I know "9 to 5" gets stuck in your head on Labor Day too, right? Not just me?

Let me make it even more unnecessarily complicated. I get two versions. The first - and the more appropriate response given we just lost her - is Dolly in the movie, complete with all the off-the-hinges (and garage door hinges) chaos. Still such a great flick. The second is a deep cut from the backpacker rap era: Aesop Rock reprising it, of all things, on Labor Days - making a lot of us feel very seen and somewhat comforted in our principled financial struggles.

They're two layers of American suffering. I won't equate them, but they're human in the best and worst ways. Glass ceilings are as real as feeling like your true self and authentic passion has to live in a glass case you can't touch. In both cases, rent is due and you just have to get on with life.

Dolly understood both. So did Aesop. And on this holiday, the timelessness of each is getting to me, like every year, so it seems.

But this particular Labor Day, pouring my coffee, my head is taking a step in another direction - back when I was listening to more Aesop Rock, working in bands and studios and kitchens and doing school, and then that crazy Dolly bluegrass album came out. My whole life timeline got tripped out by it. I'll get to why, but we have to jump from the early 2000s to the mid-90s first.

One of the first shows I saw - without parents or adult supervision, just me and a buddy - was Collective Soul. Rust opened. The internet tells me it was 1996. It also says we paid $15 to get in. We were surrounded by college kids. My buddy smoked a cigarette in line and told me it would keep him warm. I said it would also help him get cancer. And probably not college girls. He agreed on the college girls part.

It was a great night. I remember standing there watching the stage and thinking: I want that. Not that specifically. But something like it. Somehow.

Now let's jump back to the 2000s. Collective Soul is still in your head, right? Good. Keep it there.

I'm in Hartford, working at a studio that does a lot of work with the local hard rock radio station, where we help them record acoustic sessions with whatever national act is passing through our market. My boss asked me to cover a session that fell on my 23rd birthday. I started to feel weird about it until he told me who it was. 23 - that was the year of the Jordan. Stuff was really going to lock in. I could feel the gears turning.

Collective Soul. Yeah, I'll do it.

I went in that day feeling like the universe was sending me a message. They played their new stuff, it was a radio spot on an album promotion tour, “Counting the Days” still exists online from that set, and for sake of the small studio audience in a pre-Tiny Desk world, they also did "Shine," and some of the other songs we all know. Come on let your light shine down.

But "Shine" acoustic hit different by then, because before I even knew I was doing this session - like a few years prior - I was addicted to playing the (probably illegally downloaded, sorry!) Dolly Parton bluegrass cover of it. I had some hippyish guitar friends who would send me Nickel Creek stuff, and I've always had a soft spot for Dolly in general - holding her on that Hank Sr. pedestal level in my mind. Somebody thought I'd love that record and they were not wrong.

Sitting in the control room, just turning 23, watching these guys do it acoustic and clean and fine, all I could think was: I want to talk to them about the Dolly version. I wondered how they felt about what she did with their song - making it ancient, old as the hills and all that, with them, a full turn older than the first time I’d seen them do the song live. Dolly’s angle felt like a testament to their songwriting, or at least it was in my mind, and I was sure they felt it too.

I had a few minutes in teardown to talk to the band. After the normal "great job" and in the limited space where they'll at least take a sentence from yet another person - remember, this was for radio, with a small in-studio group of fans - I got to tell them how they were one of my first shows, and this was my birthday, and kind of a cool thing to have happen for me personally. They smiled and said some nice things, in their mature rock star ways. Then I added: so that Dolly cover of "Shine" though. And they were like, we love it, it's so great. And that was the end of our conversation.

Into the personal life history books it went. I don't think of it much, but with Dolly's passing and Labor Day and this weird linking of events, I'm thinking about it now.

I'm turning 45, on this day, in literally a few months. 23 feels forever ago, and even if 90s fashion is making a comeback - I don’t have any interest in a DeLorean ride. I look around the world and - the glass is still everywhere, just in slightly different places. And the passion projects - I talk to so many people struggling to figure out how to make it work, and also more and more people who have defiantly figured out ways to do it anyway, me included - both sides of that are a part of it, too.

But it’s just glass. The glass is there because somebody put it there. Which means it’s also there for the breaking. And - I hadn't thought of this before - you know what goes through glass without breaking it? Light. There you go, Collective Soul, you're all the way in this now too. Feels like a more mature truth. Feels like an age-updated lesson. Feels like Dolly knew it and saw it that clearly before any of us, as usual, too.

It’s a human truth. You don’t have to break things you can also transcend. Just take the right form about it. Sometimes that means you are the one to transform, not the obstacle. That’s what I’m thinking about today, on this work-free holiday.

RIP Dolly. Ace Rizzle - keep making new music with that indie spirit. Future really is amazing. And Collective Soul, wherever you are, thank you.

Join me in listening to Dolly covering "Shine" today. She's shining down on us. I know it.