289. Song No. 4,476: “Hey Man (Now You’re Really Living),” Eels
Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, 2005

When your high school sweetheart casually recommends an album to you, you’re not thinking about how, years and decades later, that same band is one you’ll accidentally introduce your husband to or fly across the country to see with your best friend. You’re not contemplating future scenarios where you’re still snatching up multiple formats of that band’s fifth, eighth, fifteenth albums as soon as they’re released or, later, available in a multiply configured preorder bundle: You’re just diving into that introductory album as soon as you can talk a friend with a car into a music-buying mission and immersing yourself in this thing that suddenly feels so important for the insights it can yield into this person you want to get to know even better and as well as you can.

Maybe that’s the best way to fall for an album, looking for reasons to love it like you love the person it’s suddenly an extension of. And maybe that’s why Electro-Shock Blues remains the Eels album that’s indelibly imprinted on my heart and the yardstick against which I can’t help but measure every single album the musical outfit has released since our first chance encounter in 2001. For all the songs and albums I can’t listen to without bracing for an onrush of old emotions and memories, Electro-Shock Blues was never really one that I could bear to sacrifice at the altar of a closed chapter: Making sure that Mr. E and all of his beautiful blues didn’t get lost to the ache of complicated associations has paid off in ways that remain pleasant, abundant surprises.

Blinking Lights and Other Revelations was the first Eels album released after the most significant breakup of my life, and it was their first release I didn’t have anyone to mutually enjoy it with. I had no idea it was released on the second-to-last birthday my future husband would observe without me, just that its mid-spring release gave me an entire summer to get lost in a double album of treats. Right off the bat, “Things the Grandchildren Should Know” endeared itself to me more than any other track did (and remains my far-and-away favorite song on this 93-minute album); once the dopamine hit of playing it on repeat infinitely more than any of its littermates finally started to wear off, I made my way through the other 32 tracks and found all-new things to love.

“Hey Man (Now You’re Really Living)” and its banger of a tune joyously defying descriptions of depression separated itself from the herd pretty early. I had already become more of an indie snob than an emo kid at that point, but my vestigial (and apparently permanent) soft spot for vulnerable songs that appeal to “what it’s like to fall on the floor and cry your guts out ’til you got no more” and speak to how that depth of sorrow is the part of life you have to live through to appreciate things like the thrill of a vibrant sunrise splashing across the sky and the kind of human connection that “made you feel like it’s not such a bad world.” Knowing that the band’s driving creative force has lived through things I’ll probably never even come close to understanding and getting to witness how his musical progression was also one of healing not only made plumbing the breadth of the human experience feel that much more authentic, but also was a quiet reminder that there’s something so rawly touching about watching someone reclaim their life and their emotional well-being across an ever-expanding catalogue of music.

No one likes dwelling on life’s inevitable nadirs; living through that shit is even less appealing. But you can’t appreciate the highest highs without dragging yourself through lows like you’ve never known, even if that’s not the stuff of polite conversation. I generally feel like overstatement can amplify humor just as understatement can laser-focus the blow of tragedy, and the interplay between the two in this song is such an impactful illustration of how you learn from one experience to learn how to appreciate even more: Itemizing everything from caring “too much ’bout someone that you’re never gonna get to touch” or contemplating the inevitability of death from a verdant patch of grass as basic human experiences uniting, leveling and delighting us all at various turns and stages and chapters as the parts of life that really define existence celebrates the crucially interlinked duality of existential ebbs and flows in “living what this life is all about” every day and giving it all you’ve got to get everything you can from this weird and wonderful journey.