"This Is Heavy"

We all have that one defining album that will take us back to a point in our lives, whether it be good or bad (or both), one that will always hold such a special place in our hearts. One that will always make your heart beat just a little bit faster and that smile stretch wide across your face the minute you hear that opening song.

For me, that is From Under the Cork Tree. As I sit here and listen to it, at 1:52 on a cold Monday morning in January, eleven years after the thing was produced, I am taken back to the first time I ever heard the album. I was in middle school. I bought it over the summer, and couldn't wait to get home so I could lock myself away and listen to it. I was immediately in love the moment I heard those cameras shuttering. I remember sitting on my floor by the speakers and just listening to it all, taking it all in, reading the lyrics along with Patrick, trying my hardest to cram it all in as fast as I could. Little did I know this album would come to be the defining album of my adolescence.

It was the soundtrack for love, loss, heartbreak, and everything in between. It brought me so much closer to people I never thought I would be close with. Entire days structured around Fall Out Boy, this album on repeat while we ate pizza and talked about our lives (she had moved to North Carolina and I was heartbroken, it was really our time to catch up. Fall Out Boy was our glue). Our midnight roadtrip singalongs to Sugar, We're Goin' Down and XO will always be burned into my memory. The waiting fourteen hours in line just to see the band that brought us together, this album being played on our phones between us, quietly singing along as we laid in the sun on that sidewalk. I miss those days, and I know we'll have more. We always will. No matter how much we change.

With the good, comes the bad.

I was about fourteen when I first found myself struggling with thoughts of suicide. The one song that always lulled me to sleep and put aside the dark thoughts, if only for the brief three minutes and eleven seconds it played, was I've Got a Dark Alley and a Bad Idea that Says You Should Shut Your Mouth (Summer Song). It was so deep and different from any song on that album. I felt it was the most raw. The most real. The one I just connected with the most. And, no matter how much I age, how much things change for me, and how much I go through, this song is always the one that lulls away the pain. And, I feel it will continue to be the one. Even when I'm seventy fuckin' years old and losing everyone I love, this song will be there for me.

The whole album will be there, really, long after Fall Out Boy is gone. And that's the greatest thing about music. It will always be there for you, even when you don't know who else will. You will always turn to that one defining album to be the background and soundtrack to your entire life. From Under the Cork Tree is mine, and always will be.

What's yours?