My Life In 35 Songs, Track 30: “The Days” by Hailey Whitters

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Instead of counting up the days, I just want to make ‘em count

In books and movies, it’s easy to spot the foreshadowing – the little details in the narrative that hint at something bad coming around the corner. In real life, you often only spot those warning signs in retrospect, when you’re looking back after some catastrophe transpires and wondering whether you could have known what was coming. Such is the case when I look back on the music that was dominating my life in 2019, right before the world went into a tailspin. And it is especially true about “The Days,” an achingly wistful summer song by country singer-songwriter Hailey Whitters, about making every good moment count lest they run dry a whole lot sooner than you expect.

In the moment, the good times seemed to be in endless supply in 2019, at least in my life. By the time that summer rolled around, I felt like I’d reached a state of total contentment. I was 28 years old and things were finally falling into place with my career. As a runner, I was getting back into racing after having not run competitively since high school, and my training had me feeling like I was in the best shape of my life. Most importantly, by moving back to our hometown, my wife and I had reignited our social life, which had mostly fallen by the wayside since our college years. We reconnected with old friends, made new ones, and spent a lot of time with family that we’d seen too little of in our years away. Everything felt just about perfect.

If there was one thing causing me angst that summer, at least judging by the music that made my annual summertime mixtape, it was that time was flying by too quickly. Nearly every song or album that was striking a chord with me seemed to be speaking, in some way, to the inertia of life, and to the “blink and you’ll miss it” sensation I was experiencing more as I got older. Maybe it was a product of being busier and having more fun in my day-to-day life. Maybe it was just the fact that I was 10 years removed from my high school graduation, a fact I dwelled upon a surprising amount in my end-of-the-year writeups from 2018. Whatever the reason, time suddenly seemed to by flying by faster than I’d ever seen it go.

The soundtrack of my summer spoke to that sensation. “I still see all the wonder in those eyes/We can live life before we die/Counting the days I wanna fall in love with you.” So went the lyrics to “Better Light,” a slow-burn sundown song from the then-brand-new Dangerous Summer LP Mother Nature. I reached for that album every time I found myself in a car after dark that summer, and it reminded me of how the band’s music had made me feel when I was younger. That cascade of memories and carpe diem platitudes filled up other defining tunes of the season, too, from the carefree country songs (“Life is short, make it sweet,” went one of my favorites, the Old Dominion jam “Make It Sweet) to the sad, forlorn lullabies (“She was boarded up and gone like an old summer song/Nothing but an empty shell,” Springsteen sang on “Moonlight Motel,” his greatest song in years, from that year’s Western Stars). There was even foreshadowing right there in the first song I put on my summer playlist that year: “And I’m so alive, best year of my life…it’s gonna break my heart to see it blown to bits,” goes a Charley Bliss track that felt almost alarmingly clairvoyant when I went back to listen to it just a few months later.

But “The Days” is the one I always wind back around to. I remember driving home on Labor Day that year, from an afternoon and evening spent at the beach, and playing that song loud as I gazed out the window at the sunset refracting off the water. “The other day, it hit me like a hammer/That you can’t get back those moments that really matter,” goes the pre-chorus, a hardly-profound statement that sure as hell feels profound when you hear it against the backdrop of the last night of summer. This song is about all the things that pile up too quickly: the candles on your birthday cake, the calendar pages you don’t need anymore, the hellos and goodbyes, the plans, the memories, the regrets, the “we’ll do it next year” assurances. “You blink, another year under the sun we all go ’round,” Whitters sings, fretting because it’s all going by too fast. “I know that they’re flying away, and there’s no way to slow ’em down,” she laments, before coming up with a pledge: “Instead of counting up the days/I just wanna make ’em count.”

Today, Hailey Whitters is a relatively well-established, well-regarded country singer-songwriter. Back then, though, she was still just picking up steam. Her first single, “Ten Year Town,” had garnered some attention for its honest and unvarnished portrayal of what life is like for aspiring country singers in Nashville (“I’m 12 years in to a 10-year town” is the key line). “The Days” was the follow-up, a lilting, sepia-toned beauty perfect for summertime bliss. Six years later, it remains, for me, her best song.

When I hear “The Days” now, I think of a lot of things. I definitely think of the friend group my wife and I had built since moving back home, and everything we shared together: day trips and hikes and explorations all around northern Michigan; trivia nights at the bar; evenings full of laughter, sharing a bottle of wine (or four) and chatting until the wee small hours; Friendsgivings and New Year’s Eves; times spent dancing the night away to the cover band at the local brewery; weddings where some of us got too drunk. Up to that point, my wife and I had never really had the “grown-up friendship” thing – the thing they depict in TV shows like Friends, where you get together with your buddies all the time and they eventually come to feel like family. Now I did, and I loved it. No wonder I was so drawn to a song about cherishing the moments of your life as they pass, and making every single one of them count.

