I’ve always believed there was a certain sound you’d hear when you love someone. At first I thought it was Nico’s “These Days” because of The Royal Tenenbaums. And then I thought it was Jens Lekman’s “A Higher Power” because of the strings. And then, when Night Falls Over Kortedala came out in the November of that year, I realized it was “Your Arms Around Me.”

The first girl I loved didn’t love me back. Her name was April. If these things can be anyone’s fault, it wasn’t hers. And it wasn’t mine either, even though I loved her with the knowledge she loved someone else..

She planned a surprise birthday party for me when I turned 21. On a bad night she came into the office when she didn’t have to and brought me brownies. On another, she thanked me for being me. She called my story on Florida wildfires “hot.” I labeled her U-Haul story “moving.” She teased me about calling The Flaming Lips show a life-changing experience. Birds choked on the paper confetti she hypothesized.

We first hung out during a birthday party for one of our coworkers. The night before, she asked me if I planned on going  out. I said something non-committal. She had planned on going but was concerned about the fact that she didn’t drink.

“Do you want to go and not drink together?”

She said yes.

Over the winter break a female friend asked me about something Judd Apatow said in his commentary for Funny People. “This is the kind of thing I would do, I’d meet a woman, not know her very well,” Judd said, “and then . . . in my head I’m trying to figure out where everyone is sitting in the wedding party.”

“Do guys really thing like that?” my friend asked.

I said yes.

There is a certain type of guy that always commits before he ever has to. He will fall in love with a girl before ever being physically intimate with her. He ceaselessly believes in the transformative power of love and will hold onto it for as long as he can. He will change himself for a girl without ever being asked to.

I felt the urge to stop drinking because April didn’t. I apologized for when I did even though she explicitly told me to do what I wanted to. I eased up on my music snobbery. I was willing to listen to bands I knew I disliked just because she did like them. I even liked T.A.t.u. But this had nothing to do with lying. At the time T.A.t.u honestly sounded pretty good to me because it was something April liked. And at the time the idea of getting drunk seemed absolutely repulsive because it was something April didn’t like.

The summer of 2007 was the summer of Swedes more or less. I loved Swedish indie pop singers (Jens Lekman), Swedish furniture (IKEA), a half Swedish girl (April), and Swedish balls of ground beef (meatballs).

I have a strict rule that on my first listen of an album or compilation that I cannot repeat a track until I’ve listened to the album in it’s entirety once. I broke it when I got to Jens’ “Someone to Share My Life With.” And then I broke it again. And again. And one more time. “I don’t want a girl to go down on her knees. I just want someone to share my life with,”Jens baritoned. That night I tried to compose an email to Jens explaining why this song meant so much to me. Why I simply couldn’t get past it. How this song stood in defiance of all the stereotypes of rock and roll and how it articulated what I’ve felt for 2 decades. I deleted it before I ever sent it.

The night I knew I loved April was shortly after the night we did not drink together at our friend’s birthday party. I brought over my guitar and she brought out her violin. She harmonized with my clumsy chords effortlessly.

And then she played the “Throne Room Theme” from Star Wars.

I kicked my feet into the air and couldn’t stop smiling. She giggled and didn’t understand why I did it. I didn’t either. I just did it. The night would last until our eyes became red when April told me to call her when I got home. I told her it was 3 a.m. ”Do you still want me to call?” She looked at me flatly.

She said yes.

We hugged goodbye and I went home with Jens Lekman’s “A Higher Power” playing in my head.^†

As 2007 came to its end and my eventual departure from Gainesville became immediate, I decided to tell April about how I felt. Somewhere in my brain I thought it would be brilliant to give her a homemade Flaming Lips concert in my apartment since she would never go to one. I bought some gift bag paper linings to work as the confetti, a Santa hat and flashlight and a live DVD to fill in the rest of the gaps. I set it to “Do You Realize??” I rained paper, danced spastically and briefly played a verse on guitar before plopping down next to her.

