elite 8
(13) Ani DiFranco, “You Had Time”
outlasted
(6) Collective Soul, “The World I Know”
217-201
for a spot in the final four

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/25/26.

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DON’T KNOW WHAT GOOD FEELS LIKE UNTIL YOU FEEL BAD: JAMES CHARLESWORTH ON “THE WORLD I KNOW”

[EXT. JERSEY CITY – EARLY MORNING]

The Colgate Clock in the pre-dawn gloom. A mournful dirge on acoustic guitar. A harried BUSINESS MAN in suit and tie checks his watch as he trudges along a chain-link fence backdropped by the Hudson and the skyline of lower Manhattan. Through his eyes we rise from a subway station into the steel canyons of the city, its windblown sidewalks and sewer grates. At a bodega, he procures a plain bagel and a steaming coffee.

From his place on the periphery, where he’s been eying the Business Man with a pensive sort of curiosity, ED ROLAND, lead singer and songwriter of Collective Soul, gazes earnestly into the camera and, his long hair lifting in a slight breeze, begins to sing.

ED ROLAND (singing)

Has our conscience shown?

Has the sweet breeze blown?

*

In the fall of 1994, on an afternoon his newly famous band had been flown by private jet to New York City at the behest of NBC to perform as live musical guests on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, preacher’s son Ed Roland stepped outside a midtown hotel room and went for a long walk up and down Broadway. As usual, he had the beginnings of a song in his head.
“It was a different New York City then,” he would remember later. “There was still some grit and dirt… especially around Times Square and Union Square. There were homeless people living in cardboard boxes. Then somebody pulled up in a limousine with a fur coat on and walked right by.”
It’s easy to picture him, tall and traversing the city in the trench coat he dons for the video, long hair ablow across his drawn equine face, a handsomeness that will one day make him pop up on Playgirl’s annual list of the sexiest rock stars. But in the video he looks less like a sex symbol and more like some prophet or professor or wiseman, this son of a Baptist minister and Elton John devotee who has always insisted on “the separation of Church and rock ‘n’ roll,” but whose songwriting style is undeniably laced with the spiritual, woven with references to heaven and littered with allusions to guiding lights and paced with the rhythms of a church choir. When Ed Roland was fifteen, he was in a car accident that killed his best friend; when he was twenty-three, he lost his other best friend to a heroin overdose; for a full decade he struggled to find his place in the music industry before finding massive success almost accidentally at the age of thirty. If nothing else, the man who strode those streets and avenues of Midtown that day was one attuned to the highs and lows of the world, the struggles and redemptions that contour our lives and give them depth and meaning.
“I took a two-hour walk,”—he would say later of the day he wrote the song that would become his band’s second biggest hit—“and just absorbed and observed from the highs and lows of what society was offering the greatest city in the world. I was looking at what the good was [and] what the bad was. But also, you don’t know what bad feels like until you feel good. You don’t know what good feels like until you feel bad.”

*

[EXT. MANHATTAN – MORNING]

The Business Man waits in line to board a bus. Preoccupied with his copy of the Times proclaiming headlines of despair (“War Victims; Camp Children Starve”), he fails to notice a woman next to him begging for change.

ED ROLAND (singing V.O.)

Has all kindness gone?

Hope still lingers on...

From his seat on the bus, the Business Man observes as the woman turns and trudges off. He winces, and his face shifts toward the camera, eyes meeting ours as if imploring us to absolve him of his guilt.

ED ROLAND (singing V.O.)

I drink myself of new-found pity...

