Summer Sounds

I found The Moon Is Down in one of those demo CD bins at a music shop when I went to buy The Moon Is Down in a CD shop. That I was lucky enough to save six dollars on the album--an album hardly no one had listened to because Chris Carabba was just Chris Carabba at the time, and who is Chris Carabba?--is something I still gain some small pleasure from. The side of the album has a hole-punch hole punched through it to mark it as a demo.  He wasn't Dashboard Confessional yet. But it was a beautiful summer day. I remember the shop door swinging close behind me and the tin bell attached to the handle of it ringing when it was completely closed. I was standing there like Tony Soprano does after  he picks up his paper, surveying the world as if everything within sight was also under my claim. I remember listening to the album about three times a day. It was August and hot. I lived with my parents, still, at the time in a white room in the basement of cinder blocks. It was cool all year round in that room, cool and smelling of laundry scent, and if you had nothing to do you should lie down on your bed and listen to Further Seems Forever and move in and out of sleep in small decreasing increments.

That is what summer sounds like to me.

A week later I packed up a tent with my brother and we went to Purple Door Festival in the middle of Pennsylvania. It was a hot weekend, my first festival. We watched a lot of bands and met a lot of artists that we really looked up to and, it was surreal, because they were right there in front of us, but they were in a tent, so it was a set up, in a way. It was so hot. We spent a lot of the day, right after lunch particularly, sitting outside our tent. Except Saturday when we went to see Further Seems Forever play. My brother and I had spent the summer apart. He was working out of state. He hadn't heard me listening to them. He was like, I have to get this album, in the middle of "The Bradley". I told him I had it. And I burned it on a new computer that I unpacked a week later, in preparation for college. That was a time before the ethics of copyright law were a lot less developed. I burned a lot of CDs that year. And that was another sound of summer, the slow whir of a new disc drive. Summer, though, by and far, mostly sounded like a tent being packed and unpacked, gravel spurred under auto tires, and the murmur of a hot crowd on a summer day inbetween sets.

Strangely, it's "Snowbirds and Townies" that gets me the most. It's a song about a long winter, but the jangling guitars and dramatic vocals--possibly over-dramatic--and scalar riffs remind me of those summer night warm winds. And there is nothing that I'd rather remember. Dostoyevsky wrote this line about good memories making a life when summed, that little ones like these sounds I've described and feelings I've recalled make up for everything. Now, at this time, with these thoughts pulled from their files, pushed together with the real-day pressure of everyday, and allowed some breath to them, I agree.