224. Song No. 3,431: “Five, Eight and Ten,” Mineral
The Power of Failing, 1997

The humble and righteous and meek
Are teaching me whose will to seek
But who really knows how to speak
About these things

Okay, well. Apparently there are just going to be some songs that so thoroughly transcend their track lengths (an impressive 5:26 in this instance) that the entire album pulls me in and reminds me of how intimately I once knew every crescendo, bridge, breakdown and devastating lyric from the first note to the last one.

I am so thoroughly gobsmacked by the tangibility of not only this song but also the album that unspools in its wake that I just wanna indulgently roll around in both for a while. Thanks to some strategically plotted magazine deadlines, I have had (and still have!) more time than usual to dive into the blog part of this project, so now’s as good a time as any to start writing about album rediscoveries born of falling in love with a song all over again so hard and so completely that you had to stick around for the whole freaking thing it leads off. So you’re goddamn right I’m giving myself permission to detour through entire albums when they embody the driving ethos of 12,700 Songs: finding out what kind of unfairly passed-over gems, second chances and significant memories are contained within the well-loved and still-used iPod that marks me as an Elder Millennial who recognized the zenith of music-playing technology when I saw it burst onto the scene almost 20 years ago. Which is to say, consider both of yourselves warned that gushing about all 49 minutes of a powerhouse emo masterpiece is coming (y’know, once it’s done percolating).

Questions of where can he go
When he is feeling so low
And kicking himself just to show
How he still bleeds
And I want to know
The difference between
What sparkles
And what is gold

So unintentionally rediscovering The Power of Failing in its entirety because I have loved the overwhelmingly palpable experience of hearing “Five, Eight and Ten”—the closing salvo of this song is, without exaggeration, permanently etched on my soul and came screaming back to the surface of my consciousness just in time for me to full-throatedly wail that quartet of lyrics in the shower just like my overly angsty younger self once did in much different circumstances—for the first time in honestly probably a decade is exactly the kind of tribute this song deserves. I’m almost surprised it didn’t make a sound when it hit me that first time since its landing had such a demonstrative heft and weight and dimension and downright dangerously pent-up potential energy powering it toward one helluva dramatic impact.

But I guess it’s just as likely that the sound my emotional whiplash made once this song resurfaced absorbed everything around it. I never promised these stories would come alphabetically, and I never meant that more than when I went from “Meh, maybe revisiting ‘Five, Eight and Ten’ will merit a One More Second Chance blurb” to “HOOOOLY SHIT I FORGOT HOW FACE-MELTINGLY GOOD THIS SONG IS” and immediately needed to gush about this song introducing one of the most important albums to come out of emo’s formidable, incredible second wave (and I’m not just saying that out of overtly subjective adoration).

I wonder how many eyes
Are fixed like a vulture’s on me now
I wonder if I can even move or breathe
Without disappointing someone
And I know what they call themselves
But I don’t remember inviting them
To put me on this pedestal and make me feel so naked
Afraid to look down,
Afraid to turn around
I’ll bring it on myself
I know I’ll bring it on myself

I cannot believe I am almost 40 and waxing nostalgic about this song from which my 20something self used to painstakingly cherry-pick lyrics for the most overwrought away messages I could compose as a stand-in for actually talking about and directly addressing all the thorny, messy feelings I couldn’t identify, let alone had the vocabulary to verbalize; that, quite honestly, is a visceral reminder of how the college experience I loved so much and regard so fondly did have some absolutely brutalizing rough patches that at least being an emo kid meant I had the most on-the-nose soundtrack accompanying (and helpfully refocusing my energy during) some of four otherwise incredible years’ blips of darkness and the necessarily self-eviscerating introspection of personal growth.

Even with all the time that separates me from when “Five, Eight and Ten” was on endless repeat and The Power of Failing CD took up permanent residence in my five-disc changer when it wasn’t traveling in whatever Discman I hadn’t used to death yet, this song packs such an emotional punch and still feels like a painfully familiar part of me. There is no superlative that adequately conveys just how instantly I went from not expecting to care much that this song had its turn to the legitimate siege of feelings, places, memories and chunks of lyrics that rode in on just a few opening bars and made me confront them.

I walked along beside the purple mountains
Beneath the orange sky
Imagined what it all might look like
With these planks out of my eyes
I wondered if the big white horse
Was coming down tonight
I wanted to taste that victory
But my mouth was dry

To a subjectively lesser but still meaningful extent (as it is kind of the overriding theme of the song and all), grappling with the loss of one’s religion, finding peace without a godhead and in spite of the existential anxiety that comes with the death of everything you ever thought you knew about the delusion of an eternal afterlife, and recalibrating your perspective to take in the splendor of an accidentally beautiful and assuredly transient world brings a whole different condition of the spirit to a song already teeming with more earthy reckonings.

But for all the deeply personal associations and tangible muscle memory that rushed in alongside “Five, Eight and Ten,” the clincher really was how all these years later, that cathartic crescendo the song explodes into as it reaches for one absolutely leveling closer in a hail of music and words brimming with emotional clarity felt just as close and intense as it did when this album was just a few years old and a rotational mainstay, and came right back to me like they’d never left, like all the most significantly biographically appropriated songs do:

There is only tonight!
And the light that bleeds from your heart
Makes me want to try
And start again