I’m entering my second week of songs that have personal meaning for me — a quality that is extremely rare in the music I listen to. Tellingly, many of these songs aren’t particular favorites of mine… the personal connection clearly isn’t that important when it comes to my enjoyment and appreciation of good music.

Last week’s songs all focused on the life cycle of a relationship… from adolescent romance through marriage, kids and ultimately death. This week’s songs are less unified in theme but they do seem to share a certain melancholy (surprise!) quality and most of them deal with some combination of nostalgia and regret.

Josh Rouse’s ‘Middle School Frown’ is a bittersweet track tucked away in the middle of his excellent album Nashville.

It deals with the remorse he feels for the way he and his friends treated a young outsider during middle school. Rouse doesn’t paint the girl as a victim — on the contrary, she gets the better of her detractors by rising above their taunts. It is Rouse who ends up deeply ashamed by the events.

I don’t have any specific recollections of being on either end of this common middle-school scenario, but it still feels very familiar. It’s so much easier to join the crowd rather than the person who sits outside the crowd. We should all hope to have the strength to fight that urge at some point in our lives, even if we couldn’t manage it in middle school.