177. Song No. 2,619: “Do You Love Me,” Guster
Easy Wonderful, 2010

By the time Guster’s sixth studio album came out, I had been a college graduate for as long as I’d been a college student. I’d left newspapers for the first time, I was newly married and I had begrudgingly accepted that all of my closest friends would never live within a five-minute walk from my dorm room again. My affinity for Guster, a band I liked well enough by the end of high school but had dominated the soundtrack to my university experience because so many college friends shared my love for them, had receded into the past the farther we all propelled ourselves into adulthood and the more distant college grew.

Honestly, no matter how much I loved Guster and how excitedly I received their announcements of new albums and tours for years, I was always misguidedly hoping they’d return to the vaguely jam-bandesque, intricately arranged but comparatively unpolished sound of their debut album Parachute. They didn’t, of course, and that baseline disappointment ate away at my fondness for a band that remains at the core of some of my favorite college-era memories.

But the more defined and refined Guster’s studio sound grew, the more call-and-response their concerts became. That heavy audience interaction eventually influenced the kind of music Guster made, like they were writing songs they wanted to hear sung back at them. The dominant feature of their overall presence morphed into a standing invitation to sing along and, ye gods, singing along at a Guster show had already been an irresistible compulsion for years.

Listening to Easy Wonderful again, an album that originally sounded so far from what first made me fall in love with Guster despite that sound being relegated to a single album’s occurrence, is a goddamn trip. I had forgotten that I actually love so much of its songs and know all of its meant-to-be-sung-whole-heartedly words. There were so many hallmarks of what makes Guster so much fun and so easy to love (the encouraged intimacy of “Stay With Me Jesus” echoing the way acoustic, show-closing performances of “Jesus on the Radio” physically drew an entire venue as close to the stage as possible [Christ, no wonder everyone always assumed this band full of Jewish dudes was a contemporary Christian group]; the full-throated harmonies of “C’mon” reborn as “This Could All Be Yours Someday;” “Bad Bad World” being the spiritual successor to “Happier”) that are so much more obvious with the hindsight of time softening reactions and expectations born of a time when I loved my music so much that I couldn’t help but make unrealistic, hyper-personal demands of it.

Rather than teeming with derivative reshufflings of previously successful sounds, Easy Wonderful is a continuation of Guster’s strongest and best features, and “Do You Love Me” is a fabulous example of that. It’s breezy and joyous, anthemic and self-aware, and gleefully allows its catchiness to eclipse its contrasting lyrical anxiety. Listening to it again, aided by the nostalgic fondness that accompanies almos every college memory, is all the evidence I need that it clearly belongs among those songs that encapsulate and exemplify everything I just love about Guster.