, as yet unused. Nothing had happened yet, so I could imagine it all. That’s why I devoured so many books, wrote so many stories, and listened to so much music. It helped me formulate future lives without any editing yet. My imagination spun out into dozens, hundreds of imaginary future experiences, like parallel worlds that I could somehow all see in that moment - from real scenarios in certain cities like New York or fantasy scenarios like my Final Fantasy II world with the Jenny Lewis character. Yet, I was still in that early 1993 moment, fully and completely, feeling real and alive. “Would?” captures the reason why it’s so difficult for me to embrace new music with the same enthusiasm that I had in 1993. In early 1993, I had my moment. My depression, ethos, philosophy, and attitude all made sense in this moment - and it’s never made sense since. The Top 500 has taught me that I live outside of time. As I near the end of the Top 500, I face this truth, and it’s unpleasant. I’d love to understand what Kayne West and Kendrick Lamar are doing, or know the bands that Pitchfork talks about. I’d love to go to tons of music festivals and enjoy the bands. I’d love to skim pop culture like a connoisseur tasting coffee. Friends often barrage me with new things to check out, and I maybe explore only 1% of what they share. That’s because, for better or for worse, my soul lives here in this moment of time with “Would?” no matter how old I get. My mind, my creative projects, my professional career, and my friendships evolve and move on. Those are fully in 2016. But a part of me always lives with “Would?” - a moment in time that maybe wasn’t the happiest or most creative but during which everything felt right - both in the present and in my hundreds of imaginary futures where I dreamed of new friends and endless life experiences that would enrich my life and allow me to escape the beautiful hellhole of high school that I secretly cherished. Perhaps I’m forever wanting to go back to that pivotal moment, captured by “Would?” when I felt all lives before me with equal access before I had to make a series of choices across decades that whittled those potentials down. In that sense, Dirt both captures my resignation and depression about my outcast status and also unexpectedly points toward my future where I really had nothing to lose with my new stoic and yet alive attitude about whatever may come.

4: Bloody Kisses - Type O Negative (1993)

While released in August 1993, I knew nothing of Bloody Kisses until spring 1994. As I’ve now talked about in countless posts, I emerged socially for the first time during late 11th grade. It was probably the most transformative time in my entire life. I went from a shy, socially inhibited outcast who felt I would never befriend anyone outside of other outcasts to someone who many charismatic and popular kids began to see as smart, funny, and creative. Plus, I began to not only expand my friendship beyond the “core group” of Jason V, Jason Z, and Jon to people such as Todd, Sean, Frank, Mary Anne, Jessica, Amy, and Dan but I also developed my definitive high school crush on Kim. And while January through March began this social explosion, it all culminated in April, May, and June of 1994. For those few moments in time, I felt the equivalent of how celebrities say that they struggle as unknowns for 10 years and then become famous overnight. Those months felt like getting drunk at a party with all of your best friends there after years of solitary confinement. Many times, the hilarity and joy was almost too much. Later, that initial high would haunt me - especially during the summer and early 12th grade as I wondered why the sudden rush of social validation didn’t last (rather like a drug high that eventually produces diminishing returns). But man...those three months...the first time ever that I felt surrounded by people who “got” me. What felt good about those few months was that I didn’t have to compromise who I was. The mixture of outcasts, charismatic and popular people looking for an alternative to the mainstream, and beautiful girls who were also my friends all made me feel like I won the lotto. Bloody Kisses encapsulates that social emergence in late 11th grade that I’ve talked about in so many of these posts. But instead of just hinting at it or playing in the background with only a few songs in high relief, the entirety of Bloody Kisses captures it all. It’s the combination of elements that does it. Sickfuck, corrupt, horrible adolescent humor (the kind that the PC police would stamp out today). Gothic, sentimental romance. Bitterness about romantic rejection. Offensiveness just to shock. Dark depression. The flavor of an Anne Rice novel. And ultimately a giant fuck you to everyone and everything as I paradoxically got accepted into the mainstream for the first time even with this attitude. Bloody Kisses captures it all. It’s better than a yearbook and accurately documents my spectrum of feelings, moods, and experiences that exploded me out of my shell, allowed me to fully explore my personality for the first time, and encouraged me to share my gifts of intellect, humor, and creativity with people...rippling into my life even to this day as I interact with others.

Bloody Kisses opens up with the stupid, hilariously offensive “Machine Screw” which serves as the incongruous intro to “Christian Woman.” While the lyrics to “Christian Woman” are provocative and offensive, I gravitated to the music. The longing, pining, and desperation of Peter Steele’s vocals combined with the Gothic, dark, depressing music matches my earliest feelings for my crush - encompassing the agony and ecstasy of love. A song like “Christian Woman” is adolescence incarnate. You don’t know how to express the turbulent feelings within you. They combine both the ideal and the sensual, the sincerity and the shame. Consisting of three sections, the second section feels like I’m in the middle of some castle garden in a fantasy novel, pining for some princess whom I love. And then, the third section kicks back into full-on 11th grade. There’s my cynical, dark humor coming out - combining the heavy metal riff with the snarky lyrics. Shifting moods over nine minutes, the song captures three aspects of my late 11th grade self perfectly. At the end of high school, I ranked “Christian Woman” as my third favorite song of all time. To this day, it remains so definitive that I am literally taken back to late 11th grade as if I’m reliving it. More popular and definitive although not as much a personal favorite, “Black No. 1” helped define 1994 when 94K Rock endlessly played in during late 11th grade. This song smacked us all upside the head. It sounded unlike anything else we had ever encountered. After reading Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat, I often fantasized about finding music that matched that Gothic feel while remaining metal and aggressive. Well, “Black No. 1” nailed it completely. Nailed it so completely that any other “Gothic” metal or alternative band I encountered since “Black No. 1” just doesn’t measure up. The Cure? Evanescence? Cruxshadows? Please. Type O Negative owns you all. This was my introduction to Type O Negative, Peter Steele’s deep voice, Peter’s Steele’s dark humor, and Type O Negative’s Black Sabbath meets Anne Rice evil sound. My friends and I all but bonded over this song. Forget our disparate reactions to various grunge and heavy metal bands. We all united over “Black No. 1” and Type O Negative. It’s hard not to like the song. When Jason V and I soon bought the CD, we were stunned and delighted to hear the full 11+ minute version. It didn’t offer a lot of additional variety, but we got to hear some naughty lyrics that weren’t played on the radio. Again, adolescence...in all its glory.

After the stupid and intriguing “Fay Wray Come Out and Play” interlude, we get the hardcore maybe-offensive “Kill All the White People.” As a 17 year old, I just liked how dangerous and violent it sounded. The super-fast headbanging riff combined with the hilarious “racist” lyrics was exhilarating. Then, we come to the double whammy of “Summer Breeze” and “Set Me On Fire.” Let me take a deep breath here. … Okay, this is why Bloody Kisses is #4. My crush. Late 11th grade. April and May of 1994. It’s so funny. I knew her since kindergarten, but one day in early 1994 I suddenly...saw her differently. She was beautiful. She was funny. Her smile. Her laughter. One minute, I was just chugging along with my scowls and sarcasm. Then, it hit me in early April that I really really really liked her. I’d had crushes before, but not like this. It smacked me upside the head. That crush timed itself with the dawn of spring and its eventual transition to summer in Sauquoit in Upstate New York. You have to imagine all of these pieces aligning. My emotional maturity. My sharpening humor now emerging into the light. My outcast friends becoming more vivid and hilarious as personalities. New friends joining our group who added richness, life, and vitality to my social life. Seeing my crush every day and feeling like my heart was alive for the first time. Smelling the spring air, seeing the sunshine, and feeling the wind on my skin as I went outdoors - whether watching my friends doing fantasy live roleplaying in Jason V’s or Jon’s backyards, going on a New York City band trip with my friends Todd and my crush Kim, or spending all day at Darien Lake with my physics class roaring with laughter and social intoxication the entire way there and back. I was ALIVE! FOR THE FIRST TIME. Listening to “Summer Breeze” and “Set Me On Fire” back to back captures that transition from January to May, starting off slow and brooding and ending euphoric, ecstatic, and high on life and love. It was magnificent, real, and undeniable what was happening to me. “Set Me on Fire” - with its mantra of “summer girl” - perfectly captures my earliest days of my crush for Kim and some of my happiest days in high school when I felt like I had finally started to live and feel the electricity of life.

However (and a BIG however), befriending non-outcasts and beautiful girls did not mean I compromised the identity I forged in 9th, 10th, and early 11th grade. That grunge/metal version of Kevin who imbibed hours and hours of Metallica, Pantera, and Alice in Chains was still there. And although my outcast friends grew more popular and well-received, they remained uncompromising assholes like me. It’s just that we had more fans and a louder “microphone" so to speak. Our attitude helped transform 11th grade into a truly rebellious time when we took what we’d learned from our outcast days that applied that philosophy to our physics, health, and English classes. “We Hate Everyone”’s presence on Bloody Kisses is essential in helping define late 11th grade. Jason V, Jason Z, Jon, and I stirred up and/or joined people like Mary Anne, Todd, and Sean to openly challenge and rebel against teachers and perceived injustices in high school. We were a bunch of fuckers causing trouble but we always felt we mocked aspects of high school in a Monty Python-esque way. Our physics teacher routinely overreacted to students misbehaving, often blamed the wrong person, and punished arbitrarily, and so Jason Z, Mary Anne, and I would wrangle with him. Our health teacher tried to lecture us about Christian and conservative values as he frowned upon anything really fun or humorous, and so he became an easy target for satire. Our English teacher overloaded us with busy work, graded us harshly, and lacked depth in her lessons, and both Mary Anne and I especially harshly took her to task many times. I thoroughly enjoyed this rebellion - maybe too much. After all, I had nothing to lose, and I used a new weapon I realized I had - my intellect. I was smart and realized that teachers weren’t always super-brilliant or able to match wits with me. I abused my spiritual gifts by waving around my intellect too much, but I was 17, angry, and looking for a fight. “We Hate Everyone” encapsulates our adolescent rebellions against teachers, the school system, and peers we hated. After two years of pent up frustration, us outcasts joined up with a few popular students and we attacked everything. It was glorious and intoxicating - as much as my crush on Kim, my emerging humor, or my new social groups. “We Hate Everyone” and its representation of my outcast friends taking over the ship of high school and causing trouble formed an essential part of the tapestry of that glorious time.

