214. Song No. 3,228: “Fall in Two,” Guster
Parachute, 1994

I fucking love this album, and Big Friend’s friendly, jovial visage is just the icing on the cake. LOOK AT BIG FRIEND. JUST LOOK. AT. HIM.

This is the Guster I was introduced to over the same prom weekend that changed the trajectory of my musical taste with Dashboard Confessional‘s earliest acoustic sound. I can’t overemphasize just what kind of seismically shifting bomb the likes of The Swiss Army Romance and The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most dropped on a musical landscape largely comprising classic rock and how instrumental they were in nudging me toward one mightily formative emo-kid period that still influences so much of how I will forever interact with music.

But it’s Guster that persisted. I wrung all the dopamine from Dashboard far too quickly, loving Chris Carrabba’s most famous musical project just a little too hard and a little too fervently. In the two years between Places and 2003’s A Mark, a Mission, a Brand, a Scar, I was balls-deep in college, which left its own impact on how I love music and distanced me from the bands I once felt an intense intimate ownership of but had become more pop-culturally known than the things I love usually do. A smattering of Dashboard EPs kept the fire burning enough to make me snatch up a copy of Carrabba’s (fucking excellent, BTW) third studio album under the DC banner, but it was not nearly the transformative experience of its predecessors.

Dashboard might’ve been the band that blew up within a year of me learning about its existence, but Guster was the one all of my college friends seemed to love just as deeply as I did while maintaining a loyal but under-the-radar following. But the collective always seemed to gravitate to Goldfly and especially Lost and Gone Forever (which, I mean, is a pretty incredible album in its own right) and, later, Keep it Together, with my favorite Guster album always seeming to fall by the wayside, never mind that it was wholly responsible for introducing one very amiable Big Friend as the band’s unofficial mascot. Its songs barely ever even popped up in live shows, even when the band was just three albums into their career.

To me, Parachute is first and best Guster. I love so many of their subsequent albums, and I loved that I could share them with so many of my favorite people across four of my favorite years, but this is the Guster I fell hopelessly in love with: the bongos, the stripped-down production, the Dispatch-adjacent jam-band-esque indulgent musicality of three dudes just having a mighty fine time vibing their way through a range of sound.

So much really does depend on the album’s first track, and “Fall in Two” does everything a good lead-off song should do and more. It sets the tone and pace for the album, its quieter parts never really diminishing in energy but still telling of all the dips and ascents and harmonies and bongo-driven delights that await. It perfectly encapsulates and introduces the rest of the album with an energy, a warmth and a raw passion that I wish Guster hadn’t lost as they refined their sound and the production quality of their studio albums subsequently skyrocketed.

Revisiting this song was like seeing that old friend you never miss a beat with regardless of how long it’s been. I truly love Lost and Gone Forever as a collection of songs, but Parachute is absolutely what I go for first when I’m in a Guster mood. I miss jam-band Guster like I miss the warm weather it sounds like, to the point that I’m surprised that Parachute is only my 78th most-played album, though it is in some pretty excellent company (including my very-close-second-favorite Zeppelin album):