She collected bundles of the red paper strings covering the carpet and began to clean. I insisted she didn’t have to. She took a volleyball-sized clump and dropped it in her lap. One of us made a vulgar joke. I could feel my lungs in sync with my heartbeat. My numbed fingers clasped the brass door handle and I let her leave first.

As I walked her to her car I told her. I can only really remember what my shoes looked like.

Her empathetic eyes opened up, and I heard weak voice say “I’m sorry.”

She put her arms around me.

1. † None of the literal events in the song transpired but the sentiment was there.

I started hating Pitchfork when I was 14. I found a negative review of Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity and as a result I decided I would have everything this publication ever liked. Kid A, a 10.0? Fucking glorified cable testing, even though I had only heard “National Anthem.” . . . And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead? What a dumb pretentious name that’s impossible to put into a manageable sentence.

Up until the sophomore year of my college career, I didn’t know anyone who was even aware of the P4K, a common abbreviation for the site. The girl I met had gone to the inaugural festival held by the online news outlet. She described a litany of bands I had heard of but never heard and the numerous amount of hipsters, which I had never seen. “Is there anything more trite than the electric guitar?” was the overheard phrase that justified my hatred. Her shared animosity at this likely tight pants wearing, wolf shirt donned hipster proved to me that I could trust her.

We shared war stories of going to the same stand up and live shows despite never meeting each other. We hated the same opening bands and loved the same headlining act. My vitriolic hatred for anything in “Best New Music” began to whither. I would accept P4K recommended bands as long as they came with a personal voucher. If someone in real life could love a band without actually referring to a three digit numerical score, I could give them a fair shot.

At the end of 2005, she made me a mixtape in the form of a CD. Both of us were aware of the rules of mixtaping without ever talking about them. But there it was. Both “Rebellion (Lies)” and “Haiti” were by Arcade Fire.

In 2006 I bought Funeral and listened to it incessantly. It followed me to my car, to my stereo and would often play gently in the background if I had any company. I didn’t even listen to the lyrics. Hell, I would never fully understand “Wake Up” until it appeared in the Where the Wild Things Are trailer.

I didn’t know who I could trust. But now, now that I had a mixtape to guide me on which albums to buy, it became easier. I now knew someone who could help me. More importantly, it was someone who didn’t give Clarity a review describing it as the emoest album ever.

The mixtapes we exchanged would be vital in me discovering new music. If she liked something it was a pretty safe bet I’d like it. But in hindsight, all my attempts to not let my musical tastes be shaped by the hegemonic web site of indie subculture, I was still falling victim to P4K. Instead of blindly listening to anything listed in Best New Music, I’d turn a deaf ear to anything that P4K would praise. And now that I’m older, I can see it was all a big lie.

I assume there were tons of reasons to hate Interpol’s Our Love To Admire. Generally panned by critics Our Love to Admire seemed to mark a once promising band’s decent into mediocrity. I agreed for entirely different reasons. From the track listing I knew I would hate this album. “No I in Threesome” doesn’t sound like the band I fell in love with my freshman year of college. Well maybe it does. But it doesn’t sound like it should be from the same suited quartet that wrote “NYC.”

In the summer of 2004, I couldn’t wait to leave Zephyrhills. I applied to colleges with the specific intent of leaving the Tampa Bay Area and never returning. I wanted a fresh start. I wanted to recreate myself in a new found image. I wanted to be completely different. In high school I was generally whiny and pretty weird. I don’t think these things lend themselves well to being well liked or even getting a girl to find me mildly attractive. As a result I knew moving to Gainesville, where I knew no one, would mean I could start over.

But I forgot. I knew no one.

