My Life In 35 Songs, Track 17: “Ride” by Cary Brothers

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If I told you the reasons why, would you leave your life and ride?

“College sucks, but you’re also not trying.”

That quote comes from the 2020 film Shithouse, the directorial debut of indie filmmaker Cooper Raiff, and my favorite movie of the decade so far. The movie is about Alex’s struggles to find a place and make friends at college, and about the nagging homesickness that prevents him from fully throwing himself into his new environment. Along the way, he strikes up a romance with his RA, a girl named Maggie, and it breaks him out of his shell.

I didn’t see Shithouse until 2022, two years after it came out and more than 12 years after my own college freshman year. When I did, though, it absolutely leveled me. I cannot recall any movie I’ve ever seen that I related to more strongly. My journey wasn’t exactly like Alex’s, but I saw so much of myself and my own first-year-of-college loneliness in that character. It felt like Cooper Raiff had made a movie about my life.

For some people, freshman year of college is an awakening. It’s when they cut loose, let their guard down, shed their former self, make a ton of new friends, chase down a few romances, and have some of their life’s most unforgettable adventures.

I was not one of those people.

My first year of college was, bar none, the loneliest period of my life. Growing up, I always struggled with being shy and reserved, which made it hard, sometimes, to make friends. By the end of high school, I thought I’d successfully eliminated that side of myself. I’d become more outgoing, more approachable, more open to meeting new people, and the outcome had been a wonderful group of friends that made my senior year feel like one big, long party.

All of that seemed to evaporate when I got to school. From day one, I struggled to get on the same wavelength as virtually anyone else I was meeting. I didn’t feel the pull of frat parties and rowdy debauchery that a lot of college freshmen do, and living in a dorm building where the other residents were mostly upperclassmen didn’t exactly lend itself to me making friends with my neighbors. I struck up a fast friendship with my roommate, a fellow music major, but he had a girlfriend back home, which meant he wasn’t around most weekends. And even in the choral department, a new version of the place where I’d found so much belonging and camaraderie in high school, I quickly realized that I didn’t quite vibe with a lot of my fellow students.

The result was that I spent a lot of time by myself: sitting alone in the dining hall at lunch or dinner; whiling away hours in my dorm room, watching movies or chatting with internet friends rather than getting out and making real friends; making the three-hour drive home on weekends rather than stick around and try out the hallmark “college experience” of Friday and Saturday night parties.

Maybe it was because my roommate was also peacing out most weekends, but going home so regularly during freshman year did not strike me as depressing at the time. One of my best friends from high school was taking a gap year and attending classes at our hometown’s community college, so he was often around to hang out with when I made the trip back home for the weekend. I also still had a lot of friends from the grade below me who were in the midst of their senior year of high school, and seeing them regularly was fun. And I got to spend a lot of time with my parents (who I missed a lot) and my dogs (who I missed a lot), and to eat great home-cooked or restaurant-prepared meals (which were much, much better than what I was getting at the dorm). All these things made my trips home feel totally worthwhile.

I also came to cherish that solitary three-hour drive as an opportunity to listen to music and let my mind wander. Cruising those highways on Friday afternoons and Sunday evenings became my favorite way to give new or new-to-me albums focused listens and fall in love with them.

There is no album I associate more with those drives than Who You Are, the 2007 debut from singer-songwriter Cary Brothers. Best-known for his contribution to the Garden State soundtrack – “Blue Eyes,” which appears on this album in the bonus track slot – Brothers makes moody, emotional music that splits the difference between the first Coldplay record and John Hughes movie soundtracks. The album’s cover depicts a series of bisecting, overlapping highways, and the music inside somehow sounds like what that image evokes: chaos, confusion, possibility, freedom, gridlock, and escape. Every time I found myself on the highway, there was no album that felt more appropriate for the occasion.

