When I say that I had “pre-musical” years, I mean that in the same way as “pre-sexual.” Suddenly, your body reacts when looking at someone you fancy, and it’s not unlike the shock of your heart swelling when you hear a song that isn’t merely nice, but for the first time really speaks to you. For me, these two not-so-distinct events happened at roughly the same period of life–age 10 or 11. And I’m sure a great study or essay could be done on this parallel, but this isn’t it.

So pre-musical for me was mostly the Carpenters and John Denver, these pleasant sounds that just floated from my Mom’s 8-track while she cleaned the house. I’ll always equate Denver’s masterpiece, Back Home Again, with the honeyed light glancing off a freshly-Pledged, perfectly round coffee table while I lounged in the front room of our house on Orchard Road. Both the music and the light were pretty in the same way I must have thought girls were at the time–hazily, theoretically pretty. There was, I’d admit, a nice smell, a merging of colors that soothed the eye–but I wasn’t exactly passionate about it. My attraction was not yet tempered by intent.

Now, I’m not going to say that Simon and Garfunkel, a group some readers would quickly shelve alongside the artists already mentioned, came crashing into my life with the same sort of revelation that usually colors first encounters with, say, Black Flag. Rather, the songs on the duo’s final, grand album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, served as stepping stones between the merely-pleasant and the inspirational. Or, more simply, between my parents’ records and those that I would call my own. Or, more accurately, between my parents’ records and those of my older brother Brian. But whatever. What I’m trying to say is that these were the only songs I smuggled over the border between pre- and plain- adolescence.

Yes: during my handful of aborted, delinquent attempts at jogging, it was “The Boxer” pumping in the walkman, the first song I ever mixed into that dangerous cocktail of physical exertion, music, and thinking about girls not noticing me. Those gigantic drum-whacks after each “lie-la-lie” served my self-flagellating purposes very well. Meanwhile, “Keep the Customer Satisfied” was, by contrast, a silly, horn-laden thing that entertained a glimmer of hope. If you’ve never heard it, think of a slightly less brainless “Walking on Sunshine,” maybe. In my world, “Keep the Customer Satisfied” was the rousing soundtrack to the getting-the-girl montage. I spent an embarrassing amount of time constructing this montage in my mind. Me playing the guitar, her looking away (“One step ahead of the shoe-shine”); me dialing her number, her leaving the house (“two steps away from the county line”); me putting out a burning building with a shovel and dirt; her yawning. No matter: My pimply, sex-starved ass was just tryin’ to keep the customer satisfied.

Other, younger, more dour bands would soon rush in, groups I could more easily and fashionably claim as my own. But in a way, these later musical favorites reversed the order that Simon and Garfunkel had set up, a cart/horse, chicken/egg thing that seems pretty clear to me now: It’s the emotion that comes first, followed by the need for some type of music to voice it, hose it down, or exorcize it entirely. Ah, well. I guess things are just simpler when you’re pre-musical.

It feels like this isn’t a choice, the increments being so small. Plus it’s not like you’re scooting yourself along: the grade is negative, sloping away toward the precipice. You’re just sitting there. Yet you’re moving. You’re moving towards it, and you know that one day you could fall, you could sleep-walk your wrists right into a razor.

This is the trick of intertia, the devil of it, the lie. You are in fact voting with your inactivity, working on a building with every moment you refuse to resist. (Now there’s a catch-22.) No, you didn’t make life this shitty; this is not your doing or design. But that’s not an excuse against undoing. It doesn’t give you license to check out, or more precisely, to let your safeguards against go fallow.

Of course, you don’t know this yet, and you won’t for a long while. You string together weeks with cigarettes, days with labor and nights with trysts and misses. You’re betting that the sensory overload will eventually pay off, leak into your work, but your work just seems to be treading water. Sure, there’s a sometimes-flash of dramatic flail, but you’re not waving, you’re drowning. Music, that miracle, the only beauty left from when you were young, has gone from a bullhorn to a dead horse to a locked-tight secret, a thing you do in a basement, into a machine.

And so one night you are far from home, and someone in your band puts this CD in, and this song hits you like a silver bolt, instant frostbite on your heart. In college, you knew all about the seduction of suicide, described by Keats in those odes you wrote about…but you hadn’t really felt it until now. Sad songs say so much. Toll booth, white line, sodium light, monoxide. Go ahead, sit there.

Temptation is the part of hitting bottom they don’t talk about. The sirens really are gorgeous, prettier the closer you slide towards them. You choose not to choose today, repeat tomorrow, repeat again, and every day you do that, the siren’s song grows sweeter and clearer. It sounds something like this.

Some songs always play slower than you remember them. Sometimes this is a good thing. I am not the biggest Matthew Sweet fan, and as an album I prefer 100% Fun. But this, the fifth song from Altered Beast, makes me swoon every time.

If you know his voice at all, you know it can be described as “reedy.” Here the reed bends until it shivers:

So hold me and love me
Tie me up and drug me
‘Cause I’m not gonna beg you for my life

When that high and boyish voice sings of such weariness, the clarity of the rejection is all the more crystal. It’s a version of surrender so resolute it’s almost funny. Only what kills me about it is how the refrain keeps the song’s subject vague. There is a “you,” but since “you” might not equal “the one,” the refrain just says how he wants “someone” to pull the trigger.

