My Life In 35 Songs, Track 13: “Someone Like You” by SafetySuit

Can you see me, holding you right in my arms?

Fast cars, loud music, and summertime: These are a few of my favorite things.

I have long been obsessed with the way a windows-down summer car ride can turn a song transcendent. Hearing the right song when you’re cruising down the road without a care in the world? In my opinion, there’s not much in the world that can make you feel more boundless. It’s something about the volume of the music in the car, the way it surrounds you, the reverberations you can feel coursing through the seats, the armrests, the steering wheel, your entire body. It’s something about the wind in your hair, and the sunshine, and the way the summer air smells. It’s definitely something about the freedom summertime brings, especially when you’re young, and especially when you’ve got wheels. Combine all these things with the right song, and it will sound as good as anything you have ever heard.

That’s what I learned at the outset of summer 2008, the first time I listened to the SafetySuit album Life Left to Go in the car. I’d gotten my driver’s license the previous summer, but this would be my first summer with my own car, and it wasn’t lost on me what that meant. That old cliché about wheels giving you wings might be overused, but it’s also accurate, because having a car unlocks so much when you’re a teenager. I didn’t know what the summer was going to bring, but I’d already made up my mind that I was going to make it count, and the freedom of having my own means of transportation was absolutely at the center of that pledge. All I needed was the right song to consecrate my vow. Enter SafetySuit.

SafetySuit are a pop-rock band from Oklahoma that, for years, seemed like they were right on the verge of blowing up into the mainstream. Their song “Stay” topped the VH1 Top 20 Video Countdown, back when that kind of thing was a big deal, and they worked with noted collaborators like Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic on their second album, 2012’s These Times. One of their songs from that album, “Never Stop,” also became something of a wedding staple in the early 2010s. For my money, the band’s debut album, 2008’s Life Left to Go, is one of the great pop-rock albums of its era, packed with gigantic, memorable hooks delivered with extreme passion. (If you liked the Feeder song I wrote about a few weeks ago, I have a feeling you’d dig this album.) I always thought SafetySuit’s songs sounded ready to fill stadiums, but I never got to find out whether that was true. The band fizzled out thanks to label mismanagement, long gaps between albums, and bad creative decisions that pulled them away from their arena rock roots and toward poppier, dancier textures. For a minute, though, they were one of the most important bands in the world to me, and it’s all because of how great Life Left to Go – and specifically the soaring opening track, “Someone Like You” – sounded in the car.

Every year since 2006, I’ve made playlists to document my summers. I’ve put together a lot of mixtapes over the years, for a lot of reasons, but the summer mixtape is the one I look forward to making all year. It’s gotten to the point, in my adulthood, where I start pulling potential summer bangers into an “early ideas” playlist around the start of February each year, just so I’m armed and ready with the right tunes the first day the mercury goes above 50. I then treat the playlist as a work in progress for the entire season, adding and subtracting songs as the months go by until, around Labor Day, I lock in the final 40-song tracklist to stand as a monument to the summer I just lived. In the old days, it was a less ambitious process, where I’d make the playlist in the final weeks of the season based on the songs I’d listened to most. In summer 2008, there was no song I listened to more than “Someone Like You,” so it’s no surprise that if you pulled up my summer 2008 playlist on iTunes, you’d see SafetySuit’s track featured prominently.

“Someone Like You” felt like the start of a new chapter in my life – my “getting out there and smelling the roses” era. “If I were strong enough, if I were wrong enough to be someone like you/Would you have let me come to be with you?” That’s how the song begins, and those lines became something of a mission statement for me that summer. I had caught big feelings for a good friend of mine toward the tail end of the school year, and my summer resolution was to do something about them. In retrospect, it was a foolish ambition: She had a boyfriend, for one thing, and was heading off to college the turn of autumn. But when I was 17, I was thinking first with my heart and second with my head, and so I forged ahead with reckless abandon.

