Ellen Cameron
Staff Writer

After all the late nights, after all the laughter and the tears, after all the dashed hopes and betrayed expectations, I finally let go of my first love.

It was a painful process. That’s the thing about first love: you just keep hoping for better. And so I hoped, and I tried to recreate the magic, but eventually I realized that the only magic was in the memories. Yet, my first love will never really be gone, but just an unclicked click on my iPod wheel away.

I feel no shame in knowing that my first love was a CD. It was called “Indian Summer” by Carbon Leaf. It was amazing.

That album had a song for the majority of my the events in my early teen years: “Changeless”, for when my best friend moved to New Hampshire; “One Prairie Outpost”, for when my other best friend decided she didn’t want to be my best friend anymore; “What About Everything” for when I was upset about my parents divorcing; “The Sea” for my late, insomniac nights. And even if the music itself wasn’t very good, isn’t that all we could ever want out of music? Something to relate to?

And then there was the fact that they made me feel cool. I have a very vivid memory of walking down the hall in the seventh grade humming “Life Less Ordinary” after getting the CD for Christmas and being asked what I was humming, and then feeling cutting-edge because the person I was talking to had no idea who they were.

But the thing was, I didn’t even like a lot of the songs on the album; my love was so great I granted the songs I didn’t listen to amnesty. The songs I did like I can still see the value in, though; it was poetry to music, and for the longest time, every time I listened to a song, I gleaned something new. I think, in hindsight, I should have realized that our love would be ending soon when that happened.

But that’s what we, as humans, do: we find things we love and we hold on because they’re a source of comfort and fond memories. Five years is maybe a long time to hold on, but hey, it was first love. There was magic in every note of music, magic that faded as much I was loath to admit. And yet, music as a whole still thrives despite this private tragedy, because I secretly think we’re all still searching for the magic in the notes, searching for the sounds that connect to our souls and make us laugh and cry and feel alive. Isn’t that what art is supposed to be?

But I won’t recommend the Carbon Leaf album “Indian Summer”, nor their following albums “Love Loss Hope Repeat” and “Nothing Rhymes with Woman” (in which I tried—and failed—to rediscover the magic that had drawn me to the band). It’s not just that I want to keep my first love private, but really a matter of learning with music what others learn with people: love blinds the lover.

I’ll thank the album for being a good first love, though, and for always being faithful (or how an album could be faithless, I really don’t know). Thus ends the greatest romance of my life so far. This story has a happy ending though, because I’ve learned an important lesson about music: your tastes in music change, and you should regret not what you listened to, but how you listened to it—music should be appreciated, dived into, loved.