153. Song No. 2,344: “The Day We Started,” This Day & Age
Always Leave the Ground, 2004

Yeah, yeah, emo might deserve all its mopey and angsty stereotypes but I’m not sure This Day & Age even counts as emo proper (although, as expansive as the genre seems to be in retrospect, maybe it is a right retronym now…? I don’t know, I’ve been too old for this game for years). Either way, this band and this album in particular are as joyfully, impressively twee as music gets, in that half the album sounds like it’s scoring the triumphant climax where the charmingly quirky protagonist gets the manic pixie dream girl and all is right in the world because idiosyncratic, improbable love always conquers all in low-budget arthouse films.

(It is a shame that no better, less ostensibly cynical and dismissive description exists. I swear that’s just how rare something this sweet and pure and authentic gem of an album is: You can’t talk about it without sounding meanly reductive. This is earnest, catchy and ultimately uncomplicated music, like an emotional palette cleanser worth sneaking a second or third helping of.)

This Day & Age benefits from that same youthful, emotional urgency the likes of Cartel and Mae pulled off with similar degrees of endearing success. It’s not exciting or genre-bending or innovative but it was never meant to be those things in the first place. Instead, it is well-crafted and vulnerable and so in tune with its feelings that it’s hard not wanting to protect it from a world of jagged edges waiting to snag its softer places.

The more contemplative tracks absolutely have their gazes fixed firmly at the ground or somewhere off into the dreamy middle distance, but there’s this cautiously optimistic chain of songs all a chapter away from breaking into full-throated anthems. “The Day We Started” brings up the end of a cautiously celebratory trifecta beginning with the twinkly introduction to “Slide Show” and continuing into the driving hope of “History is Falling for Science.”

“The Day We Started,” too, detours through parting ways and the death of love, but it leans hard into how necessary and inevitable it is, making peace with how the difficult stuff is the cost of enjoying the best of what life has to offer. It’s not necessarily my favorite of this trio, but it’s the best capstone to a great cluster of tunes and the best way to introduce the album’s more restrained and a little more wounded second half.

I will shamelessly fill hours upon hours with exactly one song on infinite repeat, but that’s only one way I hyperfocus on the music I love most. I can live inside one crushing moment in a song—a key change, a tonal shift, a transcendent snippet of lyrics, a cluster of notes that does something no other music has—or can get hooked on a string of songs just as easily. That latter example ranges from smaller moments, like the pairing of “Tangerine” and “That’s the Way” on LZIII to things like the five-track stretch on Fanfarlo’s Let’s Go Extinct spanning from “Cell Song” to “Landlocked” that I could play on an endless loop and still find something new to love every single time.

Isolating those songs and remembering why they have a place among such a satisfying musical collective is a mighty satisfying aural romp in its own right, and I spent a good chunk of time listening to this song over and over and over and falling in love with it again. But goddamn if it didn’t feel right until I played “The Day We Parted” as the finale in the melodic triumvirate it, to me, was made to be its best self for.