July 13, 2019:
I would play the same song endlessly. My boombox could be set to repeat one track infinitely. I listened to Lindsey Buckingham's single "Countown" an uncountable number of times, literally all day and all night when I wasn't working.
I needed the optimism. "Things about to turn around." That was what I so badly wished for reality to be. Reality wasn't that, not even a little. But the song was for me a kind of verbal life preserver. If I could hang onto it I felt less like I was drowning in misery.
I'm not generally a Lindsey fan, and that song has a peculiar texture. It's very 1980s: programmed MIDI drums trying to be big. The guitar figure pokes my nervous system, even listening to it right now it's an unmistakably odd tonality. He plays without a pick so there's a certain lack of definition to the front of his notes, and the guitar is through an early amp simulator called a Sans Amp, giving it a fuzzy, inorganic overdrive. It's actually quite irritating. But the dynamics are uplifting, he sings it almost like gospel, where his voice soars up the octave on the hook line: "Things about to turn around." I needed to be told that and I played it thousands after thousands of times the first year of my breakdown.