*

I was drunk the first time I saw the video for “The World I Know.” Not the festive carefree drunk you see glamorous actors pantomiming in movies; not the vividly and artistically rendered fever dream drunk you read in certain books. Rural central Pennsylvania: October 1995. At the height of Collective Soul’s fame, I was an eighteen-year-old part-time pizza delivery boy living at my parents’ house, unenthusiastically enrolled in my first semester at the local branch campus of the state university, and on the day in question I had skipped my Friday afternoon classes with a couple friends to drink a case of Stoney’s at one of the friends’ father’s house while he was at work. The Stoney’s was a rare splurge. Typically in those days we subsisted on forties of Silver Thunder malt liquor that could be procured for $1.25 and tasted like gasoline with a pound of sugar poured in, or glass flasks of fortified wines like Cisco or Mad Dog 20/20. I don’t remember what the impetus was for the Stoney’s: one of us must have aced a test, or more likely failed it (my major was D.U.S., i.e. Division of Undergraduate Studies, i.e. I’m mostly here for the parties). What I remember about that afternoon, as I sat on the couch watching the opening frames of the video, was thinking “ugghh jeezus, fucking Collective Soul…”
I was not a Collective Soul fan. It wasn’t necessarily that I hated their music: they had some pretty cool guitar riffs, and at least one of my friends was the owner of their self-titled second album, which had come out earlier that year. It was more that something about their music struck me as—how do I put it?—too mainstream for my taste. Maybe a little too uplifting? In the aftermath of the dissolution of grunge I had returned to my metal roots and was passing through the doorways of Green Day and Rancid into more obscure hardcore melodic punk rock. All I knew about Collective Soul was that they were a Christian band (they’re not) and that their song “December” from earlier that year was hotly rumored to be “about a blow job” (it’s not).
Probably my dislike for Collective Soul was rooted in something else entirely: a manifestation of internal anxiety that had something to do with low self-esteem, something to do with the insecurities of adolescence: an unwillingness to look unguarded emotion in the eyes combined with a mistrust of anyone who purported to have found something that made them feel less lonely and uncertain. It was this same anxiety that had made me turn to alcohol. I’d started drinking in my mid-teens, somewhere around the time I began to realize that the thing that was holding me back was this nervous stress that shuddered through my body like an electric current anytime I found myself in social situations. Best I could tell, the kids I saw with bottles of Icehouse or Red Dog or Zima or Mickey’s wide mouths in their hands seemed not to suffer from this affliction. I crossed the threshold with reluctance and fear—I’d heard stories all my life of family members who’d struggled with alcohol, stories told in the guise of humor but always underneath I could sense the warning—and then from the first sip these admonitions were forgotten and my life with alcohol became a long straight road with a series of green lights turning yellow that I had to accelerate through, the pedal floored so I could make it before those red lights of my reservations and my guilt arrived.
That was my situation on that day I sat on the couch at my friend’s dad’s house watching the video for “The World I Know,” three years into an entertainment that had become a habit that had become a dependency. Picture me there: dingy flannel shirt and loose jeans, feet up on the coffee table and watching obliviously as the morose Business Man in the music video navigated the day-to-day drudgery of his morning commute. Years later, after I’d left home and embraced a new identity as a grad student studying creative writing at a liberal arts school in Boston, I would have been quick to identify these opening scenes with the world-weary Business Man as an easy example of what we liked to call a Last Chance to Change Story: a moody tale of a protagonist mired in a mournful state of mind, clearly on his way to some reckoning or epiphany or catharsis that would confront him with the opportunity to face down his ennui and his angst and his malaise and either find a way to overcome it or succumb to it.
But on that day in October ’95—half-drunk, my GPA hovering around a 2.0—I lacked the perspective to identify such narratives, let alone recognize them in myself. Picture me: clad in my backwards baseball cap and clutching a brown Stoney’s bottle. The world I knew was so small then, not much larger than the ten-mile radius stretching from my parents’ house to the local branch campus of the state university. What did I understand, back then, about last chances to change?

*

[EXT. MANHATTAN – MORNING]

ED ROLAND (singing)

All the words that I’ve been reading /

Now have started the act of bleeding into one...

The newsprint blurs as the Business Man’s eyes fill with tears. In broad daylight on a city street, he weeps. A metal fire escape scales a yellow brick brownstone, and it is at its base that he tosses aside the newspaper. Halfway up the ladder of the fire escape, he discards his briefcase, its contents spilling out upon the concrete sidewalk. He pulls off his suitcoat and sends it parachuting down...

[EXT. ROOFTOP – MORNING]

Alone, surrounded by the city’s anonymous rooflines and water towers, the Business Man spins in a rotating spiral of grief, raises his palms to his face while his tears roll down.