Ostensibly the purpose of the dorms is that you shouldn’t feel lonely in a new city. I inhabited the same 192 square feet with two other people. Sort of. One of my roommates had a girlfriend at the time. Not surprisingly he spent most of his time with her, probably having sex considering the first time I met her she wore a shirt that advocated supporting local music by having intercourse with local artists. The other roommate ostensibly was also having sex. Although one can never be sure, but he slept in the bunk above me and I would awake to skinny girl pleas “I’ve got to go to class, sorry” or “Do you want to watch Win a Date With Tad Hamilton again?” The tiny, most likely blond, body would spill onto the floor and disappear. Needless to say, I couldn’t really connect with the guy who slept in the bed 20 inches above me.

But I wasn’t without social interaction. On my first day in the dorms I met the people who would become my friends for most of my college career. They were warm and welcoming, but somehow I still did not feel warmly welcomed. Shyness overtook me and I couldn’t bring myself to actually ask these people to hang out even though we were literally hanging out (on the third floor ledge). In my growing depression over my lack of social interaction I found solace in the final verse of NYC “It’s up to me now, turn on the bright lights.”

Despite my high school convictions, I was tired of all these lonely nights and I was tired of training myself not to care. It did bother me that I didn’t feel like I had immediate friends. It did bother me that I ate most lunches alone. So when my family came to see me in Gainesville I started crying uncontrollably. It was too much, in that one moment when I saw my sister and father’s face smile at me I lost it. It all flooded into my brain: I was lonely and it did effect me.

And that was the problem with a song like “No I in Threesome.” It felt as though Interpol was no longer writing anthems for me, but for the guy in the top bunk. But maybe it isn’t that Paul Banks in his baritone, abandoned me. Maybe he just changed more than I could.

The recent influx of work has forced me to delay 2004 until next Monday. See you then.

But still I woke up early. And sprawled on CNN’s web site was “Clash star Joe Strummer dies.” The rumors were true. The man I had idolized for years was gone. The man my sister and I planned to fly to England for was gone. The man who formed my political beliefs was gone.

His personality seemed perfect to me. He was punk rock and he was me. The Clash railed against groups that bragged about their number of groupies. In A Riot of Our Own Joe told roadie, Johnny Green, “I can’t figure out why people have to pamper beautiful models, just for a shag, or to impress people. The end result is just superficial. Why do people do that?” It was through Joe’s magnetic personality I loved The Clash and their politics.

But The Clash were more than a way to understand the politics of the 70s and 80s. It was through the ringing chords of London Calling that I would learn about Elvis Costello & the Attractions and The Specials.

As the frenetic notes of Ted Leo & the Pharmacists’ “Where have all the Rude Boys Gone?” rang through my TV, I heard references I knew. In Ted’s mourning of the two tone beat on Late Night With Conan O’Brien I felt like I was in on an inside joke. I knew he was talking about The Specials.

When I got to Hearts of Oak’s track 4, “The High Party,” it made me uncomfortable. All I could hear were the words “too drunk to turn the lights off” and I felt like it didn’t apply to me. But it did.

When I was in high school I had made the conscious decision not to drink. I felt as though it was a forced rush to adulthood. I embraced innocence. I couldn’t understand the appeal of getting drunk or how anyone in high school had problems big enough where drinking was the answer. And beer tasted like shit.

The myriad of pleas for me to drink because I’d be “hilarious” only made me more passionate. I became militantly anti-drinking, disappointed in my friends and crushes who did drink. I forced those closest to me to be part of my anti-drinking movement without ever telling them. And as they would tell me they had started drinking I would feel betrayed. They had lost the way.

And so had I.

It was in my self-imposed struggle I realized what “The High Party” meant. It was a condemnation of being ignorant. It was a condemnation of wasting your time getting drunk when you could be doing something more useful. It was The Clash.

As my sister flipped through an issue of Jane, she handed me the magazine, pointing at Ted Leo’s picture. It was a brief column of indie rockers that were at one point straight edge. Ted facetiously described how he had gone straight edge after drinking too much at the age of 15.

