My Afterglow Moment: Sound of Summer

My Afterglow Moment is a series where staff writers and editors share their favorite music-related memories.

Written by Dallas Killeen

In the summer of 2014, I started to explore my sexuality and my music taste. The intertwined journeys began that evening in early June with him –– the boy with the warm brown eyes and mischievous smile. He and I lounged carelessly on our bed of parched earth as fireflies bobbed listlessly above our heads. The sun dipped beyond the trees, and the dying light set the park ablaze in warm oranges and pinks. I shifted my gaze ever so slightly to admire him and to envy the strands of grass woven between his fingers. For a moment, warmth flooded my entire being, but then came a paralyzing chill that crawled up my spine and nested in my throat.

As I recall, that’s how falling in love felt.

In the following months, I struggled to sort through those feelings and their dreaded implication. Fortunately, I had no shortage of good music. The brown-eyed boy had an affinity for rock, so I adopted Veckatimest by Grizzly Bear (one of his favorite bands) as my unofficial summer soundtrack. The album had a rich sonic palette that paralleled my inner turbulence. I soared with the climactic “Southern Point,”emboldened and untethered by the song’s insuppressible energy. “Foreground” left me with dull heartache and damp eyelashes. And when I listened to “Two Weeks,” I felt nostalgic –– though I didn’t know what for. Perhaps I already recognized how much that period of my life and that album would one day mean to me.

From Veckatimest, my summer love affair with rock exploded. During those precious months, I explored lots of new wave and indie rock, established icons like Talking Heads and newer artists such as St. Vincent alike.

Now, to hear the tracks I played on repeat back then catapults me into the past. Sometimes, I experience fleeting sensations, like languor-inducing heat hitting my face or his breath against my cheek. Other times, I relive my memories in vivid detail. St. Vincent’s “Digital Witness” transports me to the day I literally tried to outrun the emotional confusion during a storm. The exuberant brass fanfare evokes the distant thunder, her shifting vocals the ever-fluctuating rhythm of rain hitting the pavement. I don’t even remember if I was listening to the track at that moment, but the song never fails to conjure that cathartic scene.

I didn’t find all the answers then. I kissed the boy I loved before he left for college, an act I thought would bring closure, but doubts about my sexual identity continued to haunt me for nearly another year. However, everything began  that summer. I fell in love and started searching for answers, a journey that concluded in self-acceptance and my coming out. For the first time, I delved into music beyond what I heard on the radio, and those tracks stained my memory like paint stains canvas.

For the rest of my life, those songs will flood me with all the beauty and pain of my sexual coming-of-age. They will connect me with the boy I once was, the conflicted seventeen-year-old searching for his truth. And for the rest of my life, I will cherish everything the summer of 2014 gave me.