My Life In 35 Songs, Track 16: “Go” by Boys Like Girls

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Go on and take a shot, go give it all you got.

I’m 30 miles from home and I’m crying my eyes out. For some reason, I didn’t expect to feel this way about leaving home and heading off to college for the first time. I’ve already said all my goodbyes to friends, and I know I’ll see most of them in just a few months when we all come home for Thanksgiving. My mom is in the car ahead of mine, accompanying me to Western Michigan University with a car load of stuff for my dorm room. The “family caravan” nature of this drive has kept the “leaving home” moment from feeling like too much of a clean break, at least for the next few hours. Plus, I know I’ll be back home in just a couple of days for a holiday weekend with family, before school starts. But I’m crying anyway, and it has everything to do with the song that’s coming through my speakers.

In case it hasn’t become abundantly clear, I am the type to obsessively soundtrack moments of my life that feel significant. The fact that I took pains to make sure a specific song got played at my eighth-grade graduation ceremony might be the most signature “me” moment of my entire life. I have very rarely left a milestone moment of my existence up to chance when it came to the music that was playing in the background. But that morning heading off to school is something of an exception, because an album I’d been waiting for all summer long had leaked on the internet literal minutes before I started packing my car. I’d downloaded it quickly before shutting down my computer and stowing it in my backpack for the drive, and the album in question is now playing at full volume through the stereo of my Honda Civic, courtesy of my iPod and an FM transmitter.

The album is Love Drunk, the sophomore LP from Massachusetts-hailing pop-punk band Boys Like Girls. If you’ll recall, I’ve already mentioned Boys Like Girls once in this series, as one of the two opening acts that warmed up the stage for Butch Walker when I first saw him in 2006. The band’s self-titled debut album came out a few months after that show and blew them up to mainstream success, courtesy of big, beating-heart anthems like “The Great Escape” and “Thunder,” both of which sound like youthful summer idealism. Boys Like Girls were such a big deal by the time 2009 rolled around that they had a certain pop-country sensation named Taylor Swift crossing over and duetting on their new album’s track-four acoustic ballad, called “Two Is Better Than One.” At the time, though, I didn’t care much about Taylor Swift (blasphemy, I know); I just cared that the title track lead single from Love Drunk was one of the most massive-sounding pop-rock songs I’d ever heard.

I remember being mad, that summer, that Boys Like Girls hadn’t hustled and gotten Love Drunk out in time for the whole season, or at very least for August. “Love Drunk,” the single, dropped on June 30, and it went on to become one of my most-played songs of the summer. Two weeks after that, my brother and I caught Boys Like Girls live in Grand Rapids, and “Love Drunk” went over like gangbusters. So did the other new song the band played that night, a Bon Jovi-flavored rocker called “Heart Heart Heartbreak.” Driving home from that concert late at night, listening to the technicolor sounds of “Love Drunk” on repeat, I felt certain that 1) Boys Like Girls would drop their new album within a matter of weeks, and 2) it would go down as the bulletproof soundtrack of the summer. There were a lot of things that I wanted to do that summer before I headed off to school, and I couldn’t wait to do them with Love Drunk playing in the background.

Things didn’t end up working out that way. There was plenty of great music in the summer of 2009 – my personal soundtrack was dominated by The Dangerous Summer’s Reach for the Sun and Mat Kearney’s City of Black and White – but the new full-length from Boys Like Girls didn’t end up on the release slate. When the band finally announced the street date for their new record, I received it with an utterly deflated feeling of disappointment. The record would arrive on September 7, which also happened to be my first day of college classes – my perfect summer soundtrack stymied by the sterile crush of academia and new responsibility. What a shame.

Love Drunk leaking the morning of my departure felt like a stroke of serendipity – a chance for a “one last hurrah” style summer send-off as I drove out of town. For the most part, it was exactly that: Love Drunk is stacked with massive, massive songs that sound like sunshine and beaches and 90-degree days and summer flings that never quite leave your heart. My favorite description of this album comes from Jason Tate of this very website, who wrote at the time that Boys Like Girls had pre-choruses that were better than most band’s choruses. After hearing the title track, I more or less expected Love Drunk to be the catchiest album ever made. Let’s just say: it’s not not that.