We end Bloody Kisses on a high note, but a foreboding one. The almost 11 minute title track became a reminder that underneath all the new hilarity, romance, and social novelty, I remained depressed. “Bloody Kisses” feels like what always awaited me when the high school day ended, when no social hangouts happened, and when no phone calls occurred. Alone in my bedroom, with myself, with my mind. I brooded over everything. Should I ask Kim out? She probably thinks I’m ugly. Why didn’t I get invited to Jason V’s house last weekend? Were they excluding me? Maybe no one really likes me. Maybe it’s all been a fluke. As I wrote Jimmy stories or read Anne Rice, I thought about alternative worlds full of darkness, despair, and hardened adults full of jaded sarcasm as they got by in their lives. There’s nothing painful about “Bloody Kisses” but it’s just my general background depression on autopilot when left alone in mid-1994. That brooding especially came to the fore once summer began. High school threw me together with people who I normally didn’t hang out with, but summer broke us apart. I began to grow paranoid that maybe these new friends and my crush didn’t really like me. That mentality affected my hangouts with my outcast friends as I began to resent them as a default social group. Despite those ungrateful thoughts, I did continue to have good times with those friends all throughout the summer. “Too Late: Frozen” and “Blood and Fire” perfectly capture those lazy, magical days. There’s an absence of the electric, visceral fun of “Christian Woman,” “Black No. 1,” and “Set Me on Fire” that even on the CD seems so long ago - but I still felt that original energy coursing through my veins during the more low-key summer hangouts as I enriched my friendships with the Jasons, Jon, Frank, Sean, and Greg. The reference to “frost giants” in “Too Late: Frozen” reminded me of frost giants as an enemy in Final Fantasy, reminding me briefly that those 1990 Nintendo days and my brooding, Gothic 1994 days weren’t that far apart. It was okay to geek out with my outcast friends over Magic: The Gathering, AD&D, and live roleplaying instead of thinking I had to impress new friends like Todd, Mary Anne, and Kim by rejecting part of my core identity - as if I was suddenly ashamed of who I was before I befriended them. “Blood and Fire” reminds me how I both enjoyed my summer but never stopped thinking about Kim, looking forward to seeing her every day again in the fall as I began 12th grade. But that initial late 11th grade supernova faded fast. Sure, it changed my life forever and made 12th almost as glorious. But as I’ve written about in the Nine Inch Nails essays, that summer broke the momentum too early and my depression gnawed at my insides, corrupting that initial breakthrough. “Can’t Lose You” ends Bloody Kisses on an anticlimactic note, aimlessly drifting off into nothingness with no direction or meaning, similar to how the promise of late 11th grade ended up drifting into nothing. So much could have happened - a transformation of my attitude, a possible girlfriend, and a more expanded social set. But it all backfired, and it was all my fault. I grew even more depressed, I never asked out Kim (or even Mary Anne who I wrote to the entire year while she was in Australia), and I stuck to my close-knit group of outcast friends. It was too much, too soon, and I got scared. By 12th grade, the magic articulated by Bloody Kisses continued but in a tainted, sullied form that never recaptured those initial three months. By eerie accident, the variety, order, and subject matter of the songs documented the supernova and anticlimactic aftermath of late 11th grade and the subsequent summer. The narrative of Bloody Kisses brings back those days so vividly, so sensually, and so emotionally that it’s easy for me to both laugh and cry while I listen to it, remembering some of the best days of my life - both the promise of life fulfilled, and the promise of life unfulfilled.

5: Promised Land - Queensrÿche (1994)

While I was already a huge fan of Queensryche before Promised Land came out in late 1994, this album transcended anything that they had previously released by impacting my life in an unprecedented way. After The Downward Spiral, I had taken my self-destructive attitude as far as it could go. There was no place to go but up if I decided to stick around, but I wasn’t about to take cheesy advice or “get happy,” forgetting all about the dark paths I traveled. By late 1994 and early 1995, I needed music to help me begin putting my life back together – especially after high school ended and I reached that terrifying graduation day. While I had raged against high school the entire time I lived it, I had ironically let it completely define my identity. I was like a person, business, or country that needed an enemy to find meaning. Without that enemy, I would be lost. My rage subconsciously reflected a heavy dose of fear and anxiety about how much I depended upon high school for my personality and identity. By railing against teachers, students, the curriculum, authority, and convention, I didn’t have to create or forge anything myself. I just had to rip down what was thrown at me. (Not an uncommon human trait – think of the personalities of political pundits, for example.) But Promised Land emerged as a guide for the future and a way to assess the wreckage of my four years of high school – the perfect music I needed at the perfect time to help me move forward when I had no map. While 94K Rock had played “I Am I” quite a bit already by early November 1994, I finally bought the Promised Land CD on November 10, 1994. It quickly became legendary as part of my year of classic 1994 albums that included The Downward Spiral, Bloody Kisses, Superunknown, Far Beyond Driven, Handful of Rain, Awake, The Crow Soundtrack, Jar of Flies, and Low. Along with Awake, it was also an album that hinted at a way out of high school although Promised Land became way way more impactful on my life than Awake. Ultimately, Promised Land is high school’s conclusion - the damage assessment, the final word, the ticket out, and the path forward.

During high school, it’s worth noting that the day after I bought the CD I watched Interview with the Vampire with my friends at the mall. Like this movie, Promised Land musically feels Gothic, dark, and urban - heightened by the CD album art. It fit into my world of Nine Inch Nails, The Crow, Anne Rice, Wheel of Time, and dream conversations with friends - all of which helped create an inner world that actually affected what I did in the outer world. While I seethed with self-hate alongside The Downward Spiral, I sensed that high school could not contain the better parts of me. Promised Land captured these confusing feelings. The album felt gritty - like an adolescent experiencing “adult” life and thinking for the first time, finding himself stuck in an environment (high school) that did not fit our identities anymore, and imagining the intoxicating freedom that awaited after graduation - a world where we weren’t babysat by teachers, sharing space in a building with 14-year old freshmen, and taking dull classes that we mostly didn’t choose to take. We were on the cusp of college, and we could taste its future delights in the air. I remember that Colgate Seminars best hinted at our futures. We got to go to the Colgate University campus, sit in college classes, eat at the college cafeteria, and roam the pathways and peaceful grounds - watching students go to and from classes. Whereas just a year ago I had trouble asking permission to go out at night, I now regularly went to Carmella’s and Babe’s to drink coffee, eat chili and garlic bread, and hang out with my friends. I especially looked forward to deep conversations about philosophy, life, and dreams with my friends Jason Z and Todd. It felt so cool to hang out with Todd during this time. His charisma peaked, he wore a badass green Army jacket, and he exploded open conversations with his curious, sensitive, and volatile mind. Sometimes my crush, Kim, would join us along with her friend Amy. Kim looked AMAZING in those days. I got so nervous around her during those rare times we hung out and yet I also loved cracking her up and occasionally delving into dream conversations with her. I was also on fire during these days, despite my battles with depression and self-hate. My humor, intellect, and creativity were like fireworks wanting to burst out of their constraining high school environment. I poured intellectual and hilarious fuel into our conversational fires, and to this day we all consider these conversations legendary. In 12th grade, I may not have felt the same initial rush as I did with my late 11th grade breakthrough, but I certainly delved deep into these friendships during the last, waning days of high school. I think in our own ways, we all couldn’t believe high school was ending - and in our 13th year together, it was funny that we were just starting to get to know each other.

However, a defining moment related to Promised Land occurred on March 29, 1995. It was the last Colgate Seminar. While I went to the first half of class, I skipped the second half of class with my friends Todd, Jessica, Kim (my crush), and two girls from another school. I was already pissed that day because a teacher from Sauquoit was trying to kick my friend Heather out of high school on a technicality, but that teacher was outvoted by other teachers. And in general, I was always in a Nine Inch Nails kind of mood under the surface. But also, I remember that freedom during that skipped second half of class. We walked everywhere during those 15 minutes before our class would have started. So much space, so many ornate brick buildings, their aura of age and grandeur awing us. Ivy growing up their walls. We even walked inside a few cool-looking buildings for the hell of it, finding currently unused science lab rooms, office doors with the professor’s office hours posted, and even the bathrooms. We stared out windows to get good views of the campus. We wandered back outside, carefully now, lurking around, watching out for our teacher. Walking up a large hill, we stopped to sit under some giant maple trees. But then, we entered a small cafe. A place where you had the freedom to come and go as you chose, a place where older, mature college students sat to do homework and hang out. Nobody throwing French fries. No food fights. Something about this intoxicated me. As I saw my friends and acquaintances enter the cafe, in this context, we suddenly seemed older. Something had changed in us. And I did something for the first time that would become one of the anchoring threads of my life. I bought myself a cup of coffee. Pouring plenty of cream and sugar into it, I brought it over to a table in the corner and watched everyone order their drinks from a distance. Until this point, I had never truly felt mature. I could pretend at times - doing well at school, acting polite in front of smiling family who asked me about school, acting well-mannered to teachers. But underneath the surface, underneath my facade, there was no substance behind the maturity. I was a kid. And what separates the kid from the adult, the mature from the immature, is context. Anchoring. Understanding that your life is no longer run by outside regimen and chastising and babysitting. That you have the freedom to break away, sit back, and reflect, on your own time and money. That was my first moment like that. I sat alone, with no parents or teachers surrounding me in an institutional box, by myself, away from Sauquoit, drinking a coffee that I bought. And this was the first time in my life that I realized something. At age seventeen, one month away from being eighteen, I suddenly felt that my best days lay ahead. Because this is what life would be like after June 1995 - college and freedom and coffee shops and philosophical conversations. It all lay ahead - unspoiled, untouched, waiting to be experienced. A guitarist played. My friends and I joked. We laughed. We talked about our future majors in college with excitement and pride, as if we already had our bachelor’s degree in hand. Later, we tried to nonchalantly get on the bus as if we had gone to class. That didn’t work. Our teacher who chaperoned us got really mad and talked to me, alone, once we got back to the school. While I definitely did something irresponsible that hurt the chance of younger students going next year to Colgate Seminars, I didn’t care. I let the teacher have it. He asked me what my thought process was that led me to skip class and get others to skip. I told him no one ever cared about what was really going on inside my head all throughout high school. Until now. And yet, he acted all concerned now when, “out of nowhere,” I did this. I told him, angrily, that if he wanted to prevent me from doing something like this, he and the other teachers should have tried to know me better, sooner. My unhappiness, pain, and agony should have been quite apparent a long time ago, but no one gave a shit. Finally, when I got to have a lark after years of having no girlfriend, going to no dances, and getting excluded from sports and school spirit events from bullying and ostracization, I told him that March 1995 was way too late to start getting “concerned.” He didn’t have a great response to anything I said. He was more concerned about legal liability, job security, and Sauquoit Valley High School public relations than he was about me. So I ripped him a new asshole, won the argument, and went home.

I had many final moments in high school similar to this meeting during the next three months. If I was going to graduate and end this era of my life, I wasn’t going out without a fight. I began to assert myself in ways that I’d never asserted myself before. That’s why “I Am I” roared into my life with such authority and meaning. Just when it seemed that all was lost and that I had succumbed to the downward spiral like Gandalf wrestling with the balrog, I suddenly came roaring back to life with focused, articulate, and righteous anger. I had gone through so many years of bullying, depression, and self-hate that had toughened my creativity, intellect, and humor that I finally decided to live. But I was ANGRY - similar to how Geoff Tate roars out those first verses in “I Am I.” I felt these lyrics viscerally:

Beating with life you promised life,
Security, happiness.
Unfortunate son cornered,
Cowering…

Tate also sings, “It’s my insistence you keep your distance from the glare behind my stare. So this is the way the game is played?” Maybe I was too intense, too self-righteous, and too young to coherently articulate these feelings. But I was ALIVE. I had chosen life, and I would fuck around no longer. I started to understand the game. “I Am I” best captures my last three months of high school when I decided to stand up for myself and speak my mind for the first time to teachers and authority - not caring about any of the consequences. It wasn’t sustainable, and it’s impossible to operate in life with such self-righteousness, but it was a critical step in my evolution.