*

In the summer of 1993, the band that would become known as Collective Soul, which was not really a band at all at that point, released its debut album, which was not so much an album as a collection of demos conceived and recorded largely by one man in the basement of his home in Stockbridge, Georgia. At thirty years old, Ed Roland had by this point mostly given up on his dreams of rock stardom. After fronting a series of bands in the Atlanta underground scene to middling success, he had settled on this last-ditch effort of throwing together a demo tape and putting it out on a local label in the hopes of selling the publishing rights.
The story likely would’ve ended there, were it not for a DJ at a college radio station at Georgia State University in Atlanta who took a shine to the opening track—which happened to be called “Shine”—and put it into regular rotation. The song itself was a bit of a curiosity: with its droning drop-D guitar riffs and shifting dynamics and healthy dose of Eddie Vedder-style yarling in the choruses and the double-time outro (“Shine on meeheeheeya! Meeheeheeya!”), it was nothing extraordinarily new per se, but there was a certain novelty in the delivery, a freshness in the combination of influences. Within days, it became the station’s most requested and most played song, and when station management contacted Ed Roland to see if his band could play some local shows, he accepted—despite the fact that he did not have a band—and then cobbled one together consisting of his little brother and a couple other musicians who’d contributed to the demo and a friend or two he knew from cub scouts and little league baseball. Other radio stations around the south picked up the song and experienced similar overwhelmingly positive reactions, and as the calendar turned to 1994, “Shine” rose up the Billboard charts so fast even Atlantic Records could not ignore it. They signed Collective Soul, rereleased Ed Roland’s basement demo without even bothering to remaster it or update the chintzy cover art, and sent the band on a year-long cross-country tour opening for Aerosmith. They secured them a prime-time slot on the main stage at Woodstock ’94 in front of 300,000 people, and then, just a month later, with “Shine” peaking at number 11 on the Billboard charts—less than two years after Ed Roland had recorded it by himself in his basement studio as a last ditch effort to salvage a fleeting dream—the spot on Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
“The World I Know” is Ed Roland’s tribute to that journey, an ode to that afternoon in New York City when he had the opportunity, for the first time, to look back on how far he had come. It may have been written on a piece of hotel stationery when he got back from his two-hour walk spent observing the highs and lows of society—jotted down before he took the elevator to the lobby to catch a limo to Rockefeller Center—but it was formed in the grief of his adolescent loss, forged in the decade of struggle he’d overcome before the light of opportunity shined down on him. Ed Roland had no way of knowing, of course, that his band’s moment of massive fame was already on the downswing, that although they have released a total of thirteen albums over their undeniably successful thirty-year career, they would never again achieve the success they’d stumbled upon with “Shine.” And yet from its mournful opening dirge to the soaring major chords of its powerful chorus, “The World I Know” succeeds in achieving something more lasting and memorable and heartfelt than any of the heavy riffs and yarling of their first and biggest hit.
That afternoon at my friend’s father’s house, I knew nothing about Ed Roland or his journey (I thought he was in a Christian band who’d recorded a song about a blow job). I had not yet arrived at any such crossroads or catharsis or epiphany as the Business Man. I didn’t know anything about last chances to change or looking down from tall ledges. Perhaps it was just that I was half-drunk, or perhaps I really had bombed a test and was already feeling—somewhere in the hard to access regions of my teenage-boy brain where accountability and ambition lived—a sense of dejection and failure. Maybe it was adolescent hormones or some other circumstance weighing on me that I can’t recall now. But something about that particular song and that particular video on that particular day—when I watched the Business Man’s story and then saw how it ended—spoke to me through the soundproof walls of my ignorance, made me acknowledge something deep in my heart that forced me to turn away from my friends and twist my backwards baseball cap around to hide my eyes so they couldn’t see the emotion I was fighting, an intimation I did not yet have the serenity or the courage or the wisdom to understand or act upon, a fleeting comprehension that, while I could not yet see the light at the far end, I could at least recognize, maybe for the first time ever, the presence of a tunnel.

*

[EXT. ROOFTOP – MORNING]

At the edge of the building, the Business Man removes his shoes and sits cross-legged at the ledge, looking down from this dizzying height.

CLOSE UP ON BUSINESS MAN’S FACE: He nods, accepting his decision and his fate.

The Business Man climbs a guardrail and lifts himself to stand upon the cornice of the brownstone. His arms stretch out and the camera angle rises behind him to show us the endless uncaring city as he leans forward into death...

...and a pigeon lands on his arm.