Inspired by this, I emailed Ted Leo asking him if he was still straight edge. A couple days later I received a lengthy response from Ted describing his days of being straight edge. While the email is lost in the annals of an Outlook Express .dbx file, I still remember his decision not to drink being part of his protest of the “hypercapitalism” of the beer industry. However, he stated he was no longer straight edge, but he was glad to remember that time. At the end he thanked me for bringing it up.

And “The High Party” meant the same to me. I interviewed Ted Leo in 2005. I had told him that I thought Hearts of Oak was on the same level as London Calling. He timorously accepted the compliment. But still, I thought of Ted Leo as the next Joe Strummer.

I started listening to Paul Westerberg because of the recommendation of The Get Up Kids’ frontman Matt Pryor. Vagrant Records, who put out the album, had a web page of rotating artists espousing the virtues of Paul Westerberg’s songwriting. That summer I went with my parents to Best Buy to pick up Paul Westerberg’s Stereo and The Replacements’ All for Nothing.

Opening up Stereo, I was immediately fascinated by the note Westerberg had attached. The album, he said, was recorded in his basement and was left intact, warts and all. Includes the tape running out during “Dirt to Mud.” I loved the concept because it reminded me of the way The Clash had recorded Sandinista!

Nothing To No One

I ended up loving the music too for its mid-tempo songs and downtrodden ballads. “There’s a world in between being everything to everyone and being nothing to no one,” Westerberg howled in his basement. Westerberg sang alone, without a drummer or bass player to fill the silence.

I had friends in high school. But I never really hung out with them after school. I ate lunch with them so I never had to eat alone, but otherwise I spent most of my friday nights at home watching TV and listening to records. My friends tried though. They would invite me out to movies and parties but I always declined.

I still didn’t feel comfortable around them and feared what would happen when they met my parents. I let one of my friends meet my family. The next day at the lunch room my mother’s accent had become a point of discussion and imitation. Withholding the urge to cry and punch someone, I decided it would be best if my parents never met any of my friends. It was easier to engage in communication where the other person never listened.

Got You Down

But it felt like Paul was always listening. “He’s got your number, knows where you’ll be found, but he don’t know everything, still he’s got you down.” In the echos of Paul’s basement the off center would fade away back into what I knew. I wouldn’t feel lonely anymore and would simply feel the melodramatic depression of any self-victimizing high schooler.

At the start of sophomore year my best friend had disappeared. I don’t mean that in a symbolic way either. He literally disappeared. Mutual friends of ours joked around about his absence but none of us knew what happened. Our friendship had started the way most friendships start in 8th grade. We sat next to each other in science class and would talk about the idiotic middle school topics: music, school, girls (well in his case girls, in my case, girl), politics and personal anatomy and physiology. We teased each other a lot, but he knew what to leave alone. He never mocked my family and I always felt comfortable knowing him.

But I knew this would be short-lived.

It felt as though I moved every two years. At the end of 8th grade I predicted “This will be the last year I know you; I’ll probably move at the start of 10th grade.” But it didn’t happen. I stayed and finished high school in Zephyrhills. But he didn’t and I didn’t know how to feel about it. For the first time in my life I was the one to stay and it was my friend who left.

But for all of Conley’s melodramatic eloquence he could only capture my 15 year old emotions. What was still missing were the circumstances that made me feel the anger and depression in Stay What You Are. So I did what any idealistic 15 year old guitar player would do. I started writing my own songs. If no one could describe what it was like to be me, I would do it myself.

For most of my sophomore year I had gotten into a routine of coming home, watching TV while doing homework, getting depressed, crying, writing and then going to sleep. I should note that the constant crying shouldn’t be a cause for concern. I was a pretty thin-skinned 15 year old and it took very little for me to remember upsetting memories that of course became topics for songs. Sometimes they were violent, other times just defeated and on a rare occasion metaphorical. But the roughly one hundred songs I wrote all had one thing in common.

They were all terrible.