However, Promised Land most helped me with closing out high school after I graduated on June 24, 1995. The day had arrived. Life did go on, and it was hard to believe high school was actually over - especially since we had a summer off as usual and hung out with the same friends. But on July 15, 1995, I went to Darien Lake with my friends Jason V and Jason Z to see Queensryche on the Promised Land tour. Type O Negative opened up. Then, Queensryche hit the stage. It remains one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. Geoff Tate acted out many of the songs and transformed the way I listened to Promised Land. Songs that I’d passed over suddenly came to life. When I got home, I digested this live performance with a similar zeal that I did with Nine Inch Nails’s Woodstock ‘94 performance. Listening to Promised Land with newfound appreciation, I suddenly had my farewell album for high school. While “I Am I” defined my last three months of high school, “Damaged” defines the immediate aftermath. Just that first chord that segues from the explosive end of “I Am I” feels like the tortuous chaos of my memories as four years of high school jumbled together in my mind. What the fuck had happened? What did I go through? “Damaged” made me assess just how much I’d emotionally abused myself during the fast-paced days of high school that I only began to digest in the summer of 1995. I was damaged, hurt, and traumatized. And with the high school environment fully gone, I could begin the slow, slow, slow process of healing. But during that summer, I didn’t know where the fuck to start. Tate sings:

Searching for the answers,
All I see is Damage through the haze.
Picking up the pieces of my life
With no direction for re-assembly.

Eventually, I would piece myself back together again, but in the summer of 1995 it seemed an impossible task. How could I go from the howling self-hate of Nine Inch Nails and go to college like a normal person? I didn’t know.

However, one thing that began to occur (although it would take me many years to more fully adopt it) was my development of empathy. In high school, I was so self-absorbed that I wasn’t able to think about another person going through something difficult too. Now, I don’t want to oversell my maturity in the summer of 1995. I was still nasty and selfish around friends and acted with great insensitivity. But I recall that the songs “Out of Mind” and “Lady Jane” reminded me of my crush. I knew that despite her beauty, laughter, and charisma that she struggled with stuff too. I thought about how she might feel trapped, isolated, and scared about life - like me - and perhaps reacted insensitively and recklessly at times - like me. She wasn’t all that different from me in many ways, and we were going through many of the same adolescent problems. The song “Bridge” also hit a raw nerve in thinking about my father and my relationship with him. I felt like I didn’t know him, and I felt angry about it. As the years went on, the spiritual law of “honor thy parents” reverberated more and more with me - so I took on the task of rebuilding and reinforcing relationships that were broken. But right out of high school, I felt hurt - and the song articulated many of my feelings. But it was “Promised Land” and “Disconnected” that formed the centerpiece of the album - tying together all of the strands of this story so far - from my newly assertive yet damaged identity to my relationships with family and friends.

With “Promised Land,” I imagined a mini-movie in my head similar to how Tate performed the song on stage in concert. It’s a romanticized yet real projection of my post-high school feelings where I imagined myself at my prom - recalling the feelings that I repressed and did not express. My senior prom took place on May 19, 1995. This dance is supposed to be the happy culmination of everything great about high school. Yet, I went in with a full-on Nine Inch Nails attitude. Despite a wonderful friend going with me, I instead pined with envy over my crush who went to the prom with another friend of mine. Even though they weren’t romantically involved, it still hurt so bad. I wanted to go to prom with her more than anything. I still remember how absolutely stunningly beautiful she looked that night. Yet, when I finally got to the Harts Hill Inn, there was no dancing with pretty girls (other than my date). My crush didn’t dance with me. Everyone else seemed to be having hyper-happy fun. I felt like “Promised Land.” In my animated recollection that blurred reality and feelings, I imagined myself just sitting alone, drinking, while everyone danced around me. Tate sings, “Is this all? Because it’s not what I expected.” I felt irrationally betrayed by friends who “fled the fast lane.” The song’s opening is so spare, stark, and bleak - representing the emptiness of that night and my summer recollections usually late at night in my bedroom during the Upstate New York summer. I didn’t drink but I liked the metaphor of thinking about myself as some lonely, pathetic drunk in a bar who had lost his way. Tate sings, “Where did it all go wrong?” and “So many times I’ve tried and failed to gather my courage, reach again for that nail…” Thinking back to that night at the prom, it summarized everything wrong about me. Everything went wrong. I fucked everything up. I couldn’t have fun. I tried. I failed. I did not have the courage to proceed. It was hopeless. How do I rebuild from such low moments as those? Can you rebuild from such low moments when I basically tried to destroy the possibility of ever enjoying myself, dating someone, and having fun with a group of friends without bringing down the group? As the song plods on and drags itself through the mud, it feels like that hopelessness I felt in summer 1995 - the chance that I might never heal and so I might as well wallow in my misery like a hopeless alcoholic at his favorite bar.

“Promised Land” segues into the brilliant “Disconnected.” It’s a strange song that gives me goosebumps every time I’ve heard it. Back in 1995, I’d listen to it in the dark and think how my uncompromising personal journey from 1991 to 1995 – which was so far removed from the experiences of my peers – had disconnected me from “normal life.” However, I also sensed a future ahead that I could smell in the song: walking around a city at night, smelling cigarette smoke, hearing sirens in the distance, hearing my boots crunch pebbles underneath me on the sidewalk, staring up into the sky on a cold night, breathing deep. A hard road may lie ahead, but I was young, alive. Ready for anything. Ready to become weathered and jaded, if that’s what life brought. That’s the flip side of “Promised Land.” I had nothing to lose as a social outcast. As life went on and college began, I could embrace the streets and grit of night. It’s eerie and prescient how much I grew into “Disconnected” over the course of my life. It’s a precursor to my love of cities lit by Boston in 1999 and now feels like my city-wise self that’s lived in Atlanta for more than 13 years. The song captured my state of disconnection in 1995 and still nails the feeling of urban disconnection in 2016 - that feeling of loneliness despite millions of people surrounding you. “My Global Mind” is also a startlingly prescient song. In the summer of 1995, I had only owned a computer for six months. The internet and email were new and novel. Despite my high school issues, I felt the promise of the information age - the possibility of alleviating my loneliness as I connected to like-minded souls around the world. It seems petty to think about now, but it’s funny that one of my earliest pulls and tugs toward the internet was hoping I might meet people who weren’t the provincial morons that I had been dealt with at Sauquoit. However, “My Global Mind” is also prescient about the disconnection we feel as we connect with more people and access more information. The lyrics made theoretical sense in 1995 but now make complete sense today. Yet, the song also talks about the positive side of the internet - the connection, the learning, and the alternative views to which you’ll be exposed. As I used the internet and email more (especially with an early email group of high school friends, college friends, and friends of friends called the Dead Cynics Society that used to share regular emails - paralleling some aspects of Facebook today), I did feel the promise of “My Global Mind” come to fruition. It’s one of the most positive, forward-looking songs I ever encountered in high school, and I still get chills and smiles when I listen to it as I think back to how I straddled two worlds in 1995 without knowing it. As I thought myself “damaged” and hopeless, in actuality EVERYTHING awaited. Today, I cannot imagine my life without the internet and social media complementing my day-to-day life.

We conclude with two brilliant, influential songs that helped me move on with my life and acted as cautionary messages for my future life that I heeded. “One More Time” hit a raw nerve in the summer of 1995 because I regretted so much about high school and how I handled it. I wanted to do high school over again. This attitude even lingered until Boulder 2002 (see #12 Simple Things and #198 Let Go). But the lyrics also warned me not to live a life based on a script. Tate sang of adults on soulless treadmills regretting their entire lives in their 30s and 40s. That felt like a nightmare to me - a nightmare I wanted to avoid. “One More Time” was a precursor to the lessons of my Utica College professor and mentor, Scott MacDonald, who introduced me to Emerson and Thoreau as a way to think about living life to the fullest. The song also foreshadowed my admiration of Neil Young’s instinctual, mercurial way of forging a career that mattered to the core of your soul - no matter how that path looked to an outsider. “One More Time” scared me so much that I ended up living the rest of my life so far without many regrets. High school taught me a lesson harshly but brutally. I squandered some incredibly magical days, fucked up some beautiful friendships, and couldn’t even ask out the love of my adolescent life. I would never make those mistakes again, and I didn’t want to become an adult and feel like I wanted to do my life over. The final song, “Someone Else?” has become a perennial song and anthem for me as it acknowledges that it’s OK to change along the road of life because those changes are part of one’s spiritual evolution. But if you change, you might not recognize yourself afterward compared to who you were. But that’s OK. “Someone Else?” again foreshadowed Neil Young and also Walt Whitman’s idea of experiencing multiple, even contradictory identities over the course of one’s life as we explore our full spiritual beings. After high school, I sharply felt the “fall from grace” but I learned about myself from my experiences and by reflecting on these experiences. In summer 1995, I knew who I was....for a while. It’s a wonderful time when that happens, when you realize all of the confusing, disparate experiences that came before now all make sense. When Tate sings “Before the magic wore thin,” that’s how I felt in both 1995 after high school and 2012 after nine years of my career in Atlanta. We hit long patches of time when we lose ourselves only to find ourselves again. It’s a part of life, an ebb and flow. This song hits a raw nerve especially in the context of the Top 500. In many of these essays, it feels like I’m talking about someone else, not me. Especially as I near 40, I’m more and more challenged by the notion of identity. Who are we? Who were we? Where are we going? I prefer understanding my life narrative as much as possible to inform the present, but I also understand there’s a time to let go of the past in order to change and evolve. It’s a fine balance, and never perfect. I’m OK if that Kevin at the prom during “Promised Land” is different than the Kevin of today. He’s learned a lot - perspective, empathy, peace, maturity, experience.