*

On a raw and rainy night in September of last year, my fiancée and I drove an hour north from our home outside Boston to see Collective Soul. This was no Woodstock ’94 with a crowd of 300,000, no live performance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien for an audience of millions. Nope, this was a show for two thousand damp souls in a hangar-like venue in an off-season beach town a block from the Gulf of Maine. Yet it was a room full of Collective Soul fans—a group of which I suppose it is now fair to call me a member—a venue packed with people mostly our age and capable of looking back on those years in the mid-90s when Collective Soul had their heyday, each perhaps with their own stories of how this band’s strangely uplifting music touched them. Folks ready and willing to sing along, early in the show, when the band dialed up the drop-D riffs of “Shine,” the song that had flung them all those years ago into stardom. And folks who seemed to understand intuitively what was coming when, near the end of the evening, after the band had worked its way through their more recent catalog, Ed Roland inconspicuously exited stage right and ducked down a short staircase, accepted from a roadie an acoustic guitar that he slung over his shoulder, then trotted back up the stairs to take center stage beneath the floodlights. A field of held-aloft smart phones rose up before our eyes and Ed Roland—sixty-two years old now, gray hair tied back in a ponytail beneath a white cattleman’s hat, eyes shielded by sunglasses—strummed his guitar and, after a few measures, began to sing…
Last year I celebrated a quarter century of sobriety. That’s not true—I didn’t celebrate it. It just happened, without fanfare or deep reflection. I’ve been sober so long now that most of my closest friends can’t comprehend at all the person I was when I first saw the video for “The World I Know.” My wife, who was still my fiancée on that day she stood singing along with me in the crowd at the Collective Soul show, can barely fathom the teenage version of her husband whose indiscretions I infrequently describe for her. Redemption seldom resembles anything so obvious as a pigeon alighting on a shoulder; for me in my drinking days there were countless harbingers and omens, innumerable instances of the world trying to tell me what I was doing was stupid, reckless, reprehensible. In the end it wasn’t an avian intervention but flashing police cruiser lights, handcuffs, twenty-eight days at a treatment facility in the Pennsylvania woods.
Watching the story of the Business Man on that long ago day in my freshman year of college did not make me stop drinking, but still every time I hear “The World I Know,” a part of me is brought back to that day—and for a moment I can see that teenage version of myself, his ignorance and his confusion and his potential. Every time I hear that moment when the final chorus finishes up and the opening theme returns—altered this time from minor to major, the substitution of just one note in the chord progression turning that mournful dirge of the intro into a redemptive and joyful conclusion—I am able to access some small piece of that now unrecognizable person I once was. I am able to look the unguarded emotion in the eyes. I am able to acknowledge the bad and, in doing so, I get to embrace the good.

*

[INT. HAMPTON BEACH CASINO BALLROOM]

When the second chorus arrives, the music stops. Ed Roland ceases his strumming and raises both arms as if in a summoning. The band stands silent around him, not even clapping to keep the beat. The only sound that fills the echoing space of the ballroom is a chant almost religious:

2,000 VOICES (singing in unison)

So I walk up on high / and I step to the edge

To see my world below...

Have to laugh at myself / while the tears roll down

Cuz it’s the world I know / well it’s the world I know...

*

Why does “The World I Know” deserve your vote in this tournament of sadness? Because the best sad songs are not the ones that leave us mired in mournful hues and tones, but those that dip us down deep into our sorrows and our griefs, immerse us in them and make us feel them so fully that they threaten to drown us, only to lift us up, still dripping, into the light. And because in life—real life—there are no last chances to change. There is always still time to make a difference, to alter a course, to carve a new path.
No matter how dark this world we know might become, it is never too late to persist. Never too late to do everything we can to make the world we know a place we’re happy to call home.
Has all kindness gone?
Hope still lingers on…

James Charlesworth (pictured here with his 1983 Nissan Pulsar that he bought for $500, c.1994) grew up eighty miles east of Pittsburgh and lives in Boston. He is the author of a novel, The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill, and four previous essays for March Xness.