I especially loved the way the second track on the album, “Ride,” sounded set against the backdrop of 80-mile-per-hour speeds and the world whizzing by outside my car windows. “Ride” is the sleekest-sounding song on Who You Are, trading the piano-led balladry that dominates most of the album for a more indie, electronic-leaning sound. If you haven’t heard that song, I’d challenge you to look at the album cover for Who You Are and imagine what you think an album with that cover would sound like. Then, go listen to “Ride.” If you’re like me, then what you heard in your head will sound and feel remarkably like this song, which somehow communicates both piercing loneliness and jittery anticipation at the same time. There’s a steely resolve in “Ride,” to get over whatever baggage is weighing you down – past heartbreaks, emotional scars, fond memories you can’t quite shake – and move on with your life. “Would you leave your life and ride?” Brothers asks repeatedly. That fall, as I drove back and forth between my hometown and my college town and slowly uncoupled myself from my old life, that question and the unassuming, patient songs surrounding it began to feel like a new beginning.

The climax of Shithouse finds Raiff’s character on the phone with his mom, openly weeping as he confesses to the crushing loneliness he’s suffered since arriving at college. “What I’ve realized is that I haven’t fully been here,” he tells her. He hasn’t thrown himself into college life, or into making friends, because he’s still been preoccupied with things like missing home and calling his parents and his sister on the phone all the time to chat. He’s been hung up on the past, and it’s inhibited his ability to embrace the future. And so he decides that, in order to move on with his life, meet new people, and experience college for real, he needs to pull away from all those things a little bit. He needs to try.

I had tears streaming down my face seeing that scene for the first time, because it so perfectly nailed where I found myself as freshman year rolled around to springtime. I’d spent so much of the year driving back and forth between home and college, catching up with my parents, hanging out with my high school friends. All those things had felt good because I was struggling to find my place at school. Slipping back into my old life – a life I’d loved – was a tonic. But I realized, eventually, that I was also stranding myself between my old life and whatever what supposed to come after. I needed to be more present at school and at least try to embrace my new life, or it was never going to feel right. I was just going to languish in no-man’s land.

Seeing that experience depicted in Shithouse, even 12 years later, wrecked me, because when I was actually going through it, I felt like I was the only person on the planet feeling the way I was. Most of my classmates who I’d graduated alongside seemed to be having much better college experiences than I was – at least if Facebook posts were anything to go by – and I remember feeling a little bit embarrassed about how few friendships I’d forged, how few parties I’d been to, how few memories I’d made that were worth documenting with photographs to be posted online. My long drives full of Cary Brothers songs and self-reflection didn’t qualify.

And so, during the second half of the school year, I started taking more active steps to break out of my shell. Simply sticking around campus for more weekends and getting out of my dorm room did so much to change the feel of that year. Crazy adventures and unlikely friendships suddenly seemed to beckon everywhere I went, from a night where my roommate’s car got towed and we had to wander miles back to campus, to an RA class where I bonded with the guy who’d end up becoming my best college friend. As spring bloomed around campus and glorious weather arrived, I finally felt grounded at school. And while I was still excited to go home for the summer, when that day did come, I left behind my freshman year with the feeling that I had a lot of friends I was going to miss and a lot to look forward to when I returned the following fall.

My college experience never ended up being anything close to “normal.” By the time I came back to school for my sophomore year, I was in a long-distance relationship, and that absolutely shifted my priorities. But when I recall my freshman year, specifically, it’s with a lot of fondness. It took me awhile, but I eventually found the friendships and adventures and excitement and self-discovery that so many people find in their first year of college.

When I do look back on those days, though, I never forget the loneliness. Sometimes, when I’m in the middle of a solitary highway drive, I’ll still put on Who You Are and try to cast myself back in time, to the boy caught between two lives and trying to reconcile them. I have never, ever been good at the clean break, and I certainly wasn’t back then. Hell, that’s probably why I’m writing this entire series, because I am notoriously bad at letting things go.

“Would you leave your life and ride?”

I guess so, Cary, but I’ll probably spend a whole lot of the ride looking in the rearview mirror.

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
• Track 16: “Go” by Boys Like Girls

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