For all that I’ve said, I need to conclude with the unspeakable aspect of Promised Land. I can articulate how it helped me out of my downward spiral, deal with my damage, and point me toward an exciting future. I can recount specific memories of 1994 and 1995 as illustrations. I can wax philosophic about how I began to construct my life from a literal ground zero in 1995 when I felt I had NOTHING and later ended up in the “promised land” of spiritual growth and connection with a worldwide network of likeminded souls. But what also helps Promised Land reach the insanely high #5 is its vivid feeling of what late 1994 and early to mid-1995 felt like. These are days that are no more. Between then and now, I’ve arguably reinvented myself completely through Utica College, Kent State University, and my career in Atlanta. Every reference point that I use to calibrate a lot of how I operate today comes from 1997 and after. Promised Land evokes a time when I roamed the Sauquoit Valley High School hallways as an angry pre-adult too big for this small high school anymore. I can smell the high school hallways, taste the chili and coffee at Carmella’s or Babe’s, see the glow in my friends’ eyes as we talk to each other late at night about dreams, feel The Celestine Prophecy in my hand after Todd let me borrow it, and hear the laughter of my crush after I cracked her up. Promised Land is a portal where I can time travel to an era that still makes more sense to me than today, despite my depression, anger, and issues that accompanied those days. My heart hurts just thinking about the tender fragility of those days. We weren’t adults yet, but we weren’t children in any way. College had not even begun, but high school was over - even as we lingered there a few more months. And so, I remember the bunch of us cracking each other up so hard in those final days in classrooms together, as if knowing we had to maximize this time before it ended. I remember the late, late night conversations at Carmella’s and Babe’s or friends’ backyards, smelling the Upstate New York summer air with that cold tang, maybe mixed in with the smell of a campfire. I remember getting rides with friends to and from places, still feeling how cool it was to drive around by ourselves in a car without adult supervision. Those early, early days when the beginning of our adult freedom dawned. It’s far distant in my memory but brought close by the magic of Promised Land. This album had one final great moment before it stayed in the past forever. On the first Mt. Marcy trip in August 1997, I had defied expectations by climbing a 5,200 foot mountain when I had not been trained for it at all. I was expecting to get teased by a bunch of manly guys, despite Dusty’s protection as a friend. But it surprised me that one of the best conversations in my life took place with Dusty’s friend Ron. In high school, he used to tease and sometimes bully me. But here, he made sure I got up the mountain, told me along the way that I was doing something that many people didn’t do in Army boot camp until quite a few weeks in (he had been in the Army), and kept me talking while I climbed down the mountain, exhausted. He was curious and awe-inspired by my accomplishments, and we covered a lot of interesting ground during those few hours down the mountain. It was magic because it was so unexpected, and Ron turned out to be someone who unlocked what made me special by asking beautiful, conversation-inducing questions. I thought I had found a new best friend. On the way back home, Ron wanted me to join him in his car, and we continued our wonderful conversation from the mountain. To my delight and surprise, he played a Promised Land cassette in the car - over and over. I didn’t care. (It’s #5, so I could always play it on repeat.) Ron identified with Promised Land too, just like me. He related to the songs, just like me. It was a beautiful moment - both of us impacted by and listening to this cassette in Ron’s car in the middle of the Adirondacks with no one around at night - this album that gets shit on by fans and critics who prefer Empire and Operation: Mindcrime in their snobbery. That night, snobbery had no place in that car. Both Ron and I identified with this beautiful album that articulated our pains, desires, and hopes as we smelled the cool Adirondack mountain air from the rolled down windows, talking late into the night, and still forging the beginnings of our fragile young adult lives when we felt both intoxication and fear about our freedom and future. And like Promised Land, the beauty of life is captured in both the pain and the joy that results from the lessons learned during those early years. For a few moments during my most recent listen to Promised Land, I still imagine that Ron and I are on that car ride late at night, enjoying each other’s company, laughing, talking about our lives, sharing our struggles and doubts, and listening to the songs unfurl themselves at a time when we felt immortal for a limited time.

6: The Joshua Tree - U2 (1987)

U2 didn’t do too bad on the Top 500. I like them, but they’re not one of my dominant all-time favorite bands. Three albums landed between 150 and 250: Achtung Baby (#152), War (#210), and All That You Can’t Leave Behind (#247). Personally, I like how U2 helped bring post-punk British alternative rock into the mainstream and make it more universal. From the 1990s to the present, U2 not only reinvented themselves but also became elder statesmen of rock - carrying on the spirit of rock in their live shows similar to Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, or Billy Joel. But arguably U2’s ultimate reputation - and why I even mention them in the same breath as McCartney, Springsteen, and Joel - rests with The Joshua Tree. When I turned 10, I was still a child and entered fifth grade. Adults and fellow students saw no change in me on the surface. But change indeed took place inside my mind. In posts for So (#32) and Invisible Touch (#42), I explained how I became aware of political and cultural satire, the inner pain of social rejection, and the nuances of following musical artists for the first time. While 10, I began to develop an adult sense about the world - able to reflect, distance myself from the moment, and extrapolate about time. I could imagine myself at some point in the future, realizing I’d one day leave elementary school, go to junior high, go to high school, and graduate - way, way, way far in the future. But it would happen. It felt weird - both disturbing and exhilarating to imagine that future stretching out before me. Plus, I had a crush on a girl who sometimes would visit her grandparents across the street from me. I really really liked her - so much that it hurt me when I found out she wouldn’t be in my fifth grade class after I got used to seeing her every day in fourth grade. For the first time in my life, I felt a crush so strongly that her absence hurt me inside. All of these little elements assembled together gave me an adult mindset in its nascent form. Most adults don’t ever realize this is happening to their kids so early. And while So and Invisible Touch help capture aspects of this fifth grade transformation, no album captures my emerging adult mindset so accurately and vividly as The Joshua Tree.

I still remember listening to The Joshua Tree on cassette around New Year’s 1988, soon after I had gotten it for Christmas 1987. The laid back vibe of “Trip Through Your Wires,” “One Tree Hill,” and “Red Hill Mining Town” remind me of times when not being in school meant unfettered, unstructured free creative time. Sitting in my bedroom, playing with race cars or G.I. Joe figures, the electric heater clinking and clanking to keep out the winter chill, the lazy days of a weekend or day off from school ticking by, slow second after slow second, U2 playing in the background, not a major responsibility in the world. Even today, the opening chords of “Where the Streets Have No Name” bring me right back to the peak of my pre-teens at age 10, with barely a care about anything serious – other than the girl I liked. But The Joshua Tree didn’t make it to #6 by remaining in childhood. These songs feature universal, spiritual lyrics delivered with sincerity and honesty supported by compassionate, creative, and innovative music. “Where the Streets Have No Name” was not only a #13 hit but also the perfect opener to The Joshua Tree. I felt it represented the blank canvas of my entire future: the rest of my childhood, adolescence, and adulthood stretching out before me. These mysterious streets with no name beckoned, and this song effectively became a watershed in my musical listening - dividing the irreverent music of my pre-1987 childhood from the meaningful pre-teen and adolescent music I would discover post-1987. “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” continued in the same vibe and was even better. This #1 song dominated summer 1987 and became one of my favorite songs of that year. I recorded it multiple times on various mixtapes until I finally received The Joshua Tree for Christmas 1987. When I hear the song, I’m on the tail end of collecting G.I. Joes and now getting heavily into baseball cards. I’m in fifth grade and feeling new feelings about friends, my crush, and hobbies blow open my mind for the first time. But in the years since, I find the song still resonates. It’s a spiritual song. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. It’s always relevant to me. By accident, the song ends up with greater profundity because it always takes me back to the innocence of age 10 as I contemplate the spiritual vacuum I feel at any time as an adult. As the New Testament teaches, we must be innocent like a child to understand our spiritual dilemmas as an adult - and we should always be searching, never quite finding what we’re looking for.

However, none of these songs even come close to “With or Without You.” I cannot explain in words (although I’ll try) how much I liked this song when it came out. I sort of had favorite songs before, but “With or Without You” was my first real FAVORITE SONG. It’s the first song that hit me so deeply and emotionally about love and for many years it remained as my favorite song, bar none. I think of my elementary school crush and how much I longed for her. I think I would have ascended to heaven if she gave me just a simple kiss on the cheek. As the years went on, “With or Without You” became a rare childhood song that survived the great purge of my music in high school. I understood the song more deeply - especially the idea that I couldn’t live with or without someone. That tortured feeling of agony when I was around my crush, and when I wasn’t. Only someone who has fallen in love can understand this feeling - especially with unrequited love. As an adult, I still find the song perfect - giving me the same chills I felt when hearing the song at age 10. It’s U2’s finest moment - transcendent, magical, spiritual, and tortured - performed with a deceptively unique song structure that’s bizarre if you pick it apart. Pure magic - and my best connection to the feelings of childhood. For a #6 album, it may seem odd to gloss over the rest of the album. But it wasn’t the individual songs that made The Joshua Tree mark time so vividly. It was the vibe that captured fifth grade so accurately. 1988 saw the beginning of the end of childhood in many ways. I remember a girl calling me at home to “ask me out” but who was actually making fun of me, and I was only one of two ugly, outcast boys she teased this way. I remember getting glasses for the first time. I remember developing a strong friendship with Jason Z for real after knowing him off and on for four years. I remember obsessing over baseball cards, their prices, and their rarity in my bedroom. I remember watching new TV shows such as The Wonder Years and Full House that showed me an ideal adolescence that started to embarrass me about how I lived my life - making me feel like I fell short and realizing for the first time I was more like Paul the nerd rather than Kevin the attractive guy that girls liked. I remember spring thawing the ground once again and playing outside with Jason V, my sister, and my dad, smelling the wet spring grass as I threw a baseball around. I remember the remaining eight songs on The Joshua Tree playing in the background as I putzed around in my bedroom during winter or spring days, already getting used to spending time alone reading, looking at baseball cards, and listening to music. I found being alone better than girls laughing at me, boys bullying me, and my family arguing with me. A song like “Red Hill Mining Town” captures the beginnings of my comfort in social isolation quite accurately - a content, peaceful, sad, and yet wistful feeling that soothed me. Later in life, my friend Adam pointed out the merits of “In God’s Country” and it - like “Where the Streets Have No Name” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” - also connected my childhood innocence to spiritual maturity simply by the nature of time and accident. I understand that complete social isolation isn’t healthy, but it’s the good side of that contemplative spirit that I began to develop as a 10 year old. The spirit of the song shines through - feeling like I reside in God’s country - while the Edge adds innovative, strikingly creative guitar that Adam pointed out to me in awe. Just listen closely to the Edge’s guitar throughout the song and you’ll see what I mean. Today, it’s one of my favorite spiritual songs. As mentioned before, the final three songs accurately capture the lazy, everyday vibe of those fifth grade days and bring back so many forgotten memories from those pre-journal days. Playing outside in the elementary school parking lot during recess. Buying notebooks at Fay’s for school with my mom. Going to Reilly’s Dairy to buy a few packs of Topps 1988 baseball cards. Overall, The Joshua Tree is that rare album that heavily impacted me as a child, captured the beginning of my transition from a child to a teenager, continued to reverberate in my soul during high school, and remains a spiritually relevant album to me as an adult. Unlike other childhood albums, The Joshua Tree has lost zero luster and still gives me the same thrills and chills that I felt as a 10 year old. I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out, despite all of my babbling in this essay, that the #6 ranking comes from an added mystery about the album that I cannot explain. No matter how much I articulate its importance, there is an eerie otherworldly atmosphere about The Joshua Tree - as if God snuck His way into the proceedings as U2 and Brian Eno struggled to make this masterpiece. U2 of course deserve their fame, but I think something magical happened with The Joshua Tree that never happened to them before or since.

7: Ride the Lightning - Metallica (1984)

It used to be a ritual many times in high school, especially for a stretch in 1994. As an angry, depressed, bitter young man, I’d come home from school, the rage of the day seething through me. Hypocritical teachers who didn’t “get” me. Bullies laying waste to whatever wisps of self-confidence I had. Girls so pretty they made my heart hurt as I more painfully felt my ugliness simply by their existence and selection of boyfriends that were never me. Day after day of social awkwardness I could never shake. And so it began. The spare, thin acoustic guitar chords of “Fight Fire with Fire” ringing with pain and despair until Lars Ulrich’s cymbal rose, and rose, and rose in volume, until…the thrashing began! “Fight Fire with Fire,” with those first headbanging moments pounding away, allowed me to unleash the fury I’d built up all day and begin moshing it away. That song is out of control, and so was I. It was not moshing for fun. It was moshing to let out pain and despair through catharsis. The brutality is so excessive that my moshing sessions felt like the nuclear holocaust that Hetfield sang about. Already, there is a visceral emotion here that even Master of Puppets lacks. I sense it. Choking, raging anger, let out fully for the first time. I know Hetfield’s biography. Not yet 21, James Hetfield’s upbringing, seething anger, and introversion meant he was the outcast of outcasts. Oh man, I could relate to that. I can feel it in full on “Fight Fire with Fire” in a way I never felt from Metallica again. Yet there’s also a mathematical precision and structure to the song that allowed me focus my rage and let it co-exist alongside my control freak, analytical mind. After the glorious, majestic soloing in the middle, I would often collapse onto my bedroom floor during the third verse, so angry now that I couldn’t even sing along with the vocals while standing up. And the explosion at the end mirrored how I wanted to metaphorically explode every shitty thing that happened that day.