I Know You’re Going To Look at Me That Way: susanna donato On Ani DiFranco’s “You Had Time”

Before you even know if it’s sad, “You Had Time” starts with the piano, two full minutes of noodling. It isn’t until 2:07 that the guitar comes in, somehow sacred, organ-like, the snik of DiFranco’s fingers on the strings dotting the mellow, melancholic sound. Maybe it will be OK, you think, but then, twenty-five seconds later, DiFranco’s voice starts softly, asking:

How can I go home
With nothing to say?
I know you’re going to look at me that way

DiFranco didn’t know how to play piano when she recorded the song, “but that wasn’t stopping me at the time,” she told Rolling Stone in 2024. Later versions of the song don’t include the piano, but the song is better, sadder, with the hesitation in those keys. She’s pretending to be a pianist playing around with writing a tune, but in actuality, she just doesn’t know what she’s doing. The pianist is a carefully constructed façade, like the person the lover thinks is coming home.  
“You Had Time” does something essential for a sad song: it’s impossible to hear it without surfacing your own heartbreak. Writing about it, I’ve found myself putting words to why two people I once loved very much decided not to love me anymore. The stumbling keyboard at the beginning provides, as advertised, time to consider the pain of an off-key relationship. And you can do a lot of thinking in two and a half minutes.
The piano intro, and then the guitar, haul us in by the nape of our neck to hear a love song. Then it comes into focus, a role we’ve played on one side or another: the panicky anticipation of heartbreak.
Ani knows the “you” so well that she predicts what they’ll say, but it’s all in her head. We accompany her from the station to the car, the luggage being loaded, the rolled-down window, the jokes about whatever the vehicle is passing, in a shared limbo. Maybe, in real time, she’s backstage, in the shower, on the bus, or sitting on her suitcase on the curb waiting for her ride. Regardless, none of this is real. Not yet.
A narrator should be culpable, and Ani is culpable. She has decided but wishes she hadn’t. We feel the sickening weight of knowing the faithful Labrador of a partner—so happy to see her, so willing to carry the heavy stuff—is going to get kicked, and we’re the ones to kick it. The only question is when.  

To talk about Ani DiFranco is to consider two personas. There’s DiFranco, the celebrated folk singer, noted guitarist (especially as a woman guitarist), and record-label entrepreneur. But her fans usually call her Ani. Ani the bravada legend with, as Jonathan Van Meter put it in his August 1997 Spin cover story, “an essential brattiness that’s the key to her appeal.” Ani the stand-in for our best friend or ourselves, brave, a bit cocky, impassioned. Ani the autobiographical truth-teller, the person we imagine we know, who told an interviewer in 1995, “There is just nothing that is too private or too personal, [that’s] just an excuse that people use for not talking about the difficult shit.”⁠
“You Had Time” is the third-to-last song on DiFranco’s fifth album, Out of Range, released in March 1994, when she was twenty-three and I was twenty-one. I only saw her play live once, November of that same year, at the Mercury Café in Denver, a hippie coffeehouse that served heavy vegetarian food and maxed out at 500 attendees in its dancehall that also hosted jazz bands and swing dance nights. She laughed a lot. I don’t remember whether she played “You Had Time,” although reviews of other 1994 gigs laud her live renditions of the song as “vulnerable,” a “lovely ballad,” “moving,” “somber.” At that time, she was playing around 120 shows a year, many at colleges: Mount Holyoke, University of Wisconsin, Virginia Tech, Duke, Evergreen State. The next year, when she returned to Denver, she played the opulent, 1,900-seat art deco Paramount Theatre—no more hippie attics for her.
Surely I’d heard of DiFranco when she was launching her career in New York City in the early 1990s, where I was attending Barnard College. The Barnard Bulletin reports that she performed on campus sometime in 1990 and again at Columbia’s Postcrypt Coffeehouse in 1991, in the same tiny room beneath St. Paul’s Chapel where my writing group met every week or so over bottles of purloined wine. 

In 1994, though, I was back in Denver, an Ivy League dropout supporting myself as a receptionist and listening thirstily to the women artists who were becoming more prominent on the edgier side of popular music, Ani but also Liz Phair and PJ Harvey. Ani had a hard edge, a ferocity I could relate to. We were both from unhappy families. We both came from steel towns, she from Buffalo, New York, and I from Pueblo, Colorado. We both were on our own early: she became an emancipated minor at fifteen, while I left Barnard at nineteen to work my way through my last two years of college at an uncool outpost of a state school, the first among my friends to fly without a net. She was a girl who knew what she didn’t want. I was a girl hoping someone would want me. 