Love Drunk lived up to almost all of my expectations. I say almost all because there’s a left turn of a song tucked into the closing track slot called “Go,” and I never saw it coming until it was playing in my car as I crossed the county line and said goodbye. “Don’t look back, just go/Take a breath, move along/Or you could spend your whole life holding on.” Frontman Martin Johnson sings those lines in the chorus of this song, and hearing them in that moment felt so remarkably apt. “Let’s go put up a fight/Let’s go make everything all right/Go on and take a shot/Go give it all you got.” Right down to the sappy string arrangement at the end of the song, “Go” felt like a commencement address – a bit cheesy, maybe, but something that could nevertheless make you tear up if you heard it at your graduation (I call this “the Vitamin C effect”). I’d learn years later that Johnson wrote “Go” about a high school friend who committed suicide, a background detail that makes the song much darker and much sadder than it sounded initially. On the surface, though, “Go” was exactly what I needed that morning: a reassuring pep talk from a friend, telling you that you’re strong, and you’re brave, and everything is going to work out okay.

Leaving home never felt real until that moment. I’d been thinking about endings and goodbyes and departures for a year at that point, but for whatever reason, my own departure always seemed abstract. I’d called this town home for the better part of two decades, and now I was driving away from it. Sitting in the car that morning, hearing this song, I think I finally reckoned with how much I was going to miss it all: my friends, my high school, the traditions of that place; my parents, my pets, my house, and the easy, comfortable feeling of waking up there every day and falling asleep there every night; the streets, the beaches and the bay, the coffee shops and diners and restaurants where my friends had taken to spending time; the sights and sounds and smells of northern Michigan. Suddenly, the enormity of everything that my home meant to me was slamming into me like a tidal wave, and it left me in tears. It’s one of the most visceral reactions I have ever had to a first listen of a song.

When I listen back to Love Drunk now, it still sounds like those first weeks at college. It’s the album I listened to as I unpacked my dorm room for the first time, and as I wandered campus in the early days of orientation. A few weeks into term, Boys Like Girls even came to campus as part of their headlining tour. I got tickets and invited my brother to join me for the show, and to stay for the weekend. The day after the concert, we tailgated the school rivalry football game, took in the game together, and then hit some college parties. It was a wild, raucous weekend, a mix between the familiar and the alien. I was stepping into my new life.

We saw Boys Like Girls again two months later, the night after our first Bruce Springsteen concert. As part-two of a weekend concertgoing double-header, I recall that show being a bit of a letdown, simply because it couldn’t live up to the sheer elation of seeing the Boss for the first time. The show still marked a milestone, though, in that it made Boys Like Girls the first band I’d ever seen live three times in a single calendar year. 16 years later, they remain the only band to achieve that kind of hat trick for me.

At none of those three shows did Boys Like Girls play “Go,” and judging by the band’s Setlist.fm statistics, it’s one of their least-played songs. It will always be one of my favorites, though, thanks to that little stroke of good timing that put it in my ears at the exact moment I was most primed to find it supremely moving. I don’t have any photographs from the day I left home for the first time, but I don’t need them, because every time I hear this song, it’s like no time has passed at all. I’m right back in the front seat of my 1998 Honda Civic, tears in my eyes, hurtling toward the future, missing the place I just left behind, and scared shitless.

Past Installments:

• Track 1: “One Headlight” by The Wallflowers
• Track 2: “Hanging by a Moment” by Lifehouse
• Track 3: “Hide” by Creed
• Track 4: “Wheel” by John Mayer
• Track 5: “Kill” by Jimmy Eat World
• Track 6: “Fix You” by Coldplay
• Track 7: “Walk On” by U2
• Track 8: “Feeling a Moment” by Feeder
• Track 9: “When Canyons Ruled the City” by Butch Walker
• Track 10: “Truth Is” by Sister Hazel
• Track 11: “Breaking Free” from High School Musical
• Track 12: “Come Around” by Counting Crows
• Track 13: “Someone Like You” by SafetySuit
• Track 14: “Crashin’” by Jack’s Mannequin
• Track 15: “Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen

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