Calming down a little (but not by much), “Ride the Lightning” established a steadier groove. But Hetfield still shrieked out the vocals like an insanely furious banshee. For a while, we tread water as if I’m regaining my footing. But I still feel 100% electrified, alive, aglow, angry. Fury coursing through me like an electric current. That scream of “OH PLEASE GOD HELP ME!” all of a sudden startles. It was like how I felt in 11th and 12th grade. Sometimes I would seem calm and just plugging along - and then I’d explode in random anger. After a slow-paced solo, we enter a part of the song that just fucking explodes. Hetfield, Hammett, and Burton all ripping up shit together. In this moment, it all came together and I would often get simultaneously emotional and insanely rage-filled. I headbanged so hard. I let it all out here - all of the day’s pain, rejection, bullying, and bullshit. Metallica matched and yet exceeded it. Catharsis achieved. Master of Puppets couldn’t even come close to this. But we weren’t done. We were just getting started. The fury majestic arrived. “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” By this time, the pace had slowed down and I now embodied my rage fully, in control. In the beginning, I imagined myself hitting a large bell with a giant hammer as if summoning orcs in Middle Earth. But then...magic. There’s something about this song that, despite its midtempo pace, feels like I’m staring at everyone - my family, friends, and high school peers - with evil, angry eyes expressing how I truly felt for the first time. I was livid. Why didn’t anyone understand me? Did I have to throw furniture to make a point? What did I have to do? The relentless, menacing, bleak feel of the song matched my daily high school mood - just storming through high school hallways wanting to punch everything and everyone in sight. I hated it all sometimes. And then...the end to “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Just tearing it all down. I could imagine myself destroying a classroom, throwing my book bag at someone in the hallways, and tossing a chair out a window. Fuck it all! That’s what the ending felt like. Fuck everything! Fuck it all!

But then...time for “Fade to Black” where I could now let my anger go and fully experience the sadness that was my life. After letting out my anger during the first three songs, I’d face myself here. During the Dirt years and as a precursor to Nine Inch Nails, I began to think about suicide. The lyrics touched a raw nerve as the heavy music soothed me in my outcast shame.

I have lost the will to live
Simply nothing more to give
There is nothing more for me
Need the end to set me free

What struck me about the song and why it planted itself so deep within me unlike other Metallica songs is that it confronts the shock of losing myself to my self-hate, depression, and giving up.

Cannot stand this hell I feel
Emptiness is filling me
To the point of agony
Growing darkness taking dawn
I was me but now, he's gone

In 1993 and 1994, I could remember back only a few years to when I was an innocent child. I didn’t even know what depression or agony meant. Who was I in 11th and 12th grade? An ugly, ungainly, social awkward outcast who always fucked things up. I wasn’t attractive, smooth, or charismatic. I was just this monster who wanted to emerge like a butterfly...but couldn’t. But thankfully, “Fade to Black” let me know I wasn’t alone. I heard this song on 94K Rock so many nights and it was always an inspirational moment, letting me know that another person understood my feelings. As a result, “Fade to Black” became one of my most important and influential high school songs.

All I usually needed was those four songs. The rest of the album served as a come down from the first four songs and I’d settle into my afternoon doing homework or reading a book by way of “Trapped Under Ice,” “Escape,” and “Creeping Death.” That’s not to knock these songs. “Trapped Under Ice” is ferocious. I felt better by now, and so this was just pure, evil moshing. The song often feels jagged and off-kilter, as if I’m indeed slipping on ice and falling under the surface of some frozen lake, trying to claw my way out. The song metaphorically felt like high school - an environment that felt like I was trapped like the character in this song. As an adolescent, I was “trapped” with no money, car, or freedom, and so that added to the sense of urgency and desperation that the song evoked. “Escape” feels like it doesn’t know whether it should be on Kill ‘Em All or Ride the Lightning, and doesn’t really go anywhere. However, it’s saved by that crackling electric energy and Hetfield’s howling anger that permeates the entire album. And the ending is just awesome - the mantra of “life’s for my own to live my own way” while a siren wails in the background. It’s menacing and perfect. “Creeping Death” is stellar and works to this day as a great concert opener. It doesn’t rival the first five songs, lacking the depth and emotion, but it maintains the ferocity and evokes a Stephen King-like horror tale almost more reminiscent of King Diamond. A crowdpleaser, pure and simple, and well executed. We close out with the anticlimactic yet still awesome “The Call of Ktulu.” Metallica were never strongest with instrumentals, but they evoke a chilling, interesting sound here. It may seem strange that I ranked an album as high as Ride the Lightning while sounding underwhelmed about the final three songs. But it’s a rare case when the first four songs (and sometimes five songs) are so strong, so emotional, and so cutting through all of the bullshit that they saved my sanity and kept me alive more times than I can count. For that I am forever in Metallica’s debt, and Ride the Lightning easily takes its place at #7. But more importantly, even the last three songs contain that crackling dangerous adolescent energy so evocative of 1993 and 1994. When I listened to Ride the Lightning to write this post, I realized how much I’ve grown up and experienced since those days. Because from the first note I was immediately taken back to my 16- and 17-year-old self. God, I was so angry, desperate for social validation, and seething, not knowing how to express my feelings other than to have Metallica guide me through controlled rage for about five songs. I was enriched with many music choices during those days, as we’ve seen in the Top 100 especially. But I often reached for Ride the Lightning during those first few minutes I got home from high school - even preferring it over Broken or Master of Puppets or Pantera or Ministry. For that, Ride the Lightning transcends Master of Puppets’s still respectable ranking at #28 and enters the Top 10 - taking its place among albums that remain a part of my DNA no matter how many years I put between then and now.

8: Broken - Nine Inch Nails (1992)

By late 1994, my inner rage had gotten crazy. At first, moshing to Metallica was enough. Then I needed Pantera. But I realized that, as my personality emerged and blossomed suddenly out of nowhere at the end of 11th grade, that despite people finally liking me after years of obscurity, I still wasn’t happy. How could this be? In hindsight, it was because I still hated myself – and validation from others didn’t cure that. So, in a war I could never win, I wanted people to SEE my worthlessness. I wanted them to SEE my pain. I wanted them to UNDERSTAND. If only I could communicate the feelings of Broken to people in school. Then I’d show them! Broken was my stepping stone to The Downward Spiral and represented a distillation of rage and self-hate not equaled in its brevity by any other album I’ve encountered in my life. Long before Nine Inch Nails roared to life, stoked by the Nine Inch Nails Woodstock ‘94 performance, I remember seeing the video for “Wish” on Headbanger’s Ball. Beyond Metallica, beyond Alice in Chains, beyond Pantera, and beyond Ministry, it felt so dangerous, bursting through aggression boundaries that I did not yet understand. In 10th and early 11th grade, it was simply ahead of its time. I felt the unadulterated rage, danger, and insanity, but I wasn’t mentally there yet. However, the “Wish” video was significant because it was my introduction to Nine Inch Nails. It was ahead of its time because I couldn’t reconcile Reznor’s feminine look, black stockings (???), and the cutting-to-the-chase self-destruction that eliminated any need for heavy metal posturing. Intrigued but not hooked, I filed that song away. Then, fast forward to September 1994. I won’t repeat the history from what I talked about in the Woodstock ‘94 post - instead focusing like the EP on the distilled power of Broken itself.

As I bought the Nine Inch Nails catalog in rapid succession in September 1994, Broken finally came into my hands. It looked awesome. The orange flames on the cover. The CD opening up into an upside down T with the lyrics on the flaps and the CD in the center. I put it in and...just lit up. Unlike the romantic rejection and brooding of Pretty Hate Machine or the epic, final self-destruction of The Downward Spiral, Broken served as a quick, sudden burst of distilled rage. It became essential listening after I got home from high school in 12th grade after seething all day from my inability to make a move on my crush, from the highs and lows of my social interactions that ultimately never gave me enough validation, and from the still lingering bullying and provincial atmosphere of what I felt was a cursed, backward place. In less than 30 minutes, “Wish,” “Last,” and “Happiness in Slavery” unleashed rage in me that I barely controlled. I wanted to destroy everything in my room…for a start. Destruction, both self and other, was all I desired during many of those early 12th grade days. I finally understood “Wish” after all of those years, with “Pinion” building up to that song’s mix of cold pulsing and unreal metal chords. Like the video, “Wish” unleashed a side of me that had gone beyond simple anger and wanted to tear everything down - once and for all. “Last” calmed and focused me a bit but I was still roaring with ferocity. I felt self-hate, shame, and seething anger throughout. Then came one of the most influential lyrics in all of high school: “This isn’t meant to last, this is for right now.” That’s how I felt. Like I didn’t care if I lived beyond high school, beyond 1994, beyond that day. I felt I had already lived through the highest and lowest emotional peaks. If I couldn’t fit in, couldn’t go out with the girl I loved, and couldn’t be seen as attractive and loveable, then I would just kill myself and take part of the surroundings with me. This isn’t meant to last. This is for right now.

Impossibly, “Help Me I Am In Hell” creates the longest, slowest buildup that gets quiet, quiet, quiet and, even though I knew what was coming, stunned the shit out of me when “Happiness in Slavery” burst out of my speakers in full fury. On this song, “Wish” and “Last” were just warmups. I let out all of my anger, self-hate, and misery in one contained burst. “SLAVE SCREAMS!” I would nearly scream it out myself, performing it in agony in my bedroom. I imagined myself performing it like Trent Reznor did at Woodstock ‘94, using the time to finally just destroy everything around me. The back and forth between the Depeche Mode-like pulsing chorus and the histrionic verses made me crazy. And that ending with the repeated screams of “SLAVERY!” was actually able to get all of my anger out. The song’s lyrics led me to think not only of other people as sheep but also to see myself as trapped like a slave in a corrupt society - of which high school was only the tip of the iceberg. Broken concluded with the sadly influential “Gave Up” which became an anti-anthem of sorts, affecting me profoundly because it summarized my tortured complex feelings that year. I thought, “I hate myself, so why do worthwhile people like me?” Reznor sings “I tried, I gave up. I tried, I gave up.” Trent Reznor repeated it in a resigned sigh, over and over again. One of my greatest life flaws is that when I feel left out of something - dating, relationships, dances, sports, parties, whatever - I will reject myself, not play the game, not become a third wheel, not join the herd, and just give up. Immediately. That’s hurt me and protected me many times in my life. Today, it’s much less of an issue but in high school that giving up weapon was my modus operandi. If you don’t want me, if you think I’m ugly, if you don’t want to hang out with me, then I’m gone. Utterly, completely. You don’t get to see me or partake of me. It was actually a selfish, bitter, backfiring attitude that also exaggerated the importance of many of the things I gave up on. But sadly “Gave Up” led to permanent damage. To this day, I still don’t date, seek regular hangouts with groups of people, or feel deserving of the good things in life - all because I think of myself as someone who falls short and gave up out of self-respect and the respect of others. In other words, I don’t want to date a woman who clearly sees how inferior I am, and I don’t feel capable of improving myself in any way to become datable. The “Gave Up” attitude still haunts me.