The resulting summer was, to quote a Taylor Swift song from a decade and a half later, “chaos and revelry.” Up to that point, with few exceptions, I’d always been a rule follower. I didn’t lie to my parents. I didn’t stay out past midnight. I’d tried alcohol a couple times, but it was far from part of the regular routine. But something about the summer of 2008 unleashed a new version of me. Maybe it was the car and the freedom. Maybe it was the girl. Maybe it was just the inertia of growing up. For whatever reason, though, I spent that summer living dangerously: staying out way too late; sneaking friends out of their houses so we could go drink on beaches, or in the middle of the woods, or at houses of friends whose parents were out of town; lying to my mom about where I was. One night, when my parents were out of town, I threw a party at my house, and then the girl I liked fell asleep in my arms.

One of my favorite movies ever made is called Adventureland, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart, and I love it because it tells a story very similar to the one I lived that summer. In the film, Eisenberg plays an overachieving smart kid who, as far as we can tell at the outset of the story, has never colored outside the lines. When his plans for the summer go up in smoke, though, Eisenberg’s character takes a job at a run-down amusement park and his life transforms. Suddenly, the responsible guy is gone, replaced by a person who lives more spontaneously and recklessly, who stays out way too late, who crashes his father’s car, who falls in love, who takes big risks and makes dumb decisions and pays for them. It’s a raucous, cringeworthy, melancholy, beautiful version of the coming-of-age story, told in all its warts-and-all glory.

That movie didn’t come out until 2009, but when I saw it, it struck an incredibly personal chord with me because the story felt so close to the coming-of-age tale I’d lived the previous summer. My shitty summer job wasn’t anywhere near as wistful and romantic as an amusement park (I was working at Burger King, which was soul-deadening and awful) and my bad decisions weren’t quite on the level of car crashes (though I did puke all over a friend-of-a-friend’s house and then pass out on an ironing board…) but the general shape of my journey was there in the film. Adventureland is wonderful because it’s about how beautiful things can happen even when all your plans fall apart, and even when you have to take the good with the bad. My summer 2008 was like that, full of delirious highs (the euphoric nights with my friends, the pulse-pounding possibility that the girl I liked might like me back, the novelty of feeling truly free for the first time in my life) but equally full of crushing lows (that terrible job, the hangovers after those euphoric nights, the heartbreak of seeing that girl pull away from me as the season went on). Looking back on that summer, I’ve always thought of it as when I really “grew up,” whatever that means. It was the most important two and a half months I’d lived up to that point.

Unsurprisingly, when I listen back to my summer mixtape from 2008, it carries a lot of extra weight. In the songs, I hear all the joy and all the pain of that season, all the anticipation and all the letdown, all the highs and all the lows. I hear it in the songs that got played every shift I worked at BK, where John Mayer’s soundtrack song “Say,” David Cook’s American Idol coronation anthem “The Time of My Life,” and Colbie Caillat’s yearning “Realize” were all in constant radio rotation. I hear it in the chart-topping jams that always seemed to pop up when I was partying with friends late into the night, like Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” or Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl.” I definitely hear it in the dusky, melancholy songs I turned to in the late summer after all my friends started heading off to college – gorgeous, heartbreaking songs like Third Eye Blind’s “Motorcycle Drive-By,” Death Cab for Cutie’s “Summer Skin,” Anberlin’s “The Unwinding Cable Car,” and Black Lab’s “Circus Lights.”

Mostly, I hear it in a pair of songs from Life Left to Go. “Someone Like You” somehow still contains all the impossible hope of I felt out the outset of that season, all the boundless possibility and all of my unerring belief that things were going to go my way. A different song from the same album, called “Gone Away,” captures the other side of the coin – the disappointment and dissatisfaction and heartbreak, and the way the season felt once it became clear that things weren’t going to go my way. Both are great, great songs; both act like time machines, maybe more than any other songs I’ll discuss in this series. It took me a long, long time to get over that summer, and no matter how many times I listen to those SafetySuit songs, they still send this aching, stabbing twinge through my sternum, straight to my heart. In Greek, the word “nostalgia” literally means “the pain from an old wound.” After that summer, I knew why.