I had gotten into a routine where if I was particularly proud of a song I would show it to one of my friends in my English class. He would pass the folded notebook paper back to me with a lukewarm “It’s good,” before he would go back to rereading the day’s assignment. As I unfurled the paper back to its original state I realized I hated the song. I knew he was a good friend because he wouldn’t crush me by telling me how awful these songs were. But the flippant “It’s good.” I wanted more so I kept showing them to him hoping for a more excited reaction. The closest I got was a concerned “Is everything ok?” which made me think for a brief moment that I was getting better. But once again when I looked at it again, I felt as though I was getting nowhere.

Chris Conley had made it look so easy. By the time Conley was 19, Saves The Day was a fairly significant emo band and his kind of lyrics seemed easy to write with enough passion. Even musically, the songs were easy to learn. Conley’s singing was too emotive to be impossible to emulate too. And it wouldn’t take me very long to find a lead guitarist, bass player and drummer. Being in a band like Saves The Day seemed like a perfectly attainable dream. The perfect way to erase who I was and become the kind of person girls would dream of.

But every time I looked at the scribbled, crinkled sheets I felt depressed. I couldn’t look at them for more than a few seconds before slamming it away into my notebook. The songs that were never there were a constant reminder that I wasn’t getting anywhere and I didn’t know how to get better. Everything I wanted to be seemed to be getting further and further away every day.

I felt like nothing would change. I would still be the only one of my friends without a girlfriend. I would still be the only one that had never actually kissed a girl. I would still be writing terrible songs about things only I seemed to go through.

I had a crush on a girl I was friends with for most of my sophomore year. My friends accused us of flirting with each other despite the fact I had no idea how such things were done. I just knew we would talk at lunch and I would arrange my path to class around her schedule. And that her boyfriend described me as “not much of a threat.”

But I knew if I was in a band I could be a threat. I could be someone she would dump her boyfriend for. I could be someone else.

Epilogue

Several weeks ago I was teaching basic songwriting mechanics at a creative writing summer camp. One girl stood out to me. Dressed in black with rectangle glasses I knew she was listening to the same music I was listening to when I was 15. As I looked over the songs she had written I saw myself. They were overwrought and desperate. They were filled with the same angst and frustration.

That night I thought about how I could talk to her the next day about writing better songs. Maybe about what artists she should be listening to for inspiration. But as the chaos of the last day ensued there wasn’t enough time to tell her everything she needed to know. There never is.

When I moved back to Zephyrhills, FL in eighth grade, I thought of it as a fresh start. I had been there before in the fourth and fifth grades, but after 3 years away, I was virtually unknown. Only a handful of people knew me. I had the chance to reinvent myself.

The first girl to ever kiss me had to be paid 20 dollars to give me a peck on the cheek. In the immediate aftermath she started to cry and was called a prostitute by my classmates. This was my South Carolinian middle school experience. I could not let this happen again.

I liked music, but the music I liked was classical and swing. That was unacceptable. I was terrorized by a seventh grader who listened to Third Eye Blind and spiked his hair into devil horns. One day in gym class, he interrogated me. “Why do you like such “gay” music?” I said nothing. That’s how I knew it was time to start watching VH1 (MTV was banned on our cable network in South Carolina) and pick out something cooler.

But even I knew Third Eye Blind was bullshit.

I sat watching the VH1 in the living room as my sister warned me against the bands that would continue my torture. “Are the Goo Goo Dolls cool?” My sister looked at me blankly. “They’re called the Goo Goo Dolls.” So my sister showed me her record collection. She led me through Ben Folds Five to Blink 182.

Blink 182 led me to Fenix TX, the opening band on their tour with Silverchair. Originally I didn’t feel much for the band. But as the year wore on, stating Blink 182 was my favorite band was becoming a liability. “Aren’t they the ones with that naked video?” I knew soon I would be asked the same question again: “Why do you like such “gay” music?” I decided it was time to call Fenix TX my favorite band. There were several reasons for this: A) My sister preferred Blink 182 so by liking Fenix TX I could assert my own musical identity. B) Fenix TX was far too obscure for anyone to have a derisive opinion of them. This way I would not have to worry about defending them. C) Fenix is the name of a hero character in the computer game Starcraft.

