36. Song No. 258: “Almost Here,” The Academy Is…
Almost Here, 2005

Oh woooooow, I haven’t thought about these guys in a minute. This is another one of those bands that I loved so hard so fast that they are forever frozen in a flash of time regardless of the song.

Before my husband and I started dating, I doggedly threw all my energy and self-delusion at what should have been a short-lived rebound, somehow prolonging it into an unsurprisingly unfulfilling two-year hangover. My ex wasn’t a bad dude, he was just inexperienced and immature, and we were hilariously incompatible in general. I was also coming out of the most significant relationship of my life at that point and, truthfully, one that I was too immature myself to value like I should have, and dragging all that guilt along always makes for a solid foundation, yeah?

Buuuuut we liked a metric fuckton of the same music and I liked his friends, who were usually helpful allies in organizing concert outings. Like, way more often than a bunch of early 20somethings with middling sources of income should have been able to pull off. The frequency of those concerts we cozily carpooled to was a significant contribution to the relationship’s longevity.

I also nannied throughout my last summer of college: I lived with the family during the week and usually spent the weekends with my then-boyfriend, which left plenty of time for all that live music that fueled an otherwise largely unsatisfying romance. At the outset of many of those weekends, his much more likable best friend drove him to pick me up, and the three of us made our way into an evening that unfurled across all kinds of long-drive checkpoints, from the nearby Barnes & Noble near my summer job to a familiar diner near their shared hometown.

Driving all through Central/North Jersey with the summer-night wind whipping through the topless Jeep drowned out any attempt at conversation so we turned up the music. With a remarkable frequency, that music was a comparably short album we were more than happy to start right over again and again every 32 minutes. We’d seen The Academy Is… at Bamboozle earlier that spring (we even walked past their awkwardly charming frontman between venues, which generated fosomer sentimental bonus points); I’m pretty sure we saw them either as headliners or as part of a smaller festival after that because we were all positively smitten with Almost Here and played it endlessly, as one does when one’s trying to recreate the magic of a perfect live set.

This is not an ex I think of often: There’s not much residual evidence of him in my life to trigger any meaningful recall, most of the bands we shared have long become footnotes in my musical past, and there’s no real reason to look back on a relationship that didn’t yield much more than some rad concert tickets. But nothing is all good or all bad, and even a college relationship that far outlasted its expiration date was capable of a few gifts. Like the kind of happily lived-in songs that still have the power to evoke one harmonious, humid moment where music transcended conversation so well it will sift through a largely colorless time to brandish meticulously preserved reminders to prove that even the smallest memories are little gems worth hanging onto.