My Life In 35 Songs, Track 8: “Feeling a Moment” by Feeder

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Turning to face what you’ve become, bury the ashes of someone…

I love the way it breaks the silence.

If you’ve never heard “Feeling a Moment” before, do yourself a favor and click play on that YouTube video down below, or go cue it up on your preferred streaming service. You’ll hear what I mean: a few seconds of something played backwards, and then a torrent of sound – an electric guitar strum and a wordless wail. For me, it is the sound of everything I was feeling at the start of my ninth-grade year: nerves, excitement, anticipation, self-belief and self-doubt in equal measure, and more than a little bit of fear.

Because what’s scarier than a totally new frontier? I’ve got the answer: being dropped into said new frontier in your early teens.

I wrote a couple chapters ago about how absolutely terrified I was at the prospect of moving away from my home and my friends on the brink of high school. I really did not want to become that character you always see in movies – the “new kid” who doesn’t know anybody and has to start over completely from scratch in the unwelcoming halls of a high school. I dodged that bullet in 2004, but I don’t think I fully grasped at the time how much I was going to end up living it one year later regardless.

The way public school was structured in my hometown was as follows: grades K-6 were at the elementary schools, grades 7-9 were at the “junior high,” and grades 10-12 were at the high school. Your freshman year, in other words, was weirdly apportioned off as part of middle school. It was an illogical way of doing things, and it felt even weirder for me, as someone who’d attended a separate charter school for eight years and was now getting dumped out into the junior high for a single year before switching schools again a year later. If freshman year had been at the high school building, then every one of my fellow ninth graders would have been feeling some version of the wrong-footing I felt on that first day of high school in 2005. Instead, I was one of the few new students in a big school where everyone already knew one another.

“Feeling a Moment,” a sublime U2-sized anthem from Welsh rock band Feeder, was not the first song I played on the morning of my first day of school, mostly because I didn’t know it existed yet. The first time I heard this song was at the top of the season 3 premiere of One Tree Hill, which would air a month after I started school, on October 5. From there, though, “Feeling a Moment” became my freshman year anthem. Seven or eight years ago, when I made a series of 18-song nostalgia mixes for each of my school years, “Feeling a Moment” was my go-to opening track for the ninth-grade mix. It’s also the opener for Pushing the Senses, the 2005 Feeder LP produced by legendary studio maven Gil Norton; it’s the second of three Norton-produced tracks that will appear in this series, after “Kill” from Jimmy Eat World’s Futures and before…well, I’ll let you guess.

Some songs just feel like they are coursing with electricity and adrenaline, and “Feeling a Moment” is one of those songs. The entire track is charged with kinetic energy, like a runaway train car hurtling down a mountainside. The big wordless vocal melody giving way to the calm-in-the-storm verses, which in turn hand the baton off to the massive, massive chorus, which itself builds to the even bigger-sounding bridge. It is a viscerally exciting song, and it was the perfect soundtrack for a viscerally exciting time, when virtually every single thing in my life felt brand new.

It turned out that being the “new kid” wasn’t so bad. Almost every classmate from my old school had known me for so long that, in certain ways, it felt like my identity and my personality had been locked into place. Moving to a new school offered an opportunity to break free of that version of myself, and to rebuild a new me in its place. New friends and relationships, new interests and hobbies, new extracurricular activities, new academic focus areas, a new personality. Everything was so fresh and groundbreaking, and I could feel myself changing and growing in real time as I experienced it all.

Along with all the new that came from this fresh start, I felt this incredible pull to search out and embrace new music. It was one of two times in my life – the other following my graduation from college – where the break from my past life felt significant enough to demand a totally new soundtrack. For at least the first few months, I don’t recall listening much to the music that had been dominating my life up to that point. Instead, I poured myself fully into new albums and new artists. Something Corporate and Jack’s Mannequin for my angsty days; Fall Out Boy and Motion City Soundtrack to connect with my emo-loving classmates; Jamie Cullum and his contemporary jazz to feel a little bit classier than usual; Josh Ritter for my budding songwriting enthusiast side. Years later, I’d make a 1,200-song playlist cataloging my entire youth, from childhood to college graduation. The stretch of songs that makes up ninth grade – which spans 90 or so tracks – is one of my favorite parts of the playlist, just because it reflects the fertile period of discovery I was going through at that time.

A lot of that music came just by virtue of having new people in my orbit to bounce off of, but I think most of it came from TV shows. By ninth grade, I had two iPods, an ever-growing mp3 library, and no interest in checking in with what was getting played on top 40 radio. Lucky for me, though, this was a time in history where TV networks were shelling out the big bucks to license half a dozen songs per episode, and most of those songs were great. The O.C. was the poster child for this trend, teaching an entire generation of teenagers that the coolest thing they could do was listen to obscure indie rock. But I loved One Tree Hill for its more emo-leaning impulses, Smallville for its grungier alternative rock mix, Grey’s Anatomy for its devotion to making adult contemporary music sound vital and profound, and Scrubs or Gilmore Girls for being a little off-kilter and all over the place. There are even some totally forgotten shows from this era that I remember exclusively because they were the first place I heard great, great songs – like Nada Surf’s “Inside Your Love” popping up on a thoroughly mediocre WB melodrama called The Mountain, or Oasis’s “Stop Crying Your Heart Out” lending some weight to Fox’s trashy Hawaii-set drama North Shore.

By ninth grade, that era of TV show music was already starting to peter out. The O.C., so gargantuan in its first two seasons, was suddenly skating on thin ice in its crappy third outing, and you could tell that shows like Smallville were dedicating smaller portions of their budgets to the soundtrack. But for the moment, so much of my music discovery was still driven by the music supervisors on TV shows that were punching well above their weight in terms of soundtrack development. It wasn’t just current music, either. Hell, One Tree Hill was the first place I heard The Replacements’ “Here Comes a Regular” and Led Zeppelin’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” two absolutely classic songs that I can’t believe got licensed for an increasingly off-the-wall teenage soap.

Freshman year ended up being a whirlwind, transitional time in my life, and I’d be lying if I said every moment along the way was good. On the contrary, I remember breathing a big sigh of relief when the bell rang on the last day and I got to walk out of that school building for the last time. I felt like I’d spent the entire year as a puzzle piece trying to find its place, only to realize that I was trying to slot my way into the wrong puzzle. When I listen back to “Feeling a Moment,” that quest for belonging is what I hear, in every wordless cry and soaring chorus. I’d find my place soon enough, but this song was an anthem for the fruitless but often glorious search. Maybe more than any other song, I hear it now as the sound of growing up.

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

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