The album has a wide variety of songs; from upbeat and playful to melancholy, from disco to rock and roll there was certainly enough variety on the tracklist to keep me from getting bored, but also to reflect how I was feeling at the time.
When I first heard “Tough to Be a Dreamer” I knew it was one of those songs. The ones that express your feelings more perfectly than you could ever hope to do yourself. The type of song that understands you. The defeated, apathetic tone of the lyrics really spoke to me, and that allowed the more positive aspects of the song to break through to me as well. A short time later, I was trying out new things again, and though I was still certainly disappointed, I was at least on the road to finding something I cared about enough to want a career in. Funnily enough, I had that very realisation while listening to this track.
As I was feeling less trepidation about my future, my favourite tracks shifted to the more upbeat “Gene Kelly” and “The World’s Yours”. While certainly not as joyous as some of the other songs on the album, they were a lot more hopeful, and bore themes of growing up and pursuing your dreams. They helped highlight, I think, the fact that the world, ultimately, was not going to kindly wait while I mourned the loss of just one career path. While “Tough to Be a Dreamer” helped nudge me towards other opportunities, these two tracks got me to start taking said opportunities seriously.
At this point, I had regained a lot of my motivation, the alternatives that I had tentatively explored at first now seemed like viable options. I certainly wasn’t glad I’d been locked out of my ambitions in such a way, but the future seemed a lot brighter. As a result, I tended to listen to the bold and cheerful “Hey I Want You” and “Be a Freak”. I wouldn’t be able to say these songs had much of an impact on my journey (although “Be a Freak” was quite affirmational in its way) as I had already reached the end. At this point, the fantastic music of this album was just there to sit with me as I enjoyed the view that I had worked so hard to reach. Still, what’s a battle without a little post-victory celebration?