My Life In 35 Songs, Track 19: “Dusk and Summer” by Dashboard Confessional

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Days like that should last and last and last…

I treat end-of-summer songs the way most people treat Christmas music.

There is an entire segment of the music industry that is built around the fact that, for at least a month at the end of every year, a significant percentage of the music-listening population only wants to hear holiday songs. It’s why Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” will have an annual stint atop of Billboard charts from now until the end of time, and why Spotify Wrapped cuts off streaming stats for its users around Halloween. The last six weeks of the year is holiday music season.

Well, for me, August is end-of-summer music season. I have an entire playlist of songs that I associate solely with the fading of Earth’s most glorious season. Most of those songs, just like Christmas carols, sound wildly out of place to me if I hear them at any other time of year. But play them for me in August, especially in those last two weeks before Labor Day, and my heart will ache with all the melancholy of watching another summer die.

No song on the planet captures the sweet, sad feeling of summer’s end better than Dashboard Confessional’s “Dusk and Summer,” and its perennial re-entry into my life has made it one of my most cherished songs of all time. To tell that story, I have to break with the typical mold of this essay series – most parts so far have focused in on one specific memory or period of time – and explain the evolution of my end-of-summer ritual, and how music came to be a core part of it.

Flashback #1:

It’s Labor Day 2005 and I’m trying to cherish my last hours of freedom before I have to get up and head to my first day of high school the following morning. Specific things on the to-do list include sleeping in, playing some video games, going for a run in the gorgeous outdoor weather, and then taking a bike ride around my neighborhood at dusk. I decide, at some point, that the day needs a soundtrack, so I put one together on my iPod, made up of songs that either mention the end of summer specifically or have the vibe of a late-August evening.

The first-ballot inductees into my end-of-summer songs hall of fame include: “The Boys of Summer,” by Don Henley; “My Sundown,” by Jimmy Eat World; “Orange Sky,” by Alexi Murdoch; “Age Six Racer (So Long Sweet Summer),” by Dashboard Confessional; “Nightswimming,” by R.E.M.; “Miami,” by Counting Crows; and both “Ocean Avenue” and “Back Home” from Yellowcard. Listening to those songs over and over again throughout the day, I feel the melancholy sink in even deeper. By the time the sun’s gone down, my sense is that I’m not only saying goodbye to summer; I’m saying goodbye to my childhood.

Flashback #2:

It’s July 2, 2006, my brother’s 21st birthday, and he’s opening gifts from the family. My present to him is a copy of Dusk and Summer, the brand-new album from Dashboard Confessional, a highly-anticipated release for the two of us. We’ve both become obsessed with the previous Dashboard album, 2003’s A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar, and especially with “Vindicated,” the gargantuan anthem Dashboard Confessional contributed to the soundtrack of the 2004 blockbuster Spider-Man 2. Maybe even more than the prospect of hearing new songs from a band I love, though, I’m excited that this record is called Dusk and Summer, because I figure you couldn’t possibly call an album that without offering up at least one perfect end-of-summer song.

As it turns out, Dusk and Summer has at least three perfect end-of-summer songs. The first is “Stolen,” the album’s big hit, which kicks off with a verse about watching as “another sun-soaked season fades away.” The second is “So Long, So Long,” a stirring piano-led duet with Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz, about leaving a town behind as the beaches clear out and the lifeguard stand shuts down for the year. And the third is “Dusk and Summer,” the title track, an acoustic lullaby to lay the summer to rest.

All three of those songs are brilliant, but to me, “Dusk and Summer” has always been in another league. No song has ever done a better job at conveying the bittersweet beauty of a late summer night than this one. Summer’s over; the sun’s already set; there’s a September chill creeping in on the air. Soon, it’ll be time to get up off the beach, dust off the sand that’s stuck to your skin, and head back to whatever responsibility is waiting for you in the morning. But for now, you can just revel in the quiet, beautiful grasp of the evening and take your time bidding farewell to a perfect season.

Dusk and Summer ends up being one of my regular-rotation albums for the summer of 2006, and it’s largely because of the title track. Even in early July, I fall in love with how that song sounds late in the evening, when the last embers of the sunset fade to black on the horizon and the night takes over. I go for runs on the golf course near my house at dusk, listening to this song on repeat, trying to become one with all the aching melancholy the song is pumping into my heart.

On some of those nights, I wonder if I’ll ever experience the kind of all-encompassing summer love the song describes. I realize that I want to know what that feels like, maybe more than I’ve ever wanted anything in the world. I can’t imagine anything more fairytale perfect than falling in love in the summertime.

By the time late August rolls around and the moment has come to bid farewell to the season, I’ve added all three of those Dusk and Summer songs to my end-of-summer playlist. “Dusk and Summer” gets a place of honor, right at the end. And as I head back to school the day after Labor Day, it’s with this song and its bittersweet strains still echoing in my head.

Flashback #3:

It’s August 18, 2010, and I’m celebrating my last night in town before heading back to school for the semester. Classes aren’t set to start until September 7, nearly three weeks away. But I’ve been hired to be a resident assistant for the coming school year, and that means I have to get back to school early for staff training and freshman orientation.

I am not at all psyched about this arrangement. While being an RA will go a long way toward helping pay for school – free room and board for an entire school year is nothing to sneeze at – it also means cutting summer short. And if there has ever been a summer that I wanted to make last a little longer, it’s this one.

My girlfriend Jillian and I have been together for about a month and a half, and that time has flown by. I can’t recall a summer in my life that’s disappeared faster. Now, I’m facing down the prospect of saying goodbye to her in a matter of hours, and I’m not even remotely ready for that.