I had made the conscious decision Fenix TX would be my favorite band. After that, they could hence do no wrong. This included a free pass on their bland and ignorable debut album as well as their vulgar “Rooster Song.”  I assumed it had to be hilarious because it used the word “cock” a lot.

Most teenage boys dream about sleeping with various women in the world, but all I wanted was to find a girl to settle down and have kids with. So as I listened to the song with friends and giggled about the oral sex metaphors and the fake southern accents, all of that secretly made me uncomfortable. My middle school marriage fantasies were not the norm.

As I delved deeper into the Drive Thru Records catalog I found more obscure bands that would ensure they would be safe from peer pubescent audit. I listened to Midtown because they were angry and had guitar solos which means they were cool music. The cover to their debut album, Save the World, Lose the Girl, became a pointillism project for me in eight grade art class. Most of that year I used album covers for my inspiration because pop art seemed safer than using any sort of classical art as a reference point.

For the rest of my middle and high school career I had succeeded. My music was no longer something that could be criticized about me. The bands I liked were too obscure to hate and more importantly too obscure for anyone to care about.

There was an undeniable safety in unknown music, but still I wanted to show off my discoveries. I dreamt of showing these bands I discovered to girls I liked. I thought this knowledge of music would make me fascinating. Perhaps I could even convince one of them to be my girlfriend. And maybe we’d get to kiss. And then I could erase the memories of South Carolina and start again.

The actuator arm on my hard drive has been wearing thin. For the past few days I’ve been listening to A New Found Glory’s Nothing Gold Can Stay on repeat. But I don’t even like the album anymore.

Nothing Gold Can Stay sat on my computer for several years before now. I hope that something other than nostalgia can be triggered on repeated listens; some sort of greater quality in the music that I could not recognize when I was 13. Instead I find the flaws in the work: the fuzzy, muddy guitars, Jordan Pundik’s off key singing, the largely ignorable lyrics.

Usually at this point in the essay is when I’d say something redeeming about the album, but I honestly can’t think of anything redeeming. A lot of what I’ve written here has glorified the past, used nostalgia to establish some sort of greater quality to the music I listen to, but this proves to be the exception. It may even prove to be the rule.

I recognize that I obsess and romanticize the past. But I don’t think that’s wrong. While I don’t believe in Tabula Rasa (although it does sound like it’d be great on some Naan) I do think people are largely shaped by their experiences. When we emerge from wherever we emerge from, some traits are built in, but our behavior usually has to do with our memories. The ways I talk to people, listen to people or act around people has to do with what I remember as yielding a positive result. These actions resulted in me either making a friend or at least not getting punched or yelled at.

Even the relationships I cultivate with people are always placed against the past. Consciously or subconsciously new friendships, loves or enemies are compared to the most significant ones, so to speak. And if for some reason I’ve lost one of the “best ones” there is always the temptation to revisit the past. There is always that eager feeling to call up someone to rekindle the feelings I once had. But I know this is a bad idea.

Instead of revisiting those memories I wanted to relive those memories, reconnect with what time has broken. And almost every time I’ve been disappointed. People change and people don’t change. The things that made me love someone has been long dead and the reason we stopped talking still remains.

I’ve struggled with these feelings, sometimes wondering how a phone call would be received, other times worrying that it wouldn’t be received at all. The past is best left alone. False pretenses and all, ancient feelings are as valid as current ones because at that moment in time it felt real. The urge to reconnect comes from the notion that “closure” is somehow necessary. Closure will somehow tell me all my feelings were right, when they were never wrong to begin with. Maybe nothing gold can stay.