#274 (of 365) "Two French Sisters" Pants Yell!

I don't know much about this band. It's sort of following a recent theme - quite similar to the Radio Dept. and Wild Nothing - and it's a wonderful catchy pop song. But the reason this song is on the chart is because of a stanza toward the end. Probably the most perfect lyrics I've ever heard and ever felt.

When I was in college, the summer after my undergrad senior year, I was in grad school and working at the school library, and I lived with my friend Norm, who was going to be a junior, in a house off-campus in New Brunswick that we would live in during the upcoming year. Norm and Dan--who had once lived with one of my best friends in college--were two of the only close friends I had who weren't graduating (as most of my friends were in the same class as me) and they were looking for an off-campus apartment and kind of latched onto me to do the searching for the three of us. One of my freshman year roommates (Steve) had openings in a house he was going to rent, enough room for all three of us, and we signed onto the lease. We were all to live upstairs--with one more roommate--while a bunch of guys were going to live downstairs. But Steve went home for the summer, as did Dan, and Steve sublet his room in the house attic to two girls--whose names I have sadly forgotten, but they were sweet and nice and I think undergraduates, and that summer, upstairs, it was me and Norm and the two girls spending a lot of our extensive free time at nights with our friend Scott who lived down the block, the five of us hanging out on our porch having beers and just talking, in the hot summer nights in New Brunswick, not a care in the world.

I don't remember their names and I haven't seen Norm or Scott (or Dan or Steve) in at least two decades but for a time, that summer, the five of us hanging out on the porch of our shitty house in New Brunswick, my confused reality (closeted gay engineer who longed to be a writer but was studying for an MBA) found some kind of solace in a bunch of people who also didn't have anything figured out either and were just enjoying the weather.

This song always reminds me of that time. That final verse at least. It's one of the only things I really miss about being young--the languorous days without pressure to accomplish things, to just be, and not be so worried about time. I don't know how to get that back. I don't know how to function anymore without a schedule and duties and an attempt to wring the most out of life. I miss it. The not caring. Just being. And I love this freaking song.

"The sun rises but it also sets. You're not done with me yet.
Of all the places I'd like to be it's in a room with no TV.
And open window and company.
Their smiling faces to say, that they missed me."

"Two French Sisters" - Pants Yell! // Alison Stanton (2007)