'Do It Again,' or How One Song Saved My Professional Life

This is a story about a song and how it saved my career.

In November 2004, I landed my first full-time, benefited position in New York City at a book publisher. After spending the first nine months working two unpaid internships and supporting myself writing TV trivia (true story) and blowing through a $5,000 inheritance, I was ready for my first real office job.

I had this Edenic image of what it would look like from all the feel-good, employment-related movies set in Manhattan that I’d seen over the years. I was going to be like Tom Hanks in Big! Michael J. Fox in The Secret of My Success! Logistically speaking, a full-time job also meant that I could lengthen my stay in the Big Apple; go to a dentist and doctor for the first time in nearly a year; enjoy discounts on tickets and such that the company offered; and not have to worry every time rent was due (at the time, I was paying $800/month for one room in a two-bedroom, first-floor apartment in Astoria, Queens, that I shared with a woman and her cat). My starting salary at the book publisher: $30,000 a year plus benefits. I was rich!

As I mentioned, I’d spent the previous nine months completing unpaid internships at two magazines and writing that TV trivia, so in my mind, a pivot to book publishing wasn’t so far off. In fact, going from the media world to book publishing would be a breeze, I said to myself. The way my 24-year-old brain processed it? Writing and editing is writing and editing is writing and editing.

In the absence of a truly dedicated career mentor -- there were a few early ones that I can’t thank enough for responding to emails and doing informational interviews with me -- what I hadn’t been told about the NYC workforce was that not all people in it were enjoyable to work with or for. My mother had dealt with some real assholes in her upstate New York job, but I was so far removed from home at this point, that it didn’t really register. All these years later, the only rational conclusion I can come up with about these people are that they have been beaten down and disrespected by life or society so much that they’ve come to the realization that making others’ lives miserable in a professional environment is their true calling -- not actually doing the job at hand and being cooperative and nice. And at this book publisher, I had a head-on collision with one such person. I was hired as this person’s assistant.

But this person, who will remain anonymous -- but whom all of my former co-workers will know immediately without me needing me to name-check -- is not the focus of this post. What it’s about is the personal fallout -- and then the happy ending.

First, the fallout.

No one should have to suffer the type of mental and emotional abuse that I did at 24 at his first real job. I consider myself a pretty detail-oriented employee, and have always gone to great lengths to give my all to every aspect of every single project, no matter if it’s crafting a companywide email, scheduling a meeting, or actually doing writing and editing work. For this person, none of that mattered; literally nothing I did was right. I was called “retarded” in front of the entire staff at a closed-door meeting, which included the company vice president and president. My body started to react in odd ways; my stomach became a constant cement-mixer, because I was always on edge and stressed out. I felt like I was dying. And I made the mistake of telling this person that I had a sharp pain in my stomach one day. This person deduced that I had the type of Hepatitis brought on by excessive drinking and was promptly accused of being an alcoholic. I was then ordered to go to the president’s office for a “man-to-man chat,” and then home (obviously, none of this was in the least bit true; in the absence of that mentor, I didn’t realize that I could’ve complained to HR or even filed a lawsuit). I was picked on daily to the point where the only safe place in the office was at the very back of it -- the men’s room -- where I would steal away to anxiety-piss and stare at myself in the mirror.

All of this abuse had a tremendously adverse effect on me. I started self-abusing -- going out and partying too hard, acting recklessly in my private and romantic lives, and being an all-around asshole to others (this person was rubbing off on me). I had those aforementioned increased bloating and stomach issues, which landed me in the doctor’s office more than once; an undiagnosed anxiety disorder, which would spiral out of control years later (read about it here); and would dive into depths of deep, dark depression out of nowhere.

All this, because of a job.

Then, one day, it happened. At this point, my desk had been moved within earshot of the abuser’s office, so as to keep closer tabs on my up-fucking (I was working my ass off still, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong). I clearly remember that I was working on a project with one of the über-kind in-house web developers, and had just discovered the company’s shared iTunes server. She recommended that I listen to her playlist, because it had a lot of stuff on it that I’d probably like. I can’t remember how I chose the album that I did -- whether it was the first in the queue or just a random selection -- but I landed on Nada Surf’s The Weight Is a Gift.

Up until that point, Nada Surf’s entire catalog had boiled down to a single song for me -- “Popular” -- which had been released while I was a 16-year-old high school student. It featured a lot of fast, angry-sounding talking and a memorable chorus, the perfect anthem for my raging teenage angst. I’d remembered enjoying it, also, because it perfectly described the cool kids at my small-town high school: football and party stars, cheerleaders, and the like.

The Weight Is a Gift was the band’s fourth album. Released in September 2005 -- or 10 months into my daily dose of professional abuse -- I remembered having read an advance album review in Magnet or Paste magazine (or something similar), and the reviewer fawning over how great it was. The album had been released on Seattle record label, Barsuk Records (pronounced Barsook), its logo, a little white dog with a record in his mouth surrounded by a pale-blue circle.