While these feelings had lingering, negative effects, I have to say that by purely experiencing these feelings in high school through Broken, I certainly only thought of “right now” and drank in those feelings in a weird Zen way, knowing I was living through something unique. Of course, it’s easy to say, “You would have saved yourself from so much pain if you had dealt with your problems differently.” True, but unlike living in Atlanta at age 39, in 1994 I was relatively socially isolated, 17 years old, surrounded mostly by other 14-17 year-olds, all with little life experience under their belts, and so all I had was my self-hate and Nine Inch Nails in late 1994. It’s all I knew, and I had closed nearly every adult out. Broken still brings me back to those jagged, ugly, irrationally angry moments, like a time machine, and reminds me of where I came. And even at age 39 when Broken doesn’t have a place in my life anymore, my 17-year old self came roaring back in anger as if 22 years hadn’t passed - like a caged, mad animal that still lives inside of me.

9: Rio - Duran Duran (1982)

While rare, there are times in my life when I can leave my mundane life behind, put on my best suit, and party it up. I feel alive, perfect, and happy in those moments. My friend Sean’s wedding in 2008 felt like that. Several Digital Balls felt like that. My standup comedy performance in 2011 felt like that. I recall my friend Tim once saying he’s got music he considers the soundtrack for his life. Out of all my friends, Tim knows how to party it up. Rio is my soundtrack music and it feels like a Tim-style night out - but 100% Kevin-style. Rio definitively mixes in with my own personality perfectly. It’s dark, mercurial, mysterious, alive, and joyous - mixing style with substance seamlessly. In terms of pure fun, it’s my #1 favorite album. While I had this album when I was six years old, I rediscovered it during the 2000s. In childhood, I remember seeing the videos for “Hungry Like the Wolf” and “Rio.” I ended up getting the album (probably for my sixth birthday in May 1983) and enjoyed the rest of it. Then, I forgot about Rio until the early 2000s. When I bought it on CD, some childhood nostalgia came back. But something otherworldly happened when I immersed myself in the music again. I still don’t know how to describe it because #9 is such an irrationally high number. I saw that picture of the band on the album looking so shamelessly awesome in their colored suits, standing against the dark backdrop of a city at night. Tapping into my love of cities, I imagined while in grad school a life in one of those cities, with Rio as its soundtrack. When I finally moved to Atlanta, I got to taste that lifestyle for the first time after I finally secured a job. Evening networking events with executives - the men dressed in suits and women looking killer. Socializing with new friends and acquaintances in restaurants and bars in the middle of Atlanta. And especially getting wined and dined in cities like Savannah when I stayed overnight and collected intel about technology news. It was Rio come to life. In a way, Rio represents the ignorance-is-bliss attitude I needed to survive the 2000s. If I knew how little money I made, how much overwork I put in, and the pointlessness of much of the work, then the bubble would have burst. But in my 20s and early 30s, that wasn’t the time to question the facade of the business world too much. Instead, if I had to leap into the river, then I might as well swim and put on a show. When I worked and networked, I did it with the attitude of Rio - day by day, event by event. I made sure to leave lasting impressions. I was intellectually interesting, funny, and emotionally engaging. I was nearly always on. Many people predictably didn’t give a shit about me, but a surprising number did. You’d be amazed what a low bar exists in the business world. Anyone who acts like a real human being will be remembered and you one day find that people look forward to seeing you at networking events. And for someone like me who used to be an outcast, lurk in the shadows, or work in an isolated profession (academia), this 2000s lifestyle was like drinking a keg of beer after a lifetime of sobriety. Plus, while I knew that I could never recapture the peaks of Utica College and Boulder 2002, I did try to give my early career in Atlanta as much of a rock star attitude as possible to make it exciting for me and to help me meet others. In a sense, Rio is like an exaggerated, animated version of me - a persona I created to operate in Atlanta. To say that it worked would be an understatement. It was a smashing success, despite eventually realizing that I needed to spiritually evolve beyond the persona I had created - leaving it behind in 2012 like a shell I no longer needed. But man! What a 10 years! And Rio is the soundtrack to those first blazing 10 years of my Atlanta career at its best.

It’s worth looking at individual songs because I need to explain how Duran Duran truly created a work of genius here - which is easy to overlook because they make Rio look easy. The title track opens up with one of the most chill-inducing intros ever. It’s like every great moment in a James Bond movie distilled into the introduction and first verse. Throughout the entire album, each instrument emerges as a unique part of the glorious music. Andy Taylor often plays subtle, funky guitar rhythms along with arty solos that never show off or interfere with a song. There are many times he knows it’s better not to play, and that’s an underrated talent in any guitarist. Roger Taylor is a master of the hi-hat and 16th note rhythms throughout, somewhere in a netherworld between disco and art rock. John Taylor’s bass lines are AMAZING. Sometimes, it’s like he’s playing lead bass and he often punches to the surface of a song like a boxer. Nick Rhodes plays perfect keyboards like he’s a painter, adding texture and countermelodies effortlessly. And I can’t forget Simon Le Bon. Duran Duran was positioned as the “Fab Five” and sex symbols, but Le Bon presented the songs MUCH deeper than simple sexy New Romantic pop. He sounds ambiguous and mysterious on each song, like a mercurial James Bond communicating about his adventures. It’s always hard to figure out what the hell each song is about. These elements somehow merge to create an album that’s more than the sum of its parts. I believe it’s because Duran Duran didn’t overthink the proceedings - which they would unfortunately do on every single album afterward. They never again captured the innocent spontaneity of Rio, and the title track represents the album’s strengths distilled in one song. The verses are dark, the choruses are light, and then the song sits back for a bit. With a genius decision, a dirty sax solo rips into the song, blowing it open. Then, the song builds up and up and up during the bridge. It’s intoxicating and perfect. When we finally conclude, I realize I’ve just heard one of the best songs ever. I’m alive, and it feels like a 2000s night out has just begun.

“My Own Way” settles Rio into a groove after the explosive “Rio.” It’s here that I truly rediscovered the album in the 2000s and fell in love with this song. Again, Duran Duran fills each moment with instrumental nuance while the catchy melody remains prominent. The bass lines are so dominant, and the drumming is just magnificent - from the precise hi-hat hits to the toms. Le Bon sings inscrutable lyrics that sound mysterious, like we’re spies somewhere in the thick of New York City at night. The keyboards especially give a menacing feel to the song that always gave me chills during the 2000s - signifying the mystery of an urban night at its most glitzy and slick. The only “misfire” on Rio (and it’s still an above average song) is “Lonely in Your Nightmare.” It slows Rio’s momentum and kind of just plods along. Yet, there is an odd early alternative rock feel to the riff - as if R.E.M. or the Cure could have performed this song if they adjusted Duran Duran’s production to match their sound. And it’s still brooding and moody - which is stunning to hear on track three of a supposedly effervescent pop-rock album from the “Fab Five.” But then we come to “Hungry Like the Wolf.” A home run, in 1983 and today. I’ve never gotten sick of this song. It broke Duran Duran in the United States in early 1983 when MTV played the Indiana Jones meets James Bond video - with hints of sexuality splashed into the bizarre imagery. While retaining a mysterious feel, “Hungry Like the Wolf” is pure joy - one of the best pop songs ever. It feels exotic, naughty, risque, and delicious. Once again, the entire band delivers - and those drums after the bridge that bring us back to the chorus! Dear God! We then launch into the near-equally energetic “Hold Back the Rain” - one of my favorite non-single Duran Duran songs. There’s something so sure, innocent, and joyous about the entire song. The verses sit on a killer layer of drums, bass, and keyboards overlaid with tasteful guitar shadings. But it’s the chorus that delivers a sugar high with gorgeous harmonies that give me chills of joy. It’s just a perfect song and evokes all fun times ever where the past and future doesn’t matter.

As possibly the most overlooked song on the album, “New Religion” is awe-inspiring. Despite only clocking in at five and a half minutes, it feels like an epic. The song takes its time, building up and releasing suspenseful energy across the intro, verses, and choruses. Again, who the hell knows what the song is about. But it doesn’t matter. The choruses deliver a high payoff, sounding agonized and tortured. The bridge before the final chorus features some of the best ratcheting of musical suspense I have ever heard as all of the song’s threads come together - exploding into a giant climax. The end almost can’t contain the energy and Roger Taylor is nearly doing double bass drumming as the song fades out. And as if this stretch of songs couldn’t get any better, we have “Last Chance on the Stairway.” It remains one of my top 10 favorite songs ever. Pure 100% joy. I don’t encounter many songs that simply celebrate life in a way that I like. Most are cheesy, affected, or strained. “Last Chance on the Stairway” seems to encapsulate every great moment in my 20s that I experienced - the late nights, the laughter, the drinking, the friends, the adventures, the coffee, the roaming around new and strange cities. The song’s bridge is one of my favorite, most definitive moments in all of music. It literally sounds like my life and emotions at a joyous peak - how I want to feel all of the time but can only feel in rare, rare moments. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve felt like this song: the physics Darien Lake trip in 1994, the first Mt. Marcy trip in 1997, the Boston 1999 trip, the 2002 Boulder trip, and my first standup comedy performance in 2011. Pure ecstasy, like life is a glorious roller coaster completely going my way. Ecstasy incarnate.

The album sails out in fine form, definitely needing these comedowns after all of this ecstasy. “Save a Prayer” succeeds where “Lonely In Your Nightmare” fell short. It feels like basking in the aftermath of a perfect bout of socializing and hilarity, where some of my melancholy returns but doesn’t overpower the peak moment. I had many moments in the 2000s that felt like this song. Going home after a conversation with a woman I really really liked, feeling the typical loneliness vacuum re-enter my heart. The drive home after meeting Jenny Lewis. The train ride back home from Boulder in 2002. Returning home after a networking event when I fired on all cylinders, alone in my apartment with my suit still on. All of the potential relationships with women I met along the way that never happened. Sitting off alone to myself during nights in Savannah when I was taken along for a night out partying by movers and shakers. All of the moments when despite the high peaks, I always kept questioning the meaning and purpose of everything. The sadness and melancholy that I don’t want to dominate me, but that needs to be present in order to mix the sweet with the sour. The splash of “Save a Prayer” in the overall drink of Rio is essential - helping to define, enrich, and texture my happiest moments. For many years, I had trouble understanding and digesting “The Chauffeur,” especially when younger. But similar to how last songs on 1984 and Led Zeppelin IV essentially end the party and look toward a foreboding future, “The Chauffeur” ends Rio by shattering the roller coaster ride and bringing us back down to Earth with a creepy dark song more reminiscent of Roxy Music meets Depeche Mode. After a disturbing, spartan intro, the song eventually settles into a still unsettling but solid midtempo groove - like sobering up with the lights on early in the morning before you have to figure out where you’re crashing for the night. Rio paralleled my social and career ascent in the 2000s as my life and self-confidence improved by leaps and bounds. After largely eschewing partying in the 1990s, I found in the 2000s that there were moments when some serious partying and celebration could go on and I was able to fully enjoy myself in ways that were denied to me when I suffered from depression and misery when younger. Rio merges so many elements that I enjoy: an air of James Bond-like mystery, classiness and sophistication, parties where people are well-dressed, fun, intrigue, and a splash of darkness (sort of like a touch of Heath Ledger’s “Joker” added to my personality). And Rio is so definitive in that respect for me that it has become one of my Top 10 ever albums. It best represents the 2000s version of me – for better or worse. It means I learned to live, stopped worrying so much, and just rolled with life – having a good time along the way during some fragile years when I had to struggle and build my financial, networking, and career foundation that eventually led to my current, more stable life. But even in the 2010s, Rio still plays in my head whenever I get dressed up, join up with friends, and hit some crackling city life - no matter my age. Rio embodies the badass, humorous, mysterious attitude that got me to where I am today - the essence of my rock star persona at its best.

