| 1 | Christen Lien | "The Escape" | single | In fourth grade I had my first hopeless, obsessive "romantic" crush. |
| 2 | Anathema | "Springfield" | single | It was on a girl in my class named Kim. I didn't know her very well, nor did I know really what the point of a crush was, but that didn't stop me from having one. |
| 3 | Ahab | "Transit" | Transit +3 | It was not a mutual crush. It went on a really long time without becoming any more mutual, or maybe it went on that long because it wasn't mutual. |
| 4 | Mantar | "Pest Crusade" | The Spell 3 | I didn't ever actually get to know her much better during or after that time, and after high school I moved away. |
| 5 | Slagmaur | "Bestemor Sang Djevelord" | Thill Smitts Terror | But we were nominally reconnected on Facebook a few years ago, so I had at least tiny glimpses into her adult life, or at least the parts in which her son was doing something adorable. |
| 6 | Moon Duo | "Sevens" | single | This is not exactly the grandest vision-statement for social media, but it allows us to maintain once-tenuous personal connections with ongoing tenuousness. |
| 7 | Labyrinth | "Someone Says" | single | Monday night, a friend I do know forwarded Kim's brother's sad note explaining that, after years of struggling with depression and alcoholism, Kim had taken her own life. |
| 8 | Dream Evil | "Dream Evil" | single | Rereading her Facebook posts, which were never intended to suddenly represent a whole life of tragic internal struggle, I could imagine ways in which they concealed pain, |
| 9 | DragonForce | "Judgement Day" | single | but only in retrospect. |
| 10 | Cornerstone | "Northern Light" | Northern Light +1 | I never knew her. Our tenuous connection never became meaningfully less tenuous. |
| 11 | Voyager | "Ascension" | single | Her 50th birthday would have been May 15th. |
| 12 | Wolf | "Final Star" | Final Star +3 | Mine was Tuesday. |
| 13 | Ensemble Economique | "Gonna Get Right with God, Right After This Next Cigarette" | In Silhouette | My daughter is in fourth grade now. |
| 14 | Natasha Bedingfield | "Love Looks Like (with Natasha Bedingfield)" | single | All our connections are tenuous, and you can arguably make any connection tenuous by pondering it long enough. |
| 15 | Cashmere Cat | "9 (After Coachella) (feat. MØ & SOPHIE)" | single | But it works the other way, too: |
| 16 | AmaLee | "Sorairo Dayz (April Fools)" | single | Emotional current can flow over tenuous connections, and you at least partly control how tenuous they are for you by how much you invest in them. |
| 17 | BackWordz | "Individualism" | Veracity | The crush was as formative for me as it was meaningless for everybody else, |
| 18 | GatoPaint | "Inside Us (feat. ChiChi )" | single | and her suicide and my daughter's coincidental age will now be inextricable parts of my subjective milestone. |
| 19 | Ela | "Senin Mi Hayat" | Senindir Hayat | You can't undo other people's deaths by living, |
| 20 | Aye Nako | "Nightcrawler" | single | but you can try to appreciate that you have been granted another day. |
| 21 | State Champs | "Slow Burn" | single | You can try to hear something you wouldn't have heard if you were dead already. |
| 22 | Pet Symmetry | "Stare Collection" | single | Of course, I guess there's nothing inherently more valuable about the things you didn't miss by dying yesterday than the things that were already around yesterday but you were listening to something else, |
| 23 | The Offseason | "'98" | Pastimes 6 | or all the things that people sang before you were born, |
| 24 | Black Sun Empire | "Scarif" | The Wrong Room | or before all the world's songs were loaded into computers, |
| 25 | Grant | "Starship" | single | or while you still ignorantly believed you didn't like whatever you still think you don't like. |
| 26 | Epic North | "Freya" | Arctic Engine | 50 years is not that long, but it's long enough to compile encyclopedias of regret. |
| 27 | Kai Engel | "Seeker" | The Run | If that's how you channel your energies, it's short enough to spend doing nothing else. |
| 28 | Tid | "Libido" | Giv Akt | I spent a year of my childhood gazing longingly at a girl for reasons I didn't understand then and don't understand now, and she lived her adult life in pain and I did nothing better for her than click "Like" on a couple pictures of her son wearing a baseball uniform. |
| 29 | SikTh | "Vivid" | single | That's one way to look at it, anyway. |
| 30 | MIYAVI | "Live To Die Another Day" | single | Then again, a couple fewer clicks and I wouldn't have known even that much about her life, nor her death. |
| 31 | Body Count | "All Love Is Lost" | Bloodlust | Don't spend your time compiling those volumes. |
| 32 | Angel Haze | "Candles" | single | Don't spend your time proofreading them, don't spend your time reading the comments on the reviews of that book. |
| 33 | Paola Turci | "Fatti bella per te" | Il secondo cuore | Do something you can only do because you're still alive. |
| 34 | Levante | "1996 La stagione del rumore" | single | Play new songs. |
| 35 | Varg | "Götterdämmerung" | single | Look at a child and remember what it was like to have lived only that long yet. |
| 36 | Kaunis Kuolematon | "Hurskas" | Vapaus | Like the picture of their son in a baseball shirt if that's all you can do today. |
| 37 | Art Nation | "Ghost Town" | single | It costs nothing, and it's unlikely to be worth much less than that, |
| 38 | Adrenaline Rush | "Sinner" | single | but it might be worth more. |
| 39 | Grossstadtgeflüster | "Wie man Feuer macht" | single | Fall in love with anything, whether you understand it or not. |
| 40 | Neuman | "Boystar" | single | If nothing else, you are exercising your capacity for love, |
| 41 | Meg Mac | "Low Blows" | single | and somebody you can reach will need that later, |
| 42 | Tired Lion | "Cinderella Dracula" | single | or now. |
| 43 | Billow Observatory | "Vex" | II: Plains/Patterns | The case against love is that isolation protects you from loss, |
| 44 | Lucybell | "Por Amor" | single | or at least from the impact of loss, |
| 45 | Lydia Ainsworth | "Ricochet" | Darling of the Afterglow | but credit this argument only if it comes from someone who has lived forever by living alone. |
| 46 | Last Leaf Down | "Existence" | Bright Wide Colder | And I'm not entirely prepared to stipulate that none of these people exist, but I'm pretty sure you didn't go to fourth grade with them. |
| 47 | Brian & Helvetin Peruna | "Keikalle Flw'hun" | Keikalle Flow'hun / Pojat 2 | And thus you never followed them around for a year thinking happily that they could somehow make you happy. |
| 48 | Ki:Theory | "Bringing Me Down (feat. Ruelle)" | Bringing Me Down | There's no way around this being their loss. |
| 49 | Ken Zazpi | "Haizu" | single | There's a way around it being your loss, though, |
| 50 | DRÆMINGS | "Fire in Hell" | single | and it is just this: Don't lose yet. Not yet. |