280. Song No. 4,220: “Hang On,” Dr. Dog
Fate, 2008

There’s something comforting about getting hooked on a song telling you to hang on during a personally and professionally turbulent time, even if it’s more of a titular relevance than a lyrically topical one.

I wholly, absolutely love this song. It, along with a later-album littermate and a truly excellent cover of the only Architecture in Helsinki track I know, is an equal member in the triumvirate of tunes that made me fall in love with Dr. Dog—the only band who can get away with wearing sunglasses during indoor sets, BTW—in an introduction that’s lost the details of its specifics to the ravages of time Swiss-cheesing my mind.

The path that “Hang On” follows has absolutely nothing to do with where my own life is right now—my marriage is, like, the one thing I’ve done right across a lifetime of making dumb, emotional decisions—but lyrics like “I need a friend, not an angel” and “What do you do when the drowning stops?” resonated a little too well against my own inner landscape of jammed-up feelings I still don’t know how to process, a slowly healing heart and being stalled out for months in the anger phase of the grieving process as death and distance and depressing disappointment in the job I used to love all jockey for dominance while I try to give a name to feelings I’ve never navigated before. Or have put off dealing with for years because I am awesome at bottling everything up ’til it all comes out in a fit of frustrated, claustrophobic word vomit.

Last.fm tells me that it has been easily more than a decade since I started listening to my neighbors to the west, and that time has been filled with all kinds of gooey, fuzzy rock with a modern psychedelic vibe that appeals to so much of what I love about the music I can get lost in. But this song remains one of those special early-imprint ones that shaped my love of and expectations for this band I adore a little more with every album I finally get around to retrospectively gobbling up, and it’s one that I’m so happy to have reconnected with in an unexpectedly signifiant way.