A classmate handed me a cassette in high school. No real explanation — just, here, listen to this. The band was Rush. The song that stuck was Subdivisions.

I didn’t know anything about Rush at the time. What I knew was that the lyrics described something I was already living but hadn’t found words for. The outsider feeling. The pressure to fit into a shape that wasn’t yours. Neil Peart wrote it plainly — nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone — and somehow that made it easier to carry.

The music matched. There’s a precision to Subdivisions that’s almost uncomfortable, all those locked-in synths and rhythms moving like clockwork. It suited the subject. A song about conformity played with mechanical exactness. I don’t know if I understood that connection at the time, but I felt it.