It’s not just that I don’t want the summer to end, though that’s a part of it. Given the option of staying with her and going back to school, I’d much, much rather stay in the utopian little world we’ve built with one another – a world full of beach days and boat trips and watching Friends in her basement and kissing late into the night. But the outside world is about to intrude, and our perfect little bubble is about to burst.

It’s the bursting of that bubble that worries me. At this point in my life, I’ve never had a relationship that lasted longer than three months, and I’ve definitely never been in a long-distance relationship. I don’t have the slightest idea of what it takes to make that kind of thing work, and I’m more than a little concerned that what Jillian and I have found together this summer will be a lot harder to maintain once we’re living in different cities 100 miles apart.

For now, though, I’m trying to shunt all those worries off to one side so that I can enjoy my de-facto last night of summer. The two of us have made plans to meet up at the beach to watch the sunset, and I’m already anticipating hearing my favorite end-of-summer songs in the context of a bittersweet romantic parting. If Jillian and I have to go our separate ways, at least I can find solace in these beautiful, melancholy songs that have been my last-night-of-summer send-off tradition for five years running.

There’s one problem with my plan: My car has been in the shop for the last 24 hours, and I get a call that afternoon that the mechanics are going to have to keep it for one more night. The car will be ready for pickup by 10am the next morning, plenty of time for me to grab it before I need to hit the road. The problem is that now I don’t have a car to drive into town and meet my girlfriend for our final night together. My stepdad selflessly offers to let me borrow his vehicle, but there’s still a problem, and it’s that I’ve left my FM transmitter in the glove box of my car. In other words, I’ve got no way to play my end-of-summer playlist off my iPod in my stepdad’s Honda.

A normal person, in this scenario, would probably resign himself to simply not having the perfect soundtrack. I am not a normal person, as this series should attest, and I am especially not a normal person when it comes to end-of-summer music. So, rather than accept my fate, I tear my room apart to find the sole blank CD-R in the house, and I hastily burn my end-of-summer playlist to the disc before I have to leave to meet Jillian at the beach. Whew; crisis averted.

The night is beautiful, with the kind of perfect sunset over the water that tens of thousands of people flock to northern Michigan each summer to witness. I want to stay out on that beach all night, and had it been earlier in the summer, we might have. But the weight of my impending departure is the elephant in the room, and that feeling we’ve successfully dodged for weeks – that of responsibility waiting for us in the morning – has crept back up on us and found our hiding spot.

We still ignore the clock and stay out late. When the time comes to part ways, we still burn through half a dozen songs in the car, kissing goodnight. The last one is “Dusk and Summer,” and it feels like the kind of moment I’ve been waiting to have with this song since the first time I’d heard it.

“And she pulled you in, and she bit your lip, and she made you hers/And she looked deep into you as your lay together, quiet in the grasp of dusk and summer,” Chris Carrabba sings to us through the speakers. We are both crying by this point, and not just because “Dusk and Summer” is the kind of song that sounds so elementally wistful that it can make your heart crack in two just from hearing it. Rather, it’s because neither of us can stand the idea of leaving this summer behind; of not being able to see each other every day; of breaking the spell.

“Days like that should last and last and last,” Chris belts at the end of the bridge. He steals whatever breath was left in my lungs with those words, because I have never wanted anything to last an eternity before, at least not in the way that I want this summer to last an eternity. How can I stop time? Surely, there’s a way.

Later, driving home, I listen to “Dusk and Summer” again. “And she combed your hair and she kissed your teeth/And she made you better than you’d been before,” the song goes. It feels a little bit like Mr. Carrabba is taunting me, as if he knows something I don’t. That’s the thing about “Dusk and Summer” that’s always broken my heart: the song is a cautionary tale. It’s yearning and sad, because it’s about the summer romance that didn’t last. The one that got away. “And you held her looser than you would have if you ever could have known,” Chris sings in the bridge. And in the final chorus, it’s “But you’ve already lost/When you only had barely enough of her to hang on.” Just like that, the girl is gone, like summer on the wind.

When I wrote about Dusk and Summer, the album, for its 10-year anniversary back in 2016, I described this exact car ride, and the moment where this particular song became forever intertwined with my life story:

“What if I had let go too easily? Said goodbye too soon? Kissed her a second shorter than I should have? What if college and long distance and the end of summer were about to kill the best thing that had ever happened to me? What if, in the morning, I was going to drive away from the one thing in the world that I knew I really wanted, and lose it? And then my tears stopped and I had a moment of clarity, and I said to myself: ‘I’m in love with that girl.’”

A week later, she visited me at school before heading back to college herself, and we said “I love you” to each other for the first time. I’d say “the rest is history,” but then how would I write another 16 installments of this series? We’ll get to it.

Epilogue:

Some traditions peter out with time, but I still go back to my end-of-summer songs every Labor Day weekend. This year will mark two decades since I started that tradition, just a nervous, jittery teenager on the cusp of high school, looking for a way to hold on to youth a little bit longer. Youth is long gone at this point, but something about ending my summers in the same way every year makes me feel closer to my younger self, and to everything he cared about.

Usually, I put on the playlist on Labor Day, when Jillian and I drive out to her parents’ house for one last beach day and summertime celebration. It always takes her 2-3 songs to clock the theme, and that’s probably because the playlist has continued to evolve with time, gathering new tracks from my later college years and our young adulthood, all the way up to the present. But at the heart of the mix is the same playlist of songs I burned to a CD 15 years ago, to make sure I had the right soundtrack to say goodbye to the girl who I had fallen in love with.

Now, we say goodbye to every single summer together: me, the girl, and the songs. It’s my favorite tradition in the world.

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
• Track 17: “Ride” by Cary Brothers
• Track 18: “Growing Up” by The Maine

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