This uncertainty is summed up at the end of each chorus; a note of hesitation in the voice of the jumper:

If you’re what I think you’ll be
If you’re who I think I see
Shoot

The last word is repeated and stretched as the music fades, an oscillation to match how we submit and retract conditions when loving, when being loved. If x is met, then y is okay. If y is met, etc. The dream is that the conditions are all met seamlessly and simultaneously, so that the bullet strikes only after you’re totally convinced and ready to go. But who ever is? Who could ever imagine what such a state would be like? Sound like?

Fall 1991. Junior year abroad. A song drifts from the student-union-turned-nightclub, ferocious and sugary. It’s the most fully satisfying song I’ve ever heard. When I buy the CD the next day, I can’t seem to take it off repeat. But this isn’t the song I’m writing about.

Spring 1992. I’ve made friends in England, and at a club called the Timepiece someone squeezes this song, which I’m not writing about, between the Fall and PJ Harvey. There’s a rush for the dancefloor–one I’m actually a part of, for a change–and for a second no-one knows how to move to it. When the chorus kicks in, it’s a little clearer. Limbs collide, hair mats.

Fall 1992 – Summer 1993. When I get back to the States, it’s a slow year for them, recording-wise. He and Courtney appear on the cover of Sassy; she’s kissing him and he’s smiling. Later on, she’s on the cover of Spin, full-bellied with their child. I graduate from college. In the summer, I travel to the far side of my home town to watch a movie about their first tour with Sonic Youth. They take the piss out of a certain loathed MTV personality, right to his face. It’s the same mocking-the-system-from-within which by now has become familiar…if not yet completely impotent.

Fall 1993. I move to a strange town to help keep my band alive. I work in a mall coffee shop, alarm clock radio faintly humming behind me. In Utero is released and, college radio station or no, it’s flatly staggering to hear a song called “Rape Me” in rotation.

Late Fall 1993. The album unfolds before me with each listen, and my pride as a fan swells even as half the songs are totally unnerving. I don’t even begin to think of them as an antidote to any of the bands that have come in their wake; instead, I convince myself that they’ll mature into something like R.E.M.’s reliability, all the savior tags stripping away with time, the buzz receding until eventually they’re dropping an amazing record every two or three years without all the fanfare. It’s a good and earnest wish; it’s what I would wish for myself.

New Year’s Eve 1993/4. I can’t say I know what’s coming. But they show a concert on MTV, and they open with “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter.” It’s better than “Teen Spirit” maybe, but it’s like a firework in a milk bottle, all combustion, no release. Later they do “Bloom,” and it sounds like an old standard, like they could be the band I want them to be, but eventually he’s hopelessly spitting at a camera lens, leering and weak. I literally think to myself, just hang on a little bit longer.

April 1994. In the morning, the coffee shop radio doesn’t identify the body, but by the time I clock out, it does. I mentally lob the news of his suicide in with all the other bummers that have accumulated in the months since graduation. I can’t seem to quit smoking, either. I can’t seem to quit yelling at my girlfriend, either. On the drive home I’m choked with how selfish I’m being. Then I think well, it’s not like I ever met him… And so I flip between letting it matter too much and not enough. At home, I engage in my short-lived exercise regimen, alternating push-ups and sit-ups while that CD spins. The last song comes. I’ve never felt further from home. It’s a laugh that he’s apologizing, but I tremble anyway. I lay there and listen and try to stop what I’m doing.

Because I was just in Cleveland about a month ago. And Scott and Greg, as hosts of a sort of bachelor party, took me around from bar to stomping ground and back to bar again. And on the first of the two nights we spent some time in Lakewood, waiting for the Phantasy to open so we could relive our past while death metal bands checked their “sound.” There was some slightly yuppie bar around the corner, the type of place with those tall, heavy wooden chairs that are too grand to be called “stools.”

We killed maybe forty minutes there, and this song came on the juke. I said it was good because, for starters, it has the envied-by-me lyric, “If you can’t hold on…hold on.” And on this nostalgia-overdose weekend, the way they the Killers sound like everything that was on the radio when I last lived on the North Coast–the wandering keys, the early-U2 guitar echoes, the stubbornly flat American new wave vocals–it created a perfect fold in time. When I got back to Chicago, I played “All These Things That I’ve Done” repeatedly, savoring the passages, folding the memories of memories over and over.

What makes it not sad, though, is how back at that bar, after I blurted my approval of the song, Scott just looked at the floor and smiled, not in the room for a second. “Where have you heard this?” I asked.

He kept grinning and said, “Heather put it on a mix for me.” And that made me smile, because I know Heather, and I know that she and Scott are excellent friends. And I feel the same way about the people who first played this song for me–Dan and Karen. So the same music that created a fold in time also made a crease in space, gathering the corners of Cleveland, Raleigh and Chicago together for an instant, spilling the spirits of friends into the empty, heavy chairs around us.