< I found Summer Sun at a listening bar at my hometown record store—where I wouldn’t have been without the boy I was seeing. Craig listened to more music than anyone I’d ever met, and every time we saw each other, he had a new album to play for me in his car [a Camry in a color we called "old-lady gold" with ironic spinning rims made of chrome-colored plastic]. A band he’d seen open for another favorite band of his. An album for which he’d read a favorable review, and then bought and loved and replayed every day for months. A track he’d gotten on a mix CD from his ex-girlfriend Imogen. A side project by one of his favorite artists. Always something new. I wanted to play new artists for him, too, so I ended up at the record store alone one Saturday when he’d been in Lexington with friends.
I made friends with the employees, who were no doubt glad to have a relatively unpretentious girl who would listen with wide eyes to their recommendations, and left two hours later with a bag of albums—some new, some used. Summer Sun was one of them. I popped the thing into my car’s CD player and the sound washed me away.
I’d been a musician since I was three. Both my parents are professional musicians. I was steeped in music. Yet I was completely unable to identify most of the sounds I was hearing on this record. The intrigue, alone with the muted sense that this was what it would sound like to watch a party through a vaselined lens—dimmed, less intense, faraway, but drenched in sentiment. It was the soundtrack to a party from perhaps 1973 that we were seeing pictures of now— too many colors grown yellow and then earthtoned with age, everyone falsely happy for the sake of the photo, even though none of the viewers could tell if it was really true.
I played this album in the car, and then on repeat for the rest of the night. I’d had no plans, so I mixed something from my carefully-renumerated liquor cabinet and sat on my apartment’s balcony to look over the city.
Light and breezy and easy to listen to, it was my perfect entry into the world of experimental music. If I’d started with other kinds, it might not have worked out so well. But I loved this because it was so different without being alien or ugly. In fact, it was pretty in a way that I hadn’t known was possible—ossa nova-style rhythms, drum machine samples, looped bass lines and steel-guitar sounds and weird, echoey distortion that sounded like it was made with the pitch bend wheel on my electric keyboard at home. It was vast and unfamiliar and wonderful, and I wanted lots more of it.
It became my go-to for the hazy, humid nights when I was driving way too fast toward Lexington to see Craig, the sun setting in my rearview and glinting into my sunglasses as I sucked down Red Bull and lowered the windows and let the wind snarl my hair nearly all the way into dreadlocks. It was my solace during the horrible week of sorority rush, when I got cut from every sorority I wanted to join [and all the ones that I didn't], and again on the muggy nights after school started and I came home early from fraternity parties and stayed in altogether, drinking icy mixed drinks and sitting at my desk and reading over texts from courses in which I was only half-interested or, when I got really stressed and couldn’t handle it anymore, rereading my favorite fall novel, The Secret History.
And when I played it for Craig, he was enthralled. But not like I was. He’d heard more experimental music than I could have imagined, so it was a good album, but nothing new. For me, though, this was my initiation into my love of rock and roll.
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