30 Day Song Challenge Day 7: Do You Remember When We Used to Sing?

Day 7: A Song That Reminds You of a Certain Event

The redundancy of these prompts is making these posts a lot less interesting. Most of the instances I noted from the last two days have not only involved a someone/somewhere, but a particular event involving that person or place. Now I’m stuck trying to find a song/moment I haven’t already addressed and then trying to find something new and interesting to say about how music works with memory. Let’s see how this goes.


Way back two days ago I mentioned a certain wedding involving a certain song about heights and a certain lifting into the air of a certain fri3nd. Well, since I was responsible for the playlist at this reception there were clearly several awesome songs played that night leading to multiple memorable moments. Not least of which (actually, most of which) being this song:

This has been one of my favorite Get Up Kids songs for quite a while and I slipped it in thinking it would just be a nice slow dance song. In hindsight I clearly underestimated the power of several drunk, reformed emokids. You see the groom, most of the groomsman, and a large chunk of the similarly-aged attendees had been in our youth (and to some degree still are in adulthood) Chuck Taylor-wearing, navel-gazing, non-ironic, die-hard fans of second-wave emo bands like the Get Up Kids, Saves the Day and Jimmy Eat World. So as this song opened – one of only a handful of happy love songs in the genre – and the newlyweds began to dance, we – mid to late 20-somethings channeling our mid to late teens – linked arms around them and began to sing.

In my head I remember a tender moment in which several close friends serenaded a just-married couple, pouring the emotions we felt into every word, articulating what the two of them really meant to each of us. Reality probably looked more like a group of fairly drunk guys surrounding a mostly sober couple screaming lyrics loudly enough to drown out the actual song. Hopefully it was more touching than ridiculous. To this day I haven't seen the video.