10: Streets: A Rock Opera - Savatage (1991)

I’ve mentioned my spirituality in a few posts but it’s probably not clear where I stand from a religious perspective. I do not subscribe to a particular religion or scripture (although I do enjoy and learn much from the New Testament) and often wind up talking about my spirituality with the weakest yet most sure argument in the books: personal experience. I articulate and make sense of my personal experience through thinkers such as Jesus, the Gospel writers, Emerson, Thoreau, William James, and Dale Carnegie. It’s a pragmatic spirituality - not scientifically provable but feeling there is a definite cause and effect spiritual relationship with God (which is the name I ascribe to a transcendent intelligence that I sense inhabits the entire universe). On a personal level, I’ve taken a rough road from childhood innocence to adolescent darkness to prideful intellectualism to crumbling despair to spiritual redemption. And no album encapsulates that journey better than Streets: A Rock Opera. That’s strange because it was probably my sixth favorite Savatage album for the longest time. In high school, I fell with love with Savatage through the Zak Stevens lineup on albums such as Edge of Thorns, Handful of Rain, and Dead Winter Dead. When I did explore earlier Jon Oliva Savatage, I gravitated to albums such as Hall of the Mountain King and Gutter Ballet. Those albums seemed more direct and visceral than the complicated, long spiritual storytelling of the oddly produced Streets. But all it took was time. First, the Zak Stevens era became forever identified with high school and remained there. Same with Hall of the Mountain King. A few songs off Gutter Ballet pointed toward Streets such as “Gutter Ballet” and “When the Crowds Are Gone.” I began to think about life after Utica College when I would live away from my childhood home for the first time. Finally, the day arrived on August 23, 1999 when I made my break with the past. I moved to Kent, Ohio for grad school. I was alone. My friends weren’t around to validate me. My family wasn’t around to support and emotionally nurture me every day. My routines and haunts were removed from me. It was just me. I was on my own.

That day was literally the beginning of the rest of my life, my adult life with real adult responsibilities where I had to take care of myself. Year after year, especially during those early years, I had to strip away so many delusions and so much bullshit. When you’re by yourself without people to support your bullshit, things get real quick. And like many things during those early years alone on my own, I shed parts of my past. Friends, illusions, delusions, security blankets, and automatic scripts that worked long ago but worked no longer. That’s why during 1999 to 2004 I started shedding things like fantasy novels, heavy metal, hangouts with large groups of friends, delusional crushes, and dreams of comedy and drumming. Things got real, and I instead needed Emerson, Thoreau, William James, and Dale Carnegie for the hardest, bleakest moments. And I started gravitating to music that lasted beyond high school and transcended rock history. It’s why Black Sabbath began to affect me as if I listened to the blues. It’s why Steely Dan began to embody my 2000s narrative like they knew my young professional story. And it’s why Streets began to rise in prominence the more life I lived. Its opening especially feels like a Christmas album - but a Christmas album for me similar to It’s a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Carol that confronts existentialism, depression, loss, loneliness, and despair in the midst of a season that celebrates joy, family, love, and spirituality. Christmas can feel terrible for people cut off from those joys. The entire album represents my William Jamesian arc of innocence, despair, and enlightenment that I experienced from 1999 to 2013, finally ending up “saved.” We begin on the streets with “Streets.” These streets, glitter in the dark. When younger, I used to see strange cities from afar and watching the glittering lights, wondering what lives were lived in those mysterious places. In Kent and Atlanta, I finally knew. You could just sit in your tiny apartment without a car or money, watching another dark evening pass knowing life crackled around you while you sat in loneliness, crying yourself to sleep. Or you could sit in the midst of Atlanta in another tiny apartment, collapsing to sleep from overwork and bitter about how the world treated you as a commodity rather than as a person, and wondering about your place in the large, cold universe. The darkness of the night did sooth sometimes, though. I remember late nights in grad school and Atlanta, alone, also finding comfort in the dark anonymity of a city, knowing my destiny lay with me. On my own. That’s the key to the beginning of Streets. Believing I was on my own. A worthy sentiment, but as we’ll soon see, a rookie spiritual mistake.

I only began to confront the bullshit and delusions of the 1990s by meeting the hard reality of Kent and Atlanta - places that didn’t give a SHIT about my past or imagination. “Jesus Saves” comes on strong with a sly message (masked by seemingly talking about the character D.T. Jesus). The attitude of the song reflected how I hit the ground running hard in both Kent and Atlanta but then soon flagged. “Tonight He Grins Again” became the first song that touched a real raw nerve. It’s the feeling of finally confronting myself and my flaws for the first time. From 2001 to 2004 especially, I realized in my fear and hubris that I often treated my friends like shit. I would “use my friends and let them down,” leading to an eventual isolation from most of them by late 2005. The Jenny Lewis debacle also especially hit me hard as, by contrast, I watched friends get married between 2001 and 2005 in the healthiest of ways. What in hell was I doing? These lyrics especially hit me:

Time and time and time again
I’m just looking for a friend
But no one seems to be around
Except this monkey that I’ve found
Still he is my only friend
And tonight he grins again

Suddenly, my past and baggage became my worst enemy. And in Kent and Atlanta, I finally saw that monkey for the first time clear and head on. I had to face my past. Face myself. “Strange Reality” adds to the majestic brooding. In the slower section, it feels like I’m staring off into the distance somewhere in Upstate New York long after high school and college was over, wondering what had happened so long ago. “So strange, so strange...reality.” That’s how I felt about much of my life once I could catch my breath. What had happened back in the 1990s? Who was I in the 2000s? How I could I be the person I was in Atlanta and have once been the Kevin from Sauquoit and Utica? Those sections feels like a cold autumn day in Upstate New York or Kent, walking around, mulling, in isolation and peace to think about myself. “A Little Too Far” is one of my favorite and most influential songs of all time. This is one of those moments, my friends. You get to a point when you just stop. All of your youthful bullshit and illusions finally come to a screeching halt one day. For me, it happened in December 2005 when my boss irrationally chewed me out so horribly that it made everything I’d accomplished in the last 10 years feel like nothing. Like I’ve talked about in various posts, I thought high school or college or Boulder or early Atlanta would last forever - that instinctual meandering from experience to experience without much thought that comprised my life. But one day, the party ends. “A Little Too Far” documents that realization. Many people don’t understand the line “Got to get back.” Many people erase, run from, or hide the past, thinking it is a bad thing. But I finally realized in these horrible moments when everything collapsed that I once wasn’t defeated like this. I once triumphed - in 1994, in 1999, in 2002. So, to move forward, I had to “get back.” Hmmm...do you think the Top 500 continues to follow in that philosophy? :)

Sure, the highs were high. But suddenly, metal didn’t ring the same. High school. College. Early TechLINKS. My young professional career before age 35. It all didn’t ring like it once rang. And as I ground to that screeching halt, I realized I needed to “get back” by exploring my past and embracing spirituality more fully. The search began. “You’re Alive” took on added resonance after I actually almost died in a car accident in May 2006 - just a few months after my boss chewed me out. That near-death experience made me realize my mortality for the first time. I somehow made it through a dangerous tire blowout unscathed despite crossing six lanes of Interstate 85 and having my car stop in lane six facing traffic head on. Two good Samaritans ended up blocking the HOV lane and staying with me until the police came, descending at the right time like angels. For the rest of 2006, I felt the sense of my “aliveness” for the first time. Work was still demoralizing and shitty, but I had a new perspective I’d never experienced before - just appreciating being alive. I kept a list of things I did after my car accident that day and it reminded me that the simple things mattered most. Reading a book. Talking to my parents. Eating out at a nice restaurant. And...listening to Streets. I specifically wrote Streets on my to-do list that day. I knew I had experienced something spiritual, and I needed to hear that experience articulated through music. Streets delivered. Oliva cautions people to take care when you’re chasing a dream in the night. That’s because the failure or success of dreams has little to do with spiritual and more with earthly ambition. Life will trip those dreams up. He also sings that somewhere in time you must pay for yesterdays. As 2006 progressed, I thought out the trail of wreckage I left behind by chasing my academic, creative, and professional dreams. I had “made it,” but when my boss took it all away, I found I had little else to stand on other than my work identity. Weak friendships, no girlfriend, faraway family, and little time spent on hobbies. “Sammy and Tex” is my least favorite song on the album but it reminds me of how there will be wolves to fuck you over and trip you up. But while that’s true, you can’t blame everything on the wolves. Only you can let your spiritual identity and gifts slip and waste away. Wolves are simply happy to help you with that task.

Probably like most people, I began talking to God out of abject desperation. While I’d intellectually thought about spirituality since 1997 with Scott MacDonald influencing me through having me read Emerson, Thoreau, and William James, I still held God at a philosophical scientific distance. But there was one night in April 2003 after three months of moving to Atlanta when I found myself unemployed, almost out of money, and wondering if I had made a humiliating mistake. I had a near nervous breakdown in the middle of the night as reality closed around me like water to a drowning man. But that night, I prayed to God. For real. Not thinking He was imaginary or an abstract pragmatic concept. A week later, I got a job as the managing editor of a magazine despite having no work experience. Today, I don’t think that was chance. To a rational atheist, I sound crazy or typical, but I’ve had too many of these direct spiritual cause and effect incidents happen so that I cannot simply dismiss them as coincidence after the 100th time. Over the years, I talked to God more and more - not ever understanding what He might be but knowing that I had initiated some kind of dialogue with an intelligence that seemed to know my best interests better than me. It required faith and belief in that I had to interpret the events of my life as guided by a transcendent intelligence. And I had to act based on spirituality rather than what looked good on paper or following career advice from a business book. A year later, a Dale Carnegie course introduced me to a more direct connection to pragmatic spirituality and I began to slowly gain hope in myself. I understood that we all must live day to day to stay sane, happy, and productive, and that people in MUCH worse circumstances than me still continued to live and thrive through faith and human support that often swooped in to help them in improbable, mysterious ways. But my fragile early spirituality was almost all crushed out during that December 2005 conversation. However, when I listened to Streets the night of my May 2006 car accident, “Can You Hear Me Now” led me to ask the question: “Is my life salvageable despite my age, failures, and years that had passed?” I kept asking that question throughout the rest of the 2000s and early 2010s as nearly all of my dream, illusions, and delusions had been burned away by the soulless Darwinian Atlanta business world. “New York City Don’t Mean Nothing” isn’t just about New York City. It could mean any city - like Atlanta. You’re a number, not wanted, not needed. If you walk in the wrong part of town, you’re just an object for a robbery, a piece of meat. And that was metaphorically true in the business world - except that people dressed nice and stabbed you behind your back instead of holding you up at gunpoint. These lines struck true:

Never follow trends if they turn on your friends
Just be sure you know who your friends are

In the mid-2000s, I wasn’t sure who my friends were anymore. Through “getting back” and talking to God, I slowly began to heal old, true friendships and make new friendships based on a real relationship rather than business interests. But despite this healing, I remained lost professionally and personally in the late 2000s and early 2010s. My notes of despair to various friends around this time are bleak and existential. As I attended fancy networking events, glitzy black tie events and afterparties, and hobnobbed with executives, “Ghost in the Ruins” defined the soulless endeavor that entailed. It’s one of the most influential songs in my life because it articulated the emptiness of my life so well. I was a ghost in the ruins of my dreams and my past. I had sold my dreams. I showed off my success but I had no substance underneath. Oliva sings:

Got to belong
Try to hang on

That summarizes so many days when I’d look for those sugar rushes of social and professional acceptance but come home exhausted, wondering if I could make it another day. Trying to hang on for dear life. Oliva’s screams paralleled my own screams of desperation in the late 2000s. Suddenly, there comes a time. For me, it came in late 2011 and early 2012 after so many years of faking my enthusiasm, passion, and care about business plans and ROI that all added little to the world. Oliva sings:

Somewhere on that long empty road
We all stand alone
Searching for clues

That’s how I felt in early 2012. Alone. Searching for clues. My only thin connection to myself and my past at that point was my old journals that I’d crack open late at night - during my scarce free time each day - to remind me of who I once was. I thought of old magical tropes like my Jenny Lewis character, my old fiction stories and universes, and my travel to Boston and Boulder. It was like staring down the “long empty hall” at pictures on walls (old memories) in the song and I wondered what would happen if I went away. Not suicide. But just disappearing. Like a road trip. Cutting ties. If I go away. I wondered that often. What would happen if I was gone? Would anyone care?

