Lil Uzi Vert's "That Way" and the first time it made me cry

I remember exactly where I was the first time I heard “That Way” in 2020. I wasn’t expecting to cry. I don’t think anyone expects to cry to a song built on a Backstreet Boys sample. But that opening, those choir-like vocals repeating over and over, felt genuinely heavenly to me. Like something opening up instead of just a beat dropping.

Then the verses hit and it wasn’t just the sound anymore, it was what they were saying.

There’s a part where they talk about not wanting to go out sad, not wanting to go out bad, wanting to go out on their own terms, because they’ve got a team behind them making sure they don’t end up in last place. I didn’t have that. Not really. And hearing someone describe it so plainly made me want it so badly. A team. People who make sure you don’t fall to the bottom. I don’t think I’d ever put a name to that want before that song did it for me.

There’s another line where they brush off whoever’s talking about them because their world revolves around one person, everyone knows it. That one hit differently. It described exactly how I saw someone I loved at the time. Like nothing else mattered as much as they did.

And then there’s the line about people laughing at them for being emo. I was at the tail end of primary school or just starting high school when I heard this, and I’d already been called emo more times than I could count. Laughed at for being sensitive, for looking a certain way, for feeling things too visibly. Hearing it said out loud like that, almost thrown away in the middle of a verse, made me feel less alone in it. Like it wasn’t just me.

I still felt like an alien most days back then. I think I’m not the only one, honestly. That song didn’t fix that. But it was one of the first times something made me feel like being sensitive, being “too much,” wasn’t something to be ashamed of. It was just something to survive with the right people around you.

That’s still the reason it gets me every time.