The album has 11 tracks on it -- none exceeding five minutes in length -- and in all, weighs in at about 39 minutes in total.

I distinctly remember enjoying and relating to the first track, “Concrete Bed,” whose “fried” narrator needed to love himself a little better in order to find the woman of his dreams. But something magical happened when the second track came on. An unseen weight was lifted from my shoulders. I felt like I was floating away from my prison-desk, up, out of the building and into the air, far away, Mary Poppins–style. It was the perfect antidote to this awful experience I had been enduring day in and day out. The track was called “Do It Again,” and it became my theme song, my motto, my creed.

In the 2005 Pitchfork review of the album, journalist Mark Hogan wrote:

“Suffering is essential to The Weight Is a Gift, but mostly as a turning point in the rearview mirror of redemption. The album's essence is encapsulated on its best song, ‘Do It Again,’ which starts with funky (well, you know, for Nada Surf) bass and spiderwebs of distorted guitar. ‘I spend all my energy staying upright,’ Caws sighs, begging for another go amid the ‘azalea air’ and finally coming to the album's title revelation as cymbals crash and background vocals swell.”

I guess, for me, active, daily suffering was essential to discovering this song. And it immediately made me appreciate life more and helped me cope with my situation. I still get goosebumps when the song kicks in and weepy when I listen to the outro, which echoes my two inner-voices at the time, arguing with each other, desperately talking me off the ledge: One sings, “Maybe this weight was a gift … like I had to see what I could lift?,” while the other interrupts with “I spent all my energy … walking upright.” It’s an epic few seconds of sonic therapy -- something even the best psychologist wouldn’t have been able to tell me in session.

I became obsessed with the song, listening to it multiple times a day at my desk -- when I wasn’t listening to the full album all the way through over and over again. All it took was that opening bass-drum combination to lighten my mood. The oddest thing was that I didn’t ever buy the physical album and take it home with me, because I was scared the magic would disappear if I took it outside of that office environment. (Years later, I bought it as a birthday present for my then-girlfriend and future wife; it was a hidden-meaning gift; she was the one.)

To this day, I still can’t sing along perfectly with the song, even though I’ve listened to it more than any other song in my entire catalog. I’m still not 100 percent clear on the exact lyrics; for example, I’m pretty sure lead singer Matthew Caws sings “I spent all my energy” instead of “I spend all my energy” in that outro. There’s also a second voice that interrupts the line “You’re lying down and the moon is sideways” that I never fully understood (“the hot and the cold that never grows old”?). And I don’t have the faintest idea what “I like the masked noise quiet of your breathing nearby” or “I want your lazy science” means.

As a longtime guitarist, I also have never really learned how to play the song on my guitar. I recently came upon a video where Caws is teaching someone off-camera how to play it, and I watched intently, but thought, if I ever do learn how to play this song, I want to figure out my own version. Because how I feel about the song and what it did for me are probably completely different than Caws’ inspiration for it.

And as luck would have it, in 2010, Nada Surf scheduled a show at Brooklyn’s Bell House venue, where they played the entire The Weight Is a Gift album front to back, even featuring some of the guest vocalists and multi-instrumentalists that appeared on the record. Of course, I was there in a heartbeat and had this intense feeling of pride and joy throughout the entire set. “Do It Again” came early on in it, but it still sounded so raw and real to me. I still got those goosebumps.

At that point, I was long removed from that first job, having found a great magazine/website with a number of top-notch mentors at it -- many of which I’m still in contact with. (My managing editor at the time, out of nowhere, bought me Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ocean Rain, just to be nice. What a place, right?)

I’ve learned a lot between that first abusive job and now. These days, I write for a living, the exact thing I set out all those years ago to do in New York City. Had I been able to tell my 24-year-old self that I would be here at this point, he would’ve probably said, “What-fucking-ever, man.” I learned that working your ass off, when under the proper guidance, could lead to promotions and a higher salary and heaps of praise. I learned that being yourself -- and being honest to yourself about your own goals -- was incredibly important in the working world. And I learned that the best thing to do when you’re being abused like that on a daily basis is either (a) go to HR or (b) quit. I eventually chose option B, without a backup plan, much to the chagrin of my parents; but before leaving the book publisher, told a gobsmacked HR rep, who conducted my exit interview, about all the abuse I’d received over the past year and change. The person I worked for was eventually fired after numerous employees like myself complained and reported abuse. Hopefully, this predator is nowhere near the publishing world anymore, but as I’ve also learned, companies are pretty shitty at vetting people like this. So my guess is he or she is still abusing people somewhere.

Above all, though, I learned that one three-minute and thirty-nine-second song could save my professional life. How cool is that?