And This Is What We Call Progress

This album, The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night, often takes me back to high school. When I was a junior, my parents drove me all the way down to the Ozarks (a three-and-a-half hour drive each way) because of a Scholastic writing competition in which I'd taken part. They agreed to drive me to this over-the-top resort called Tan-Tar-A so that I could accept an honorable mention award or something like that. I remember feeling like it was a fairly ridiculous request at the time (even more so in retrospect), but my parents insisted on taking me down to accept my hard-earned piece of congratulatory paper. So they did.

On the way home, late at night, I remember laying in the back seat of my mother's red Honda Civic, listening to this album. The sleepiness I felt, mixed with the dreaminess of the album, made a weirdly strong and lasting impression on me. I can't hear this album now without thinking of driving through mountains and fields and dark rainy night.

Here is "And This Is What We Call Progress."

- From The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night (2010)