Go on and take a shot, go give it all you got.

I’m 30 miles from home and I’m crying my eyes out. For some reason, I didn’t expect to feel this way about leaving home and heading off to college for the first time. I’ve already said all my goodbyes to friends, and I know I’ll see most of them in just a few months when we all come home for Thanksgiving. My mom is in the car ahead of mine, accompanying me to Western Michigan University with a car load of stuff for my dorm room. The “family caravan” nature of this drive has kept the “leaving home” moment from feeling like too much of a clean break, at least for the next few hours. Plus, I know I’ll be back home in just a couple of days for a holiday weekend with family, before school starts. But I’m crying anyway, and it has everything to do with the song that’s coming through my speakers.

In case it hasn’t become abundantly clear, I am the type to obsessively soundtrack moments of my life that feel significant. The fact that I took pains to make sure a specific song got played at my eighth-grade graduation ceremony might be the most signature “me” moment of my entire life. I have very rarely left a milestone moment of my existence up to chance when it came to the music that was playing in the background. But that morning heading off to school is something of an exception, because an album I’d been waiting for all summer long had leaked on the internet literal minutes before I started packing my car. I’d downloaded it quickly before shutting down my computer and stowing it in my backpack for the drive, and the album in question is now playing at full volume through the stereo of my Honda Civic, courtesy of my iPod and an FM transmitter.

The album is Love Drunk, the sophomore LP from Massachusetts-hailing pop-punk band Boys Like Girls. If you’ll recall, I’ve already mentioned Boys Like Girls once in this series, as one of the two opening acts that warmed up the stage for Butch Walker when I first saw him in 2006. The band’s self-titled debut album came out a few months after that show and blew them up to mainstream success, courtesy of big, beating-heart anthems like “The Great Escape” and “Thunder,” both of which sound like youthful summer idealism. Boys Like Girls were such a big deal by the time 2009 rolled around that they had a certain pop-country sensation named Taylor Swift crossing over and duetting on their new album’s track-four acoustic ballad, called “Two Is Better Than One.” At the time, though, I didn’t care much about Taylor Swift (blasphemy, I know); I just cared that the title track lead single from Love Drunk was one of the most massive-sounding pop-rock songs I’d ever heard.