aybe it had more to do with the moment than the music itself, but in the dog days of August, I found myself listening to the year’s perfect soundtrack.


I was on the way up to Maine to camp with my girlfriend, who would join me in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I would be spending a few days with a friend. The summer had been hectic – I had been to three weddings, serving as best man in two (my friend’s included), with all the attendant bachelor parties and planning very nearly sending me over the edge. My girlfriend and I had been very happily dating for about nine months, but with all the weddings—during which she had impressed everyone I’d introduced her to—I had been feeling some pressure from friends and family to accelerate things, leading to a little panic on my part. Meanwhile, my friend was facing a new marriage with the prospect of losing his job.


So when I arrived in Portsmouth, I couldn’t have been looking forward to it more. It turned out to be a gorgeous summer’s day, all deep greens and blues, so after lunch, we decided to hit the beach, something I now realize I hadn’t done since I was about fifteen. Driving down New Hampshire’s winding roads and then across the bridge up to York Harbor, Maine with the sunroof open, my friend took the opportunity to play me a few of his favorite things.


First in line was Max Tundra’s newest disc, with its hysterical genre-splicing immediately making me break out into fits of laughter, particularly during a little synthesizer interlude which briefly sounds like Europe’s “The Final Countdown.” Next was the Walkmen’s Everyone Who Pretended To Like Me Is Gone—my friend’s summer record of choice—with its booming, lumbering drums and yearning vocals. I knew the Walkmen; compared to the effervescence of Max Tundra, I suppose they could have been a downer, but they seemed oddly appropriate on this languid summer’s day. At that, we’d arrived in York Harbor, the site of his wedding three weeks earlier, where we all danced to Marshall Crenshaw and got high with my friend’s uncle as we dipped our feet in the briskness of the ocean.


Today, though, my friend and I just laid out in the hot sun. As we watched from our towels the teenage girls in the bikinis flirting with the teenage boys, you could almost feel the summer drawing to a close. We roused ourselves to walk on the edge of the ocean, which oddly seemed colder than it had less than a month before, talking about music, careers and, of course, those teenage girls. As we waded in further, the subject turned to my girlfriend. My friend turned to me and said something like, “Colleen is awesome, man.” We were facing the beach at this point, I remember just sort of nodding for a moment as it sunk in. “Yeah,” I said squinting into the sun. “She really is.”


The sun was beginning to go down, so we decided to pack our things and head back to Portsmouth. As we retraced our path down those winding New England back roads, my friend played me two more buzz-bands of the moment, which he’d purposefully been holding out on me. Thinking back, it was funny, because the cultural zeitgeist of pop music seemed miles away from the warm sand and the clear skies. But despite our best efforts to turn it all off, not three minutes had gone by all afternoon where the subject had not been at least scattered throughout our conversation.


Which, in many ways, was us turning it all off. The first record that graced our ride back to the world, the Liars, seemed decent enough, though its sinewy post-punky musings hardly made an impact on what had become an increasingly free-flowing exchange. But just as quickly as the Liars came, they had passed, my friend casting them aside after a few tracks in favor of the new Interpol.


Skipping through a few tunes, we quickly arrived on the track I most associate with not only that afternoon but much of the last year: the mournful “NYC.” It was hard for me to pin it down, but I was immediately struck by the song’ meaningless languor. There was just something about a band that wore its influence on its sleeve not only heavily but honestly. And of course there was that elephant in the room: September 11th. Nearly a year later, it seemed we had largely buried in our memories the drama of that tragedy, but still the sense of loss that hung over us had not yet subsided – not completely anyway. If pop music is supposed to capture a moment, on that afternoon, “NYC” did just that.


As we pulled up to his house and brushed the sand off of our feet, we realized how much the sun had tired us out. We had a big night ahead, and I had to rest up for a week’s worth of camping. The movies we had been planning to watch that afternoon would have to wait. A nap seemed more pressing…