On February 28, 2020, Hailey Whitters released what would become her breakthrough album, called The Dream. “The Days” and “Ten Year Town” were both on it, along with 10 other deeply-felt, smartly-written country songs. It was the album I listened to most during the final two weeks of relative “normalcy” in my life, before the simmering fears around COVID-19 boiled over and everything changed. Suddenly, making the days count seemed veritably impossible. My wife got sent home from the office on March 13, and didn’t go back for months. Every plan I’d been making for the year, from a cousin’s wedding to what would have been my first-ever half marathon, got cancelled or delayed. And the way of life I’d fallen so in love with since moving home – the hangouts with friends, the evenings out to dinner or drinking in bars, the summer nights alive with revelry and celebration – went up in smoke.

I cherish a lot of albums that came out in 2020, because they helped me get through that scary, uncertain, and ultimately heartbreaking period. I’ll talk more about some of those albums in the coming weeks. But I still can’t really bear to listen to The Dream. It’s too fraught with that feeling of foreshadowing. When I hear most of those songs, it’s like I’m watching a horror movie starring myself and set during the first week of March 2020. No matter how hard I scream at the screen about just how bad things are going to get, past me can’t hear or heed the warnings.

When I wrote about this album on my best of 2020 list, I talked about how most of the songs “are reminders that the best things in life are often the simplest, and the most taken for granted: a partner who can make you laugh; a home that makes your heart feel full; a paycheck at the end of the week.” The blurb continues: “At the end of the worst year that most of us have spent on this planet, there’s something incredibly comforting about hearing someone as empathetic as Whitters sing a song like ‘Living the Dream,’ about mundane things that maybe aren’t so mundane after all. ‘Ain’t we all down here livin’ the dream?’ she asks in the chorus; we aren’t right now, but I can pretty safely say that, if we ever get ‘normal’ back, I won’t be stupid enough to take it for granted again.”

I wouldn’t say “normal” ever came back, at least not in the way I would have defined it pre-pandemic. Living through a global catastrophe can’t really help but change your life irrevocably, and I know that I was a completely different person coming out of those years than I was going into them. A lot of things around me shifted too, from my family relationships to my circle of friends. Some of those changes were good, and some of them were bad, but they were cumulatively so substantial that COVID-19 ended up marking the end of a life chapter that I’d previously thought was just getting started. And while I’m generally happy about where my life is circa 2025 – sans the global political landscape, which…well, fuck – I still mourn the premature demise of the life my wife and I built for ourselves in 2018 and 2019. Sometimes I find myself wondering: if there was an alternate universe where the pandemic never happened, how different would my life be right now? I’ll never have the answer, but I don’t think I’ll ever stop asking.

Fortunately, even though I didn’t realize at the time that the summer of 2019 would be the end of an era, I still lived it to its fullest. How could I not, when my favorite song of the moment was constantly reminding me that, instead of counting up the days, I just had to make them count?

Past Installments:

• Track 1: “One Headlight” by The Wallflowers
• Track 2: “Hanging by a Moment” by Lifehouse
• Track 3: “Hide” by Creed
• Track 4: “Wheel” by John Mayer
• Track 5: “Kill” by Jimmy Eat World
• Track 6: “Fix You” by Coldplay
• Track 7: “Walk On” by U2
• Track 8: “Feeling a Moment” by Feeder
• Track 9: “When Canyons Ruled the City” by Butch Walker
• Track 10: “Truth Is” by Sister Hazel
• Track 11: “Breaking Free” from High School Musical
• Track 12: “Come Around” by Counting Crows
• Track 13: “Someone Like You” by SafetySuit
• Track 14: “Crashin’” by Jack’s Mannequin
• Track 15: “Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen
• Track 16: “Go” by Boys Like Girls
• Track 17: “Ride” by Cary Brothers
• Track 18: “Growing Up” by The Maine
• Track 19: “Dusk and Summer” by Dashboard Confessional
• Track 20: “The Sound of You and Me” by Yellowcard
• Track 21: “Holocene” by Bon Iver
• Track 22: “Handwritten” by The Gaslight Anthem
• Track 23: “Can’t Smile Without You” by Barry Manilow
• Track 24: “The House That Heaven Built” by Japandroids
• Track 25: “Miles Apart” by The Dangerous Summer
• Track 26: “Song for the Road” by David Ford
• Track 27: “Speed Trap Town” by Jason Isbell
• Track 28: “Dibs” by Kelsea Ballerini
• Track 29: “Carry Me Home” by The Alternate Routes

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