#38, “P.S., You Rock My World,” Eels (1998)

150 Favorite Songs: #38, “P.S., You Rock My World,” Eels (1998)

The worst period in my life was when I was twenty-one and living in San Antonio. I  had moved there with a girl, and she split after a few months of our emotionally tumultuous relationship fizzling out. I worked in a comic book store and lived with some people I was friends with, but didn't find myself relating to anymore; they were in school and had girlfriends and lives that felt like they were moving forward, while I was working a dead-end job. My plans to that point had revolved around this relationship that, even after a few bad months, still managed to end in an abrupt and surprising fashion. (A few weeks after September 11, while I was at work, she went to a military recruiter and enlisted in the Air Force.) I made six dollars an hour and didn't have anybody to hang out with when I wasn't at work. I have a distinct memory of spending a day by myself running some errands and being at a mall and feeling pretty sure that I was actually turning invisible—that if I had walked out of the store with armfuls of merchandise, no one would be able to see. It was a really weird, lonely time.

As happens, I came out of it. It took a while. There were a bunch of factors in it—I  was a volunteer at SXSW that year, and got to know Austin for the first time. Some friends from back home were talking about moving there,  which gave me a goal to chase. I met another girl, yeah, and while that one didn't work out either, it was really important to learn that there would be others. And I listened to the Eels a lot.

Electro-Shock Blues is an album about problems more serious than mine. Mark Oliver Everett, the band’s only permanent member, wrote it about the experience of watching his sister die from suicide while his mom died of cancer. But the sort of sadness the album describes is like a gas. It expands to fill whatever container it's in, and the fact that people have more real and serious problems doesn't make yours take up less space in your own life very much at all. Ultimately, I was dealing with a breakup and some early twenties inertia, living in a city I didn't like, feeling stuck and on a very different page from people who had been my closest friends, not what Everett was experiencing. But my favorite songs on the album were about something I could relate to: Coming out of a bad time, and finding a way to feel good about life even when it's hard and you don't know what to do next.

"P.S. You Rock My World" is explicitly hopeful. Most of the songs on Electro-Shock Blues are not. It’s not always easy to let an explicitly hopeful message in when you're in a bad place, but this one earns it.

laying in bed tonight, i was thinking
and listening to all the dogs and the sirens and the shots
and how a careful man tries to dodge the bullets
while a happy man takes a walk

At this point in my life, I’ve experienced more kinds of loss than I had when I was twenty-one and heartbroken. I’ve worried about things that can ruin your day in a more permanent way than a breakup. But that one hurt the most, because I hadn’t learned yet the resilience I would come to acquire in the years that followed: That so much of life is a matter of perspective, and that when your perspective changes, even incredibly difficult things can be a little more manageable. It took me the better part of a pretty bad year to figure that out, but it would have taken me longer without this song.