I had to do the road trip for spiritual reasons that began to prompt me. It wasn’t really a decision. God spoke loud and clear. I had gotten to a point exactly like Oliva sings:

Searching for a chord I can’t hear
Been searching for years
It’s somewhere inside
But it’s well disguised.

I still had the magic. But it was buried, almost completely. I needed to dig it out. What held me back was fear. Security, loss of income, and career suicide. For me, the song “Agony and Ecstasy” speaks of my social validation addiction. I largely lost my way trying to please other people. I didn’t realize for a long, long time that I only needed to please God. If I pleased God, then everything else would fall into place.

But even after my road trip, I remained stupid and dense. I reinvented myself as a freelance contractor but let one of my clients treat me like a full-time employee and control me just like previous employers. I fell into the same pattern of error and let it happen to me. In addition, I kept taking on a heavy volunteer role with an organization that had been part of my existential despair in 2011 - eventually becoming that organization’s Chair. By April 2013, I found myself ground into the dirt once more. My boss gave me too much work, too little communication, and harangued me relentlessly. I felt stupid, fumbling, and lost. I found my weekly plate loaded with 60 hours of work most of which was soulless and not aligned with my spiritual gifts. One night, I just cried myself to sleep but thought of my readings from the Book of John during a Bible study I attended at the time. I recalled Jesus’s story about pruning the vine - getting rid of things that did not align with spiritual gifts. Jesus spoke brutally, directly, and truely. Prune the vine. Similar to the song “Heal My Soul,” I just talked to God. I had tried everything. Road trips. Standup comedy. New jobs. Reinvention. Hard work. Learning new things. Pleasing my employers. Reading business books. Applying that advice to my job. Not quitting and instead trying harder. Abandoning my fiction dreams. No girlfriend. No consistent set of friends with whom I hung out. An untidy, crummy apartment where I’d lived for eight years. And maybe not coincidentally, all of that led to eight years of career failure from 2005 to 2013 that combined with my creative, social, and romantic failures. I really thought the road trip was a new beginning. But here I found myself overworked, exhausted, and humiliated once again. That night, I had thoughts similar to the lyrics of “Heal My Soul.”

I've been waiting
Long forgotten
Shipwrecked on
A distant shore

Am I drifting
No more wanted
Floating outward
Evermore

All the dreams
That I've harbored
In the labyrinths
Of my soul

Gone forever
Not discarded
Only sleeping
Till they're whole

In the graveyard
Of my heart now
Sleep the years
That I've long sold

For their markers
Is there nothing
Only ghost
I can not hold

Father hear me
I am tired
Shall I waken
In thy home

Hold me closer
I am trying
Sweet Lord Jesus
Heal my soul

And so I pruned the vine. I think many people’s “born again” moments are affected, exaggerated, and strained in order to fit the literal narrative of the New Testament. But the closest I’ve come to a “born again” moment was May 2013. I felt nearly 100% plugged into God for the first time - not inserting my own wishes and desires or arguing with Him. I simply followed His will. The message that blared at me was PRUNE THE VINE. I jolted my employer who had overworked and bullied me by requesting less hours and work that aligned with my spiritual gifts, or I’d walk. It was a giant risk, and my boss could have justifiably gotten rid of me. That early into my freelance career, I would have lost about 80% of my income with one client. All of the evidence pointed to an ugly exit, and we even went as far as building an exit plan when my boss was clearly not pleased with me. Then, three weeks after the initial conversation, she mysteriously was 100% cool with everything and gave me everything I asked for. The feeling that I wasn't measuring up and the overwork disappeared like a fog burned up by the sun. And we inexplicably worked together for two more years. Sure, in the short-term scheme of things, I sense that she may have been under pressure and had just snapped at me out of human frustration. No big deal. But in that moment, it just so happened that I finally had to confront and solve a spiritual problem within myself that had lingered and festered for eight years. It may have seemed like I overreacted to a typical stressful situation in the business world, but that was exactly the problem - that I had accepted these “typical stressful situations” like a false normal - never identifying the root cause of why my life kept descending into these mini-hells. Ultimately, the revelation was that I could best contribute to the world by doing something that aligned with my spiritual gifts - and I clearly wasn’t contributing if she was unhappy with me. My blunt spiritual approach was not something you often hear in business, and I think she finally understood after mulling it over for a few weeks. Then, I quit the organization where I was Chair. Some pleaded that I at least stay on the board. But I felt nothing for the organization. I pruned. On paper, I committed career suicide. That’s what many people told me in May 2013. Career suicide.

But what actually happened in the three years since? The Bible came to life. I pruned the unfruitful parts of the vine that were choking me like weeds. Sure, for a while I had empty space - more time, less income. But that time got filled up with work that did align with my gifts. I drafted a novel for the first time in four years. I continued to fill my time with creative and professional work that I enjoyed. I’ve sacrificed income, fancy job titles, and career ambition for work and a life that follows two simple rules, taught by Jesus and Paul: tap into your spiritual gifts and contribute those spiritual gifts to the world. I took some time in 2014 and 2015 to memorize Romans 12. Romans 12: 2 says:

Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.

“Somewhere in Time” feels like those late 2013 days that continue to the present as I’ve been healing. I still have to interact with wolves and people who don’t have my best interests in mind. But I feel that I’ve given over myself to God, and He takes care of those people without me having to get riled up, emotionally negative, or bitter about them like I used to do. Instead, I just have to focus on my spiritual gifts and contributions. Jesus says, “Follow me.” There’s no requirement anymore to “follow” a boss, company, or stale friendship out of obligation, fear, or habit. This is all new to me, and as long as I believe in and stay aligned with God, I feel the healing and change take place inside me day by day. Oliva sings:

I’ve been changing
Redefining
All the things I thought I knew
So long ago
When I was flying
Through those years that seem so far away

He also sings, “I’ve been grasping at rainbows hanging on till the end, but the rain is so real Lord and the rainbows pretend.” I no longer grasped at rainbows. Instead, I focused on each day - one day at a time. What could I do today that aligned with God creatively, professionally, and socially? I failed many days, and I continue to fail many days. I’m a flawed, stupid, imperfect human. But I succeeded many days - and each of those days was a small learning experience. My clients changed and became more positive, with more work I enjoyed. My creative projects became less connected to ambition and more connected to what God prompted me to work on. And I began to focus more on positive friends, support troubled friends who are open to communication, and prune negative friends who lack the essential elements of what constitute a relationship. My life now feels more like a spiritual life, and so many things that I used to fear have gone away - evaporated like dew.

That brings me to “Believe” - one of the most influential songs in my entire life. It was God speaking to me in the late 1990s and early 2000s, long before I had a relationship with Him. Later, it became His assurance to me that no matter how I felt - no matter how many friendships disappeared, no matter how many bosses crushed my soul, no matter how many empty work activities drained my creative energy, no matter how many nights I felt alone, misunderstood, and despairing of love, no matter how many nights I wished I had a girlfriend or wife to warm my bed, and no matter how many nights I’ve cried myself to sleep alone in a humble, untidy apartment - He was there. Oliva sings about being “regretful for the things you’re not and all the things you haven’t got” and then reaches the lines that moved me so many years ago and continue to move me today.

And for all the roads you followed
And for all you did not find
And for all the dreams you had to leave behind

I am the way
I am the light
I am the dark inside the night
I hear your hopes
I feel your dreams
And in the dark I hear your screams

Don’t turn away
Just take my hand
And when you make your final stand
I’ll be right there
I’ll never leave
And all I ask of you
Believe

I’ve often cried to the remainder of the song when Oliva sings about the innocence of childhood eyes. I thought of myself as a child, seeing myself in pictures where I was happy and playful. Where did that innocence go? Then I remembered a picture of myself in seventh grade where I was wearing giant glasses and I already looked scared and horrified about life. And Oliva finishes out the song singing about the wasted years, the scheming, the plotting, and essentially the reaction against lost innocence as an adolescent and young adult. In reaction to a fallen world that I fully discovered in the 1990s and 2000s, I thought that I had to fight it all by myself. I was wrong. That’s what God is for. So why do we have to believe in God? Why is that required? I understand that my belief confounds atheists, scientists, and rational thinkers. Believe me, I’ve been there. I once attacked God, Jesus, and the Bible. I can’t say I have all the answers, but I think it has to do with advances we make in quantum physics and in the unknown aspects of why this universe exists at all. God may be less of a father figure (which is more of a metaphor that’s understandable to more people and introduces authority to religious organizations) and more of an intelligent web that runs through all of the universe. We don’t understand it scientifically, but we see glimpses of it when particles react in specific ways under experiment based on an observer’s intent. If we don’t believe in this intelligence (which I call God), we cut ourselves off from it - similar to how we thrive less in life when isolated from other people. That’s a living hell - the absence of God when you think you can go it alone. We can’t scientifically prove that this intelligence exists, but if we believe in it, we access it. I think Jesus, Paul, Emerson, Thoreau, William James, and Dale Carnegie all understood this law in their own ways. Like AA, it’s not proven but it works. Streets is the story of my pragmatic spirituality and journey of redemption. I used to think I had to go it alone. I used to think that I could place hope in other people. I used to think that if I worked hard, I would be rewarded. I used to think that chasing the ambition of being a published writer, a professional with a fancy job title, a person married to or going out with a “hot” woman, or being included in a social set with “important” people were all worthwhile goals. But chasing social validation is like chasing those rainbows. It leads to spiritual emptiness. Instead, after all of those wild, crazy, lonely, despairing, and amazing years, I’ve let go of earthly ambition, pruned the vine, and now rest upon my belief in God. I know I’m not alone. I don’t need or pine for a girlfriend, best friend, or family member to hear the cries of my soul. Instead, God hears my hopes, feels my dreams, and hears my screams. He’ll be right there, He’ll never leave, and all He asks is that I believe. And I do.