You are a china shop
And I am a bull
You are really good food
And I am full

When I hear “You Had Time,” it summons the two most powerful relationships in my life up to the time I first heard it, in 1994. My best friend, whom I’ll call Annette, and C., whom I’ll call my college boyfriend, a term that simplifies and understates (or is it overstates?) the situation between us.
C. and I met in high school, then again at Columbia. An odd array of synchronicities bound us together with an understanding deeper than words, from our parents’ marrying on the exact same day to being fish out of water at a fancy college, both from humble backgrounds. I wanted to believe I possessed enough “inner brattiness” to not be completely transparent. But, mesmerized, I spent two years waiting to see if he would decide I was what he wanted while he came and went, dropping in from out of town or from another relationship. This sounds like I could see it objectively at the time, which is not true. I was a wagging tail, perpetually awaiting his return. I could catch his scent from miles away. I was young enough to believe I could love him so hard he would stop being confused about why he almost loved me back.
When Out of Range arrived, I was sharing an apartment with Annette. After meeting in seventh-grade homeroom, she and I were inseparable through middle school, high school, and straight into our twenties. We drank our first illicit beers together, smoked a zillion clove cigarettes, wore men’s white V-neck Ts and the same oversized, broken-in 501s that Ani is wearing on the cover of her next album. After I dropped out of Barnard, Annette wound up following me back to Denver from her own college. After work and evening classes, we’d eat dinner on my futon while watching Northern Exposure. We roadtripped to Carhenge and the Grand Canyon and to pick peaches, slept back-to-back like puppies, laughed until we got hiccups, cried until we laughed. Throughout our friendship, I wrote off Annette’s adolescent aggressions: telling a mutual friend I was a bitch; sharing secrets with others, knowing the information—and my exclusion from it—would get back to me; dismissing my loyalty when I cut off a mutual friend who called Annette a vile nickname of her own creation. Each betrayal devastated me, but I didn’t know there could exist a kind of love that allowed me to be an equal. I’d been conditioned to understand connection as ultimatum: I would take whatever love was offered, and I would like it.

Also, the drama of love can be deliciously painful when you’re young. In 1993, leaving New York again after visiting C. for a few days, I wept most of the way across the country, leaning against the airplane window. I felt more real for our separation’s torment.
Our relationship lasted six more months. Always, there was tenderness between us, private jokes and swapped mix tapes and a shared sense of beauty; we spoke for hours about art and music, books and films, the way we saw the world. But we were 1,600 miles apart. Video calls were still science fiction, texting didn’t exist, and email wasn’t yet commonplace, so the last year of our relationship was often telephonic (with long-distance costing at least 16 cents a minute, a penny less than I earned) or epistolary. At some point, my ultrasonic hearing suggested that his off and on was leaning off again. Because I was more articulate on paper, where I had time to think, I wrote him a letter explaining that I could no longer bear the uncertain back-and-forth amid the chaos of our burgeoning adult lives. Too chicken to call it off—well, I didn’t want to call it off—I ended with, “The ball is in your court.”
I dreamed that he wrote back, “How would I answer a letter like that?” In reality, he never responded at all. At the time, I thought this meant he was unconcerned about things ending, perhaps relieved to be rid of me, and perhaps he was. I struggled to believe I was worth more than I was getting. Anyway, our situation was impossible. He was working toward building a career in another country, where he was born; we’d talked around that eventuality but never found words to address how it might work between us. I wanted marriage and kids in my life someday and still felt the burn of the time he’d said, “I know what marriage means: no more fun.” In the end, the reverberation of his silence amounted to an agreement. The ball was in his court, but its rebounds dribbled away; it rolled into a corner; dead leaves clotted around it. How can I go home with nothing to say? One option is simply not to return. From afar, you can’t hear the other person’s silence. You can tell yourself they understand. You can convince yourself everything is fine. Or so I imagine.

You’ll say,
Did they love you or what?
I’ll say,
They love what I do
The only one who really loves me is you.

