Pete Yorn, Musicforthemorningafter

Two years ago, there was a period during which a series of after-hours parties were held at Liesel and Jill’s place and everyone just made out with each other.

It started with Spin-the-Bottle, but soon we didn’t need the excuse. It didn’t matter if you were straight or gay, single or not. It’s not something we’re proud of, it just happened, and if you were to ask any of the people involved about it they’d probably chuckle and demur. But anyway, the soundtrack to these parties was always one of two albums: either Daft Punk’s Discovery (if Liesel got to the stereo first), or Musicforthemorningafter. One night, when it was the latter, Dino accosted me and lectured me at drunken length about how I needed to make this album a part of my life post-haste, without further delay.

And it’s true; I could talk about the music, how smart the rhythmic subdivisions in “For Nancy” are, or what a simple, pretty ballad “Lose You” is, or what a raucous anthem “Life On A Chain” is and how all album openers should be raucous anthems. But really, this block of text here is ultimately all about “On Your Side”.

Nearly a year after the make-out parties, in early 2003, I was driving back from Des Moines with Jenn, where we had just seen Mama Mia (that’s right, the Abba musical) with my parents. As it happens, this turned out to be the last day I saw my father alive. The rising late-winter moon was low on the horizon and the sky was a deep steely blue, and I remember listening to “On Your Side” and feeling satisfied for the moment, like nothing needed to change just then.

But then, of course, everything changes. For months afterward, “On Your Side” had very difficult associations for me. But then later that summer, on the other side of the cycle, having shed layers of clothes and countless other things, I arrived at Jill and Leah and Liesel’s on the last day of July, on the cusp of Moveout Madness, so long after Makeout Madness, and the scene was a madhouse. The house was a mad scene. Leah was Pine-Soling the hell out of all things linoleum and beyond, Liesel was haphazardly throwing her personal effects into the back of a borrowed pickup and yelling at Susie, and Jill was busy piloting her vehicle into the back of a neighbor’s parked car.

I was buzzed from a couple beers at the Deadwood and I laid down on the swing on the girls’ front porch—or as we’d taken to calling it, Portugal—the now-former site of so many al fresco bacchanals. And Musicforthemorningafter was playing on the boombox in the otherwise empty living room, and I fell asleep on the porch swing at the beginning of the album and woke up during “On Your Side” and it was a new song again, and the evening sun was setting, turning the porch and the rest of the world a reddish hue, and I walked into the kitchen to keep Leah company, and grabbed a beer out of the otherwise empty fridge, resigned to the change at hand.