I was spending most of my time on the outskirts of my hometown, Lodi, when I heard this song for the first time. I was heavily infatuated with a skinny latina who owned a bunny. The bunny sat in a cage in her room, and, consequently, my eyes were usually puffy and red from my allergic reaction to it. Instead of being suave, I was hacking up a lung. Not one month later, she accidentally left the bunny outside during one of the hottest summer northern California days, and he died from the heat. I was secretly happy about Mr. Bunny’s death, but I would have been just as satisfied if the bunny could have been moved into her mom’s weird doll room.
Her mom was an antique fanatic; their house was filled with little odd trinkets. It was really cool…until I walked into the doll room. Dolls with weird little marble eyes were staring at me from everywhere. I was sure that they would come to life and kill me. Some nights, I would stay over, and I would have to get up to pee. The bathroom was past the doll room’s door, and it was very hard not to piss myself before getting to the bathroom. I was terrified of those dolls.
While I was busy wasting my life away with this cute little latina, I had to take breaks from our intense hang outs for my record store job. While her and I watched Coldplay and At The Drive In on the new MTV2 channel, I would moan and groan about having to go in for work. I literally wanted to spend the rest of my life watching MTV2 with this girl. What a schmuck I was. When I would finally arrive late to work, my coworkers would always reward me by playing new music for me. There was this emo kid who worked at the store, and he was probably the most genuine for his love of music. You could see it oozing out of him; his whole life was music. All of us, at this particular store, absolutely loved music, but I could tell when this emo kid went home, he probably lit candles and incense, popped pills, and listened to Radiohead all night.
On one particular day, when I’d left my girl for work, the emo kid had played this song during my shift. I had known about Pete Yorn because the record label had sent us about five promo copies of this album. They were doing some major marketing on this guy. He’d had a music video on MTV2 called Nancy that I’d fucking hated with a passion, so I’d ignored the promos as did everyone else. Not emo kid. He’d found a gem on Pete Yorn’s record.
I’ll always appreciate that emo kid for showing this song to me. It became my soundtrack over the next year when my whole life changed. I found out that the little latina was cheating on me with her “ex-boyfriend”. Her “ex” and I both broke up with her and became friends. After realizing that I was doing nothing in Lodi besides getting drunk and playing Tetris on N64, I decided to move to San Luis Obispo with my childhood friend and his girlfriend for college. I transferred my record store job to Santa Maria (forty-five minutes away from San Luis Obispo), and “Musicforthemorningafter”, the album with this song on it, played me home every night through the foggy coastal hills.
In 2006, when I recorded the Something About Dreams EP, I referenced this song the producer and engineer for “Lights On The Fire”. I wanted to make my song have that distant memory sound. ”On Your Side” was a huge influence in my life and my music.
Last night, I had a dream where this song was playing in the background. I woke up with these memories.
