My Life In 35 Songs, Track 20: “The Sound of You and Me” by Yellowcard

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I’ve never been more ready to move on.

I felt like I was escaping from prison.

In the car, fleeing campus at the end of my sophomore year of college, I got a legitimate adrenaline jolt, because a part of me couldn’t believe that this long, arduous year was finally drawing to a close. 12 months earlier, I’d pulled away from my freshman dorm feeling positive about college and extremely hopeful about the summer to come. Now, I wondered in the back of my mind whether I’d ever come back to this school again. Why had that one year made such a difference?

Fortunately, I still had a lot of hope for the summertime. For months, I’d had this day circled on the calendar, a mental “finish line” where everything that had been out of whack in my life would click back into place. I’d go back home; my girlfriend Jillian and I would be reunited; I’d go back to the summer job I loved, performing at the local dinner theater; winter would finally lose its oppressive hold on Michigan and I’d get to roll down the car windows and feel the wind blow back my hair as I blasted summertime songs on the stereo.

I even already had a summertime soundtrack picked out. On March 22, 2011, Yellowcard, one of the preeminent “summer soundtrack” bands of my youth, had released their first new album in four years. Called When You’re Through Thinking, Say Yes, the album was packed with big anthems that were begging for precisely the type of windows-down car rides I mentioned above. There’s even a song on that album, called “With You Around,” where the chorus goes “All I can think about is you and me driving with a Saves the Day record on/We were singing ’til our voices were gone.” I listened to that album on repeat during my final month of sophomore year, trying to will summertime to get here a little faster, because I’d never needed it more.

It wasn’t any one thing that made my sophomore year of college such a disaster. Rather, a whole lot of things piled up over the course of the year that, by the time April rolled around, had pushed me to a breaking point.

For one thing, I absolutely hated my job. As I mentioned last week, I’d been hired to be an RA (resident assistant) at one of the dorms on campus. I learned very, very quickly that I was completely out of my depth with this position, which required me to muster up a level of enthusiasm for the college experience and for Western Michigan University that I simply did not have. I’d applied for the gig after seeing how low-key things were in the dorm where I’d lived during my first year, and how chill and give-no-shits my RA had been. I’d met that guy approximately six times the entire year, and the most profound of those encounters had been when he and his girlfriend helped me jump-start my dead car battery. He was there to help us out if/when we needed it, and otherwise stayed the fuck out of everyone’s business. “I could do that!” I thought to myself.

What I didn’t consider is that not all college dorms are the same. The one I’d been slotted into my freshman year, rather inexplicably, was mostly occupied by upperclassmen and student-athletes. Those guys weren’t drinking in their dorm rooms or coming home from parties at 2am and screaming in the hallways like they’d just discovered alcohol for the first time. They were not, in other words, college freshmen. When I landed the RA job, though, I did get assigned to an all-freshman dorm, and it was a total fucking nightmare. One time, I had to call the police – and the paramedics – because one of my residents had brought a guy back to her room who then got hammered, puked all over the bathroom, and passed out cold in a pool of his own vomit right next to the toilet. Another time, I had to get a resident reassigned to a different dorm building because her roommate was dealing drugs out of their room. On a third occasion, I woke up in the middle of the night to a young man drunkenly sobbing and screaming at his ex-girlfriend to open the door to her room so they could talk. And there are plenty of other stories just like these ones.

The other RAs in my building were, by and large, extremely passionate about the work, and about helping their residents have the best college experience possible. I shared none of that passion, and by week three, I wanted nothing to do with most of the people who lived on my floor. In retrospect, my lack of enthusiasm for the job was probably extremely obvious to both my residents and my fellow RAs, which I’m sure did not endear me to either group. Living in that environment made me feel isolated and disconnected, and I felt some of my freshman year loneliness creeping back. I didn’t even have a roommate this time around.

Speaking of my roommate, he’d moved off campus into an apartment with a mutual friend of ours. I’d been planning to live with the two of them until I’d gotten the RA job, and I spent much of the year kicking myself for not going that route instead, since it seemed like they were having a much more enjoyable sophomore year than I was. I’d move in with them the next year, and we’d live together for the final two years of college – a much better setup, even if it meant giving up the free room and board.

As for the actual school piece of the puzzle, sophomore year started fine and then went precipitously downhill. A strong round of auditions at the start of the first semester landed me a spot in the top choral ensemble at the university, which was an amazing experience. Making it even more fun was the fact that I was in the tenor section with my friend Blake, a fellow terrible RA, and we bonded that year while commiserating about how much we hated our jobs. (Blake once let a resident light a giant stuffed panda bear on fire in a trash can 50 feet from the dorm where he worked, so I’d say he might have edged me out in the “bad RA” race. Love you, Blake!) That first semester, I was also preparing for what they call the “sophomore hearing,” a barrier exam in the voice department at Western Michigan University which determines whether vocal performance majors “have what it takes” to make it as professional classical singers. In December, I failed my hearing. I got another crack at it in the spring, and passed – narrowly – but the reality check shook me awake to the fact that I might not be in the right major. More on that next week.

The best thing about that year was my relationship with Jillian. Navigating the long-distance aspect of things was tough, but we were both committed and we put in the effort to make it work. It was 100 miles door to door between my college town and hers, and one of us made that trek most weekends. Occasionally, we’d meet up somewhere halfway, for dinner and a few hours together. Once a month or so, we’d go home and spend the weekend together up north. All those weekends together kept our relationship going, but they also had the effect of making it feel like I was living two different lives. It got to the point – especially during a miserable second semester, when I’d fully soured on the RA job and also hated all my classes that weren’t choir – where I felt like I was living my life for the Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. I even remember coming up with a mantra, that I was “defeating the days” of the school week to get to the part of my life I actually cared about. In retrospect, if you view more than half of every week as something to “get through,” that’s probably not a great sign!

