I could tell you so many things about how Lost and Gone Forever was the soundtrack to my teenage years, but I won't. I could tell you about the time my brother drove my friends to St. Joe's University because Guster was doing a small (very cheap) concert. I could tell you how we somehow landed front row and a security guard gave me Adam Gardner's guitar pick because I "knew all the words to every song." I could go on to tell you how we stopped at Taco Bell that night and made a mess of my brother's car and somehow all of those things are important together. I could also tell you how my mother, Loretta, once asked me "can we listen to something else" as she drove me to school and Guster played in the background. I could tell you all this, but it just further proves how attached I am to this album. In a sea of Kelly Clarkson, Britney Spears, and Backstreet Boys CDs, there was also Guster. A creepy, dark cover in a plastic world of pop pink. It truly is a part of the catalog of albums in my life (you know the binder kind with the plastic sleeves for all your most precious CDs).
And how does it hold up? For me, it holds up in both my attached sentimentality and musical quality. Songs like "What You Wish For," "Two Points for Honesty," and "Center of Attention" are aspirational lyrically while doing very different things musically. "If that's all you will be, you'll be a waste of time," is a lyric that loops in my brain when I'm struggling to be more, do more, and want more. "You've dreamed a thousand dreams / none seem to stick in your mind." I want to generalize and say this is a universal problem, but I also take ownership of it being a very "me" problem. And good god, what a high school problem to mull over through music.
I was assigned a task in a class to find a song that musically represented me. I chose "Happier" because I thought (or still think) the opening to that song fits how I see the world. A slow build to a bigger, grander, louder moment. And then we mellow out again. The highs and lows of being a real person, being a teenager, being a friend, being loved... I could go on forever. There is something in that opening that contradicts itself immediately, and that's where the cool stuff in life comes from. The quiet hush into the crescendo, back into the hush. The rush from a concert with friends and the quiet giggles as tacos falls apart in the backseat of a Chrysler. That's this whole album for me. And sometimes life sounds like one thing, but the lyrics say something else (ahem—"Barrell of a Gun" is a cheeky little song about masturbation). Facades, masks, and all the good stuff we use to hide what we're actually saying on the inside ("I'm the center of attention / in the walls inside my head") while we hide outwardly.
While we can't choose Musical soundtracks, this is fairly close to rock musical for me: harmonies, fa-fas, bongos, cutesie little breaks in music. I guess this wasn't such a stretch for me in high school.
On a re-listen with my husband, I worried if this would hold up. I wanted validation for all the ways in which these songs worked for me. I worried that Ryan Miller's voice was too whiny. Is this all too '90s, somehow? Inevitably, and while I know Gary did like it (or at least that's what he told me), it isn't about anyone else's experience with it. This album will forever mean getting a cheap-o guitar pick, eating tacos with friends, and annoying my mother. This album will forever mean heartbreak, highs and lows, fluctuating dreams, music that is discordant with its lyrics, and knowing all of those lyrics even 20 years later.
5 out of 5 Fa-Fas
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