Pick a song from an artist or band that’s had the biggest impact on your life.

This song is representative of a very specific and difficult time in my and my twin brother's life, when we were living in a severely abusive household, doing our best to support each other and trying get out of there together. When we were 16, we were removed from our dad's place by CPS. We ended up by ourselves in a shitty apartment where we did our best to stay afloat until we graduated high school. I was horribly depressed at the time; sometimes I didn't know if I wanted to keep trying. But I was determined to be there for my brother, and I was the only one who could do it.

This song is all about Gerard Way's struggle to stay sober after becoming a father. He knows he's heading for a spiral, but instead of resigning to his rapidly-worsening mental health, he instead asks his brother to help him find the strength to keep moving. This sentiment inspired teenage-me to rely on my brother when I couldn't handle life by myself, and to be strong for him when he needed the same. It is by far the song with the most personal meaning to the both of us, even if that sometimes makes it hard to listen to.

Did you sing along to anything today? Describe the moment.

I listen to a random CD from my collection every day while I'm showering, and today it happened to be Take This to Your Grave. TTtYG is hard not to sing along to in general, but this track is especially fun if you try to match Patrick's flourishes with the repetitions of "woah, can't do it by myself".

Share a song that changed your perspective on music.

Sometimes the songs that shake our world up aren't the masterpieces, but rather a song that came around at the right place at the right time. This was the first track I heard by Blink-182 that really spoke to me, and I heard it for the first time over the loudspeaker at a Hot Topic when I was in middle school, circa 2016. It became the gateway for me to delve deep into their older music and inspired a love of skate-punk that never went away. I bought their CDs and looped the song on my shitty radio. I even coded the song to play on my personal website for a while. So, although it's not a classic or anything like that, it changed the way I related to music when I was at an impressionable age. I wouldn't change that for anything.