... remembering Toad the Wet Sprocket, and the summer of 1994.

Since 1988 (and yes, there are reasons why I can point to that date with great confidence) my life has had a soundtrack. I fell in love with music, and I fell in love hard. And we've had great moments when we've gone running down the street laughing like madmen and daring the moon to judge us, and also times when we've sat at opposite end of the table reading competing newspapers in stony silence. But we've always been there for each other, although music has left more of a mark on me than I have on it.

Having said that, sometimes we have little flings, or play out little dares with each other, a game of chicken where no one blinks and at the end and after it all we just kind of sit there thinking "Well, that happened...."

Toad the Wet Sprocket was a middle-of-the-road pop alternative band that had a few hits in the early to mid 1990s. They never got REALLY big, but they never were REALLY small. If people remember them now, it's for the songs "All I Want" or "Good Intentions", the former of which was a painfully earnest song sounding like the meek child of REM and XTC and raised by Hootie and the Blowfish, the latter or which was more famous for being on the Friends soundtrack album.

In 1994 they released their album Dulcinea. It's named after a character in Don Quixote, so you already get a pretty good idea what you're up against before you take off the shrink wrap. They had spent the year before touring with Gin Blossoms, and so they had a little bit of that sound mixed in. It yielded a few AOR hits, but didn't really set the world on fire and can probably be found under "Misc T" at most used records store.

Unless you hung out with me in the summer of 1994.

Chances are though that you didn't hang out with me that summer, because it was quite possibly the worst summer of my life (which means I've had a pretty good life, but still...). Let me count the ways:

1. It was the summer after my academic career went pretty much in the crapper. I was burnt out, lost, and not too sure what I wanted to do, but was pretty sure that it wasn't going to involve anything more in academe.
2. My first fallback career (radio DJ) was just not going to get the support from my friends and family that I needed to make a go of it.
   
3. The job that I looked forward to all winter (my second year as staff member at Camp Wegesegum in Chipman, New Brunswick) had fallen through, so I had to find something/anything to do that summer.
4. The job I did land was pretty much as a janitor/handyman at the Minto food bank. Yes, the same place of the world famous tomato incident.
5. I had just broken up with the first girl I ever really loved. Of course in retrospect I can see that it wasn't really love, but at the time, you know, I didn't have a lot else to compare it to.

Pretty much my only hope for that summer was just to ride it out until October, at which time I was going to move back to Halifax and make a kick at the can in a whole new field, a whole new place. But if possible, it seemed that every day took me one day away from October.

In the middle of all of this I was in the record store in Fredericton and saw that Toad had released Dulcinea and I picked it up because I needed something/anything, even though I knew zero about the album.

From the moment I started listening to it, I fell in love with it. Something about the strumming at the start of "Fly from Heaven" and its slightly Paul Simon-esque cadences captured my rudderless-ness. After the first chorus a distorted guitar slashed through the melody (and over and over again on the album) and it seemed to be translating into music my impotent rage at a summer of disappointments.

And it kept going: "Woodburning" was every night I laid awake wondering what the hell I was going to do next. "Something's Always Wrong" (maybe the closest thing they had to a hit from the album, and a very underrated song in my opinion) was every discussion I had with my ghost of an ex-girlfriend when I was trying to figure out why she was so distant from me before I left. "Stupid" was all the guilt I felt about thinking that the world owed me something and that I was better than the situation I found myself in...

It went on and on. I won't list them all, but rest assured that every song meant something to me that summer. It didn't matter what the songs might have really been about, they were somehow tying into my own life.

They were all some facet of my life at that time. It was every pit of rage, depression, self-pity, and envy that I found myself in that summer. But it didn't depress me, nor was it a depressing album. At a time when I felt the most disconnected from everyone and everything it helped me feel that at least I wasn't alone. I didn't want people to tell me things were going to be better, that it was just a phase, etc etc, and at the same time I didn't want people to indulge my dark thoughts. I just wanted someone to say "I know how you feel" and then leave it at that.

To this day I still listen to Dulcinea, even when it stands out on my iPod like a sore thumb, and I'll still listen to it start to finish. I've also played out two cassette copies of it. I've never put it on a playlist or a CD or mixed tape because all the songs on it belong together. And when I listen to it I'm taken back to the summer of 1994. I still feel some of the pain that I did then, but I also see how far I've come and get a deep sense of perspective from it. It's like visiting an old friend that you haven't seen in a long time but whose life has gone nowhere: you remember the old times, but after a while you remember why you haven't seen them in so long and don't really miss that.

I also remember that I did survive that summer, and that I have some great stories from it. I also remember that after all of that I did make it back to Halifax and started my last ditch attempt at finding a career: computer programming - and today I'm a business analyst. I also remember that over time while I never forgot the girl who broke my heart I've forgotten why it hurt so bad. And I also remember how much I love "Something's Always Wrong".

Here it is now. It might not do anything for you, but it was everything to me.