Macha/Bedhead, “Only The Bodies Survive” When a person dies, their body doesn’t survive, really. It’s left behind, buried, or destroyed. This song’s lyrical conceit applies the metaphor not so much to humans, but to their prideful enterprises: Once a relationship is dissolved, its two members are merely discrete bodies rather than the two parties of an emotional contract; a small town’s boom time is over, the homes are abandoned, its residents departed for warmer climes. When only the corporeal shell remains—of a home, a town, a person, a band?—then words aren’t enough to describe that haunted feeling, so Macha’s Javanese vibraphone and Bedhead’s mournful, repetitive guitars come in to finish the job. The piece builds over a drone that sounds like mutated radio static and car engines, which subsides long enough for Josh McKay to breathe a few verses before the song collapses. Then the two doomed bands join forces long enough to restart it and unfurl a dreamy instrumental coda, the guitar and vibraphone locking together to bid goodbye. Bedhead was already dissolved at this point, and Macha’s only future album was still a few years away, so this is as fitting an elegy as the surviving bodies of either band could provide.

Daft Punk, “Digital Love” At the time, I wasn’t in love with Discovery because it wasn’t as visceral or immediate for me as Homework, but it grew on me. And I can trace the evolution now: the duo simply made the repetitive earthshaking beats of the first album a little more radio-friendly, compressed the song structures, and infused them with hilariously infectious pop. They make it sound easy, but boy howdy, is it ever not.

Cliff Martinez, “Helicopter” The opening of Martinez’ score to Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 epic Traffic could arguably adorn any of the film’s pivotal scenes, but this piece seeps into an otherwise noiseless shot of Michael Douglas’ helicopter landing in Washington. Like the muted blues in which that storyline’s scenes are cast, Martinez’ score begins in a deceptively soothing mood: surface-of-Mars synths are soon penetrated by Flea’s almost subsonic bass, while Michael Brook lays down dappled, percussive guitar notes and David Torn’s effects-laden guitar takes care of the swirling ambient wash that pervades the whole score and, therefore, the whole film.

The Sea & Cake, “All The Photos” They nailed it with this one. All the usual Sea & Cake elements plus a few more, for good measure: handclaps, a slight tremolo on the vocals, even a little doo-wop during the middle section. The summer after I moved to Iowa City in 2001 this song was perfect for driving around town by myself with the windows down, thinking about whatever girl I had a crush on that week. That couldn’t last, of course, and this song feels appropriately ephemeral.

Spoon, “Everything Hits At Once” I think of this one as the more menacing B-side of “All The Photos.” I was still cruising around with the windows down but it was nighttime and I was more lonely than alone. “The outside is all lit up with ad lights / In traffic we become on the way back home / Part of something bigger than just on our own.” Spoon weren’t Indie Rock Famous yet; they were just transmitting straight north from Austin the exact formula I needed at the height of a humid, claustrophobic summer: dry, muscular drums, pensive Mellotron, vibraphone, and stressed-out lyrics just this side of emo.

Björk, “An Echo, A Stain” And then the shit really hit the fan. The apex of Björk’s career is embodied in an album released two weeks before 9/11, and while none of us wished for it, I was glad I could take refuge in “A Hidden Place,” “Cocoon,” and “An Echo, A Stain” on that wretched, sunny day. I still get chills—not the good kind—when I listen to this album, and this song especially sounds like the soundtrack to an erotic nightmare, but it still has a place in my pop canon, however problematic.

Basement Jaxx, “Romeo” Good thing there was this song, then, or I probably wouldn’t have survived the winter. Watching the news through parted fingers, spending more time in the bars of downtown Iowa City than at my job or at home, with my roommates my only constant companions, this song is my best evidence that we can become nostalgic for even the worst periods in our lives.

I still listen to this song when I want to remind myself of those strange, dark days and the way we flouted the unstemmed march of unhappy headlines with the buoyant groove of dance music. I listen to it when I think of Neil and Mark. I listen to it and celebrate an Obama presidency. I listen to it as another November looms, eight years on. In brash defiance of intractable logic and discouraging evidence, we human beings are stupidly good at keeping our chins up, our hands in the air, and our broken hearts beating in time with the music, spiraling into winter.

Tori Amos, “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” I know, right? But really, this audacious highlight of the alternately compelling and misguided Strange Little Girls almost sounds like it was focus-grouped to hit my pleasure center: creepy, snaky guitar by Adrian Belew; a lascivious groove by Matt Chamberlain; a long Wurlitzer-drenched vamp in the middle and a trip-hop coda that wanders even farther from the source material than it was at the outset. Another random musical fragment that fell into my post-9/11 playlists, the latent violence lurking within this song’s seething beauty is at least as potent as its ostensible anti-gun message.

Death Cab For Cutie, “We Laugh Indoors” More polished and affected than their earliest recordings; leaner and more propulsive than their later ones. I’m predisposed to notice the drumming in any song, but Jason McGerr begins the song by playing unaccompanied for eight bars, daring you to ignore him. A few minutes later, winter is coming and Gueneviere is moving out, and the band is firing on all cylinders, especially McGerr, who leads the charge through a heavy, operatic bridge. A stand-out breakup song in a not-yet-crowded oeuvre of breakup songs; nothing about this seemed precious or superfluous, and Zooey was still years in the future.

The Dismemberment Plan, “Following Through” So within the space of a few months in 2001, my first band broke up, summer ended, 9/11 happened, and the Dismemberment Plan released their last album. I’m ashamed to say there were days when I felt like each of those developments carried equal weight, but that’s where I was at 25. Nothing was keeping me in Iowa City except my retail job, and I had less claim than ever to that town and the aimless, heavy-drinking lifestyle it was inculcating in me. Musically, Change—this song especially—picked up a thread that Speed of Sauce dropped way too soon, which made it hard to listen to at times. “It could have been great, it could have had real potential.” Thematically, these songs felt predestined even if they were written well before the aforementioned misfortunes; their messages of loss and heartbreak are perennial, I suppose, but especially apt for that time and place. Feeling sorry for myself while doing nothing to effect a solution; mourning lost opportunities and doing nothing to create new ones. “I dishonor the past, being so loose with my time.” I must have known that the real struggle was still ahead, but did I truly believe it, or act accordingly? (No, I did not.) Instead I fetishized the time wasted, the potential unfulfilled, the indulgent self-pity. I would like to believe I no longer do that. I would like to believe I have better things to do. “I so don’t need those dreams that I used to have.”