After a February 1994 show at Wetlands, a small, psychedelic venue near the Holland Tunnel, Ani was interviewed by Harold Channer for his TV show on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network. It’s surreal to see her in the faded-out video, against the graffiti-muraled walls where, while attending Barnard, I’d seen acts like the Dead Milkmen and River Phoenix’s band Aleka’s Attic.
The week she played was six weeks after I wrote to C. Back in Denver, I knew nothing about her performance. According to my journal, I was having a week that sounds like a movie montage of being a Gen Xer in 1994: I saw Reality Bites. I heard Beck’s song “Loser” for the first time. I went to a Mardi Gras party where we played spin the bottle, and I danced with a friend in his kitchen, hydroplaning on the wet tile floor, laughing so hard I thought I might asphyxiate; the next day, I seemed to have pulled something in my elbow. Some musician friends took me to see the acid jazz guitarist Ronny Jordan, and when I came home, I found one of C.’s hairs in my blanket. Through it all, I was trying to convince myself I would not die if I never heard from C. I was missing C., and trying to resist missing him, but also delighting in it.
Ani felt like me, passionate and interested, able to experience the missing and the pain and the delight in the pain, curious about what came next, even if she was braver than I. She was the inverse of a slacker, with the earnestness of a folkie rather than the sardonic, cynical aesthetic that characterized the emerging Gen X culture. In the interview, between politely waiting out Channer’s mansplaining, Ani expanded on the idea of telling her story “as a form of political work …. I think that there’s a lot of people out there who feel that their story—and rightly so—that their stories are not being told on TV or, you know, in history books, who feel that their voices aren’t included.”

Watching back this interview and her performance reminds me that it cannot be overstated how important Ani was to me and many of us girls. She felt like a defender and a megaphone. Fifteen years before #MeToo, she validated that we weren’t crazy, that a lot of men were, frankly, bad. She put voice to our suspicion that there is no winning while being a woman, like the time my parents scolded me for looking like “a tramp” when I was eleven years old (the same age as the girl in “Letter to a John,” another song on Out of Range), because I’d purchased a cropped top and dared to think it looked cute on my pubescent body, trying to be the girl the world wanted me to be. Songs about having been abused, about an abortion, about hitching a ride with a friend who has your back—we hadn’t really heard that, let alone seen someone our age turn down a record deal, launch her own label, and release a song about leaving a period bloodstain on the music execs’ fancy chair. All while using fake nails, not for beauty but as taped-on claws, enabling the distinct, percussive playing that has even spawned an instructional article in Guitar Player about how to mimic her sound.
Listening anew, I hear the attitude that Van Meter called brattiness, and I marvel at how wise, and careless, a twenty-three-year-old can be. My journal harbors my realization that I would no longer be responsible for bolstering C.’s self-esteem, as well as my encounter with a guy at my favorite coffee shop who interrupted my writing to ask what I was writing and offer to read it, then, when I said no, told me I would never get anywhere with an attitude like that. I was trying to convince myself I could live without focusing on a man while still being open to loving someone, evaluating a carousel of boys at a pace that shocked friends accustomed to my reserve and intense loyalty. In hindsight, I wanted not to care because look where caring had got me at an age, a time, so full of not-caring. All this makes “You Had Time” sadder still, because it’s about someone who bothers to know and love you.
Just as intensely as with C., I remember the last beats of my friendship with Annette, a few years later, when we were twenty-five. There was an evening when we ripped off pieces of a fresh-baked loaf of bread. I smeared mine with butter and felt somehow affronted that she opted to eat hers bare. Around that time, she called late one night, sobbing that her seven-year relationship had ended. The news meant the end of an era for me, too. Through those seven years, Annette and I, her boyfriend, and a couple of other friends had knitted tightly together. I’d imagined our friendships could last a lifetime, weaving in other partners, children, pets, life. The breakup killed that dream, a grief I did not let myself acknowledge as I instinctively leapt to comfort Annette. In the next days and weeks, I left message after message on her machine. Weeks passed. Months. She never called back, never at all. That spring, when I ran into her at an event, she glanced at me and then looked away, like I was a stranger.
What had I done to end thirteen years of friendship in a heartbeat? Was I too leashed, in her mind, to memories of her ex? Had I been too impassioned in my readiness to defend her? Looking back, I recognize that I was prone to loving people who never gave themselves completely. People like the Ani of this song, who’ll tell you how wonderful you are while dumping you. At the song’s start, I’m allied with Ani, sympathetic to her ambivalence. But partway through, I feel for the oblivious waiting lover, that idiot. Why can’t you see what’s happening, you chump? They’re beside me at the bar where I got drunk one night, deep in my grief over Annette’s disappearance: my elbows on the elbow-worn spots where the finish had rubbed off, my forehead on the old wood, sobbing while a girl I barely knew rubbed my back. 

