My Life In 35 Songs, Track 25: “Miles Apart” by The Dangerous Summer

This is where days feel more complete, living here with you.

I was a failure.

That’s what I found myself thinking in late June 2013, two months removed from my college graduation. It turns out that landing a good job right out of school is hard, especially when you graduate in the middle of an epic economic recession. Heck, I didn’t even need it to be a good job: I was sending out dozens of resumes and cover letters a day, and most of the jobs I was applying for sounded like soul-sucking nightmares that would have quickly squeezed my zest for life out of my body like I was a tube of toothpaste. But I was desperate, and I was demoralized, and I was starting to panic, and I would have taken damn near any life preserver thrown my way.

I didn’t want to feel this way (understatement), especially not at the dawn of a new summer (historically, my favorite time of year), and especially not with a brand-new album from my favorite band of the moment (The Dangerous Summer) burning a hole in my laptop’s hard drive. During two of the most consequential summers of my life – 2009, between my high school graduation and my first semester of college; and 2011, when I needed to reboot after a dreadful sophomore year – The Dangerous Summer had been there to provide the soundtrack. Those summers had both proved glorious, and having this band’s music in near-constant rotation was a big part of the reason why. With The Dangerous Summer set to release a new album, called Golden Record, in the summer of 2013, I hoped I’d be all set for another glorious season.

Golden Record wasn’t due out until August 6, but I got my hands on an advance stream around mid-June. The first single, opening track “Catholic Girls,” had blown the roof off my brain when it dropped early that month, and I couldn’t wait to hear what The Dangerous Summer had in store for album number 3. On their first two albums, 2009’s Reach for the Sun and 2011’s War Paint, this pop-punk band from Baltimore had delivered quintessential coming-of-age music, full of romantic yearning, aching nostalgia, twentysomething malaise, and ambitious optimism for the future. Their music was catchy enough to be ideal for windows-down summer drives, but emotional enough to deliver deep, meaningful catharsis when I needed it most. It’s another understatement to say that I hold both of those albums near and dear to my heart.

My mistake with Golden Record was expecting an album that would make me feel the same way as those first two had. The problem I didn’t account for was that my life had changed dramatically since the summers of 2009 and 2011. Both of those seasons had found me still in the protective grasp of my hometown, still a college student, still a few years away from real responsibility. The summer of 2013 was decidedly different. After graduating in April, I went home for just a few weeks before moving to the Chicago area to live with my girlfriend, who’d gotten a job there the previous summer. I was in an unfamiliar place, away from the idyllic summertime playground that had been my hometown, and no longer protected by the buffer from the real world that being a college student provides. It wasn’t just summer jobs anymore; now, I was looking for a real “big boy” job, and my utter failure to find one made me feel really, really low.

“Even with the walls around me/I always miss the place where we grew up/It made us tough.” So go the first lines of “Catholic Girls,” a song that made me miss home more than any other song I’d ever heard. I was a post-college grad trying to make a new life in a new city and new state, and “Catholic Girls” made me yearn for better days, or for the lost innocence described in the lyrics. There are a lot of songs about growing up, but there aren’t many that capture how much it hurts like this one does.

In that way, I guess Golden Record was timely. It was a darker and more grown-up version of the Dangerous Summer bag of tricks that I’d fallen in love with. My problem was not wanting to be grown up. I’d thought I’d gotten a thick skin after failing out of my music major in college and then finding my way successfully toward a new path. In school, my writing had very quickly landed me internships, freelance gigs, and departmental awards, and I thought, naively, the same thing would happen in the real world. Out in a highly competitive job market, though, those things didn’t amount to much, and after just a few weeks, I’d had enough of all my job applications drumming up nothing but radio silence. I wanted to go home, I wanted to go back in time, I wanted another summer that felt like the past few. And I wanted a Dangerous Summer album that would provide suitable soundtrack for that more carefree life I was craving, not this darker, harder-edged version of the band I loved so much. On a trip home for the Fourth of July, I put on Golden Record while driving around town and tried to conjure up that old magic. It mostly just made me feel depressed.