By the time the calendar flipped over to April, I wasn’t just ready for summer vacation; I needed it. I needed a few months away from school, to recalibrate and reassess whether I was still on a path that made any sense for my future. I needed to put my year of being an RA behind me, and to get back to a job that actually felt fulfilling and fun. I needed the winter to break – that year, we got an ice storm on April 20 – and to feel the sun on my skin again. I needed a few months where I wasn’t spending hours in the car every other weekend. And I needed to slip back into the easy rhythms that Jillian and I’d had with our relationship at home, when we could see each other every day and weren’t beholden to the limits of the weekend and the small spaces we had to share at my dorm or her apartment.

I think that’s why I gravitated toward that new Yellowcard album so, so strongly. Maybe more than any other band, Yellowcard had been the sound of summer when I was growing up. I first heard “Ocean Avenue” in the summer of 2004. I was packing my bags for a summer road trip vacation with my family, and I’d had the radio on, listening for new tunes to download and add to my still-in-progress vacation mix CD. “Ocean Avenue” immediately got added to the list, thanks to its infectious chorus hook and hall-of-fame-worthy bridge. The rest of the album trickled into my listening over the course of the next year: the big romantic yearning of “Only One”; the faded friendship of “Empty Apartment”; the postcard reminiscence of “One Year, Six Months”; obviously, the end-of-summer sweep of “Back Home.” Ocean Avenue was even the first album I played on my first official day of summer vacation the day after I graduated from high school. It was just that elemental to what summer was in my brain.

You know that part in The Lord of the Rings where reincarnated Gandalf shows up and says “I come back to you now, at the turn of the tide”? That’s kind of how I felt about Yellowcard coming back in 2011. The band had gone dormant after their 2007 album, Paper Walls. Nowadays, it seems like every band that breaks up or goes on hiatus has a reunion 3-4 years later. In that era, though, it was more common for bands that went away to stay gone. In other words, I was not holding my breath for more Yellowcard albums. But here they were, with a brand-new set of songs that sounded like their heyday, and that evoked a similar emotional tug at my heartstrings. I especially loved the key line in the very last song: “There’s a place we could find where this pain is useless/And we’ll forever be the young.”

I loved that sentiment, and I felt like I desperately needed to hear it. If the summer soundtrack band to end all summer soundtrack bands could come back sounding so renewed and re-energized and full of life and passion, then maybe I could do the same. Maybe I could go back home, and have another perfect summer, and figure out a version of my future that didn’t consist of four days of misery for every three days that were good. Maybe I could go back in time and feel young for a few more months, without the baggage and exhaustion and frustration that had built up on me over the course of that awful school year. Maybe.

April 30 was the day that I’d had circled on my calendar. As an RA, I had to hang around campus for a few extra days after I finished up my exams, to check my residents out of their dorms and go through a cleanup and maintenance checklist with my fellow RAs. A few days with no classes and minimal responsibility shouldn’t have been that bad, but I was so antsy to leave that those days felt borderline torturous. Jillian was already home, and I had a dinner theater show scheduled for the first night I got home. The summer escape I’d been yearning for was right there, within my grasp. But reaching out the final few inches to grab it was the hardest part.

But finally, that day rolled around. I even packed the car the night before, to give myself a cleaner, quicker exit. When I woke up that morning, I didn’t even say goodbye to any of my fellow staff members. I’d already made up my mind that I wouldn’t be returning as an RA, and I got the sense most of those people were ready to see the last of me, anyway. So, with my final few bags in hand, I locked the door to my last-ever dorm room, dropped my key on the desk in the office, and beelined for the car. Good fucking riddance.

My heart was legitimately racing as I climbed into my front seat, because I couldn’t believe I was finally going to be free of that job and that school year. A part of me had this (probably irrational) fear that my now-former-boss would stop me as I piled the last of my things in the car, tell me there’d been some sort of mistake, that there was more for me to do, that I couldn’t leave just yet – that, god forbid, I’d have to stay another day. But nobody stopped me. And so, when I got to the car, I turned the key in the ignition, strapped myself in, and pressed play on When You’re Through Thinking, Say Yes.

“Are you there?/Putting all the words together/Painting your new masterpiece?” So begins “The Sound of You and Me,” the big, ambitious, two-part anthem that kicks off Yellowcard’s 2011 comeback album. It’s a track that fits squarely into the category of “break-up song,” but on that particular morning, I was most interested in it as a song about closing out a life chapter and getting on to the next one as quickly as humanly possible. “Someday, everything ends/Can we begin/Finding our way back before it’s too late/And lost in between/The Truth and the dream/I’ve never been more ready to move on.”

“I’ve never been more ready to move on.” I couldn’t have scripted a better sentiment to accompany my clean break from the worst school year of my life, or to communicate how much hope and electricity I felt surging through my body simply because I was leaving that year in my rearview. I didn’t know what was coming next, but I knew it would look nothing like what had come before. “The Sound of You and Me” was the sound of that clean slate, and to finding my way back to a better, happier version of myself. And it was the sweetest sound I had ever heard.

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
• Track 19: “Dusk and Summer” by Dashboard Confessional

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