What did you do out there?
And what did you decide?
You said you needed time
And you had time 

In “You Had Time,” the narrator has gone blank. Pre-emptive grief creates a void, and if DiFranco understands one thing, it’s how to manipulate voids. She explains in her memoir No Walls and the Recurring Dream, “An acoustic guitar’s ability to make sound and silence sit right next to each other is at the core of its power. As with any rhythm instrument, the spaces are essential.”⁠
The space of time. The space between knowing and not knowing how to play the piano. The space of your long future unfurling after you break someone’s heart. The space after I dropped the letter to C. in a mailbox and before I deeply understood that he wouldn’t write back, that we’d never talk again, that I would fall in love with someone else, a different love growing its own strong roots around the lacuna of that heartbreak.
Again, for all the things the “you” in this song tells Ani, they never actually get a chance to speak—it’s all a projection. Beautiful, poignant, even real. But how does the “you” experience this episode? The more I think about it, the uneasier I feel. What imagined voice narrated my absence from C.’s or Annette’s lives? How much—or how little—does that construction align with who I really am?

Nick Hornby writes that “You Had Time” is “perhaps the gentlest and most generous-spirited breakup song I know.” Of the china shop and very good food, he asks, “How many of us wouldn’t have felt better about being dumped if someone said that to us?” Perhaps he’s right.
A week before I got married, a mutual friend happened to run into C. in New York and told him the news. She reported that he was so shocked, his hands were shaking when they exchanged numbers to “catch up soon.” To my surprise, I realized he might have actually loved me. A gratifying insight, years too late. All along, I’d thought I was the Labrador, but maybe we both were.
Later still, one evening in my early thirties, I popped into the grocery store for a pint of ice cream and ran into Annette and her husband. Warily, we said hello; we made plans to meet. Over the next five years, we regained some of our closeness: having dinner, spending New Year’s Eve together with our families, thrift-shopping like the old days but this time for maternity clothes when she was newly pregnant with her second child and I felt sure I’d soon conceive mine. I told her, tentatively, how painful our split had been. True to form, she didn’t really have an explanation for dematerializing the way she had. I didn’t want to push; for me, our reunion felt like fitting a lost rib back into place, too fragile to dislodge. When I look back at our emails from that time, my voice sounds stiff, a stenosis lingering where the fracture had occurred. Once, I asked about our old letters, hoping to draw on them for the memoir I was writing. She told me she’d thrown them into the Burning Man pyre. It felt perversely good to know I had mattered enough to require purging. After a few years, she fizzled into silence again. I can’t imagine we’ll ever reconnect; ghosts shouldn’t be chased more than once.
Listening so intently to “You Had Time” lifts the veil between the me I’ve become—comfortable or at least resigned to people vanishing from my life—and the me who loved so hard, I could hear voices that weren’t even speaking. The young me thought Ani was unfair. Now, I have more insight into how C. or Annette may have struggled with what to do about me. I loved ferociously, but I demanded much of two young people trying to feel their own way into the world. Maybe they didn’t want to bear my flawed love along as they peered through the dark, or maybe they were not strong enough. For me, the outcome was the same. The Ani of the song relegates her partner to being a voice from beyond before their relationship is even over. Now, I credit her for knowing her own mind, and I see a sort of compassion there. I hope she had the courage to speak, but if not, I hope the song fulfilled its purpose; I hope that, one day, her partner could hear how much she loved them.
Looking back into my own shadows, maybe Hornby’s assessment is right. My pain might have been lessened if I’d known that C. and Annette left me, not because they did not love me, but despite it. After all, having someone see all you are and still not want you is devastating. But not wanting someone and not loving them are two different things.  

Susanna Donato’s work has appeared in the anthology A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays (University of Nebraska, 2021), Electric Literature, Redivider, Entropy, Proximity, and elsewhere. She is completing a memoir, The Only Girl in the Record Store, about growing up as a music-obsessed, Gothy, redheaded preacher’s kid.