If there was one song on Golden Record that made me feel the way War Paint or Reach for the Sun had, it was “Miles Apart,” the album’s big, epic, five-minute centerpiece power ballad. Here, singing about his then-fiancée, frontman AJ Perdomo conjured up the heart-on-the-sleeve romanticism I’d always loved so much about his band’s music. The song is about a marriage proposal (“I saw the love in tears from your father’s eyes/When everything was new”) and about a long-distance relationship that’s finally shed the distance part of the equation (“Light from the moon; the question I had/Pieces of you/And the year that you spent far away”). It wasn’t lost on me that the song itself was mirroring the one bright spot in my life at the time, which was that I was finally sharing a home with the person I loved.

In the time we’d known each other, Jillian and I had never shared a zip code – not even in our hometown, where her parents’ house was a half hour’s drive away from my parents’ house. Distance had been such an omnipresent factor in our relationship that we’d eventually become old pros at all the things about long-distance relationships that tend to break couples: the time apart, the communicating mostly through text messages and phone calls, the commitment to spending hours in the car on a regular basis to see one another, the putting each other first and forgoing other opportunities or experiences to do so. All of that was done now, and I remember feeling so proud that we’d made it to the moment where we could simply be – just the two of us, sharing a home, building a life, moving into a new phase of our relationship. And I loved “Miles Apart” right away because, when I heard Perdomo sing that sweet, sweet chorus, I could hear all the pride and gratitude I was feeling in the words: “In the throes of a stare, I was open/Time spent miles apart/On a long drive, from a pay phone/Know that I never had doubt.”

So many love songs are exclusively about the infatuation stage – the early butterflies, the anything-could-happen unpredictability, the yearning and lust. An equally large number are about the heartbreak stage, and about how it feels to come to the end of the road for a relationship that meant something special to you. There are other categories of love songs, of course: the ones that celebrate the beauty in the mundane parts of building a life with someone, or the ones that feel so weightlessly, effusively triumphant that they can’t help becoming wedding reception staples.

One thing I always loved about “Miles Apart” is that it doesn’t fit neatly into any of those categories. It’s closest corollary, probably, is the first dance wedding song category, but then again, “Miles Apart” is anything but weightless. Rather than give you the Hallmark card version of love, it’s a song that tells the story of an extremely happy moment through the lens of what it took to get there. Great love stories, contrary to popular belief, are not written in the stars by fate; they’re written by two people who choose each other, again and again and again, regardless of the hurdles the world throws their way. And so, when you get to the choruses of “Miles Apart” and feel the adrenaline rush of that beautiful, propulsive hook, it hits harder than any Ed Sheeran love song ever could, because it feels true and real and earned.

The summer of 2013 was a struggle for me because I wasn’t sure about a lot of things. I wasn’t sure about myself or my ability to find a job. I wasn’t even sure what kind of job I wanted. And I definitely wasn’t sure whether I liked the new Dangerous Summer album. But I was sure about the girl, and about the love story we’d written together, and hearing all that reflected back at me in the words and music of “Miles Apart” was reassuring. I might not have had everything figured out right away, and that was okay; there was a fucking recession outside, for god’s sake! I could take solace in knowing that I had at least one thing figured out, and it was a big one.

That assurance was on my mind on the Saturday before Labor Day, when I stopped into a jewelry shop in my hometown and bought a diamond ring. Later that day, I walked my girlfriend down to the beach where we’d had our first kiss, got down on one knee, and asked her to marry me. She said yes. I was 22 years old then, and it’s become clear in the decade since just how young we were to be taking that step. I got married before all my friends, before both of my older siblings, before all but one of my older cousins. But, as the chorus goes in “Miles Apart,” “I never had doubt.” We’d faced down three years of distance and sacrifice for one another, and we were ready to start our life together, and to find a place together “where days feel more complete.”

It’s one of the few choices I’ve made in my life that I have never, ever regretted.

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