Single No. 2- 'Summer'
Romantic Air Recording Company RAR-0002
12" Split Single
Released May, 2005

1st pressing: Clear Blue Vinyl, Limited Edition of 500 copies, available.

Track Listing:
PAS/CAL: Summer Is Almost Here
La Laque: Secret

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Neither was sure how things had gotten this bad. The lovers had come here to wrest themselves free of exactly this – this tension, this anxiety, this dissonance. They needed a vacation, a getaway from the banal and prosaic routines that were wearing them down. Perhaps they should take flight to her parents’ place up north, she proposed. Perhaps a week-end away could restore some semblance of harmony and wash away the stains that everyday stress was leaving on their well-being.

Now, here at the cottage, they were exactly where they’d started – bickering and quarrelling in the pettiest fashion. The heat of the ever-encroaching summer seemed only to make things worse, slowing them down, making patience and understanding seem so far off in the distance – too far to reach.

Then he, in the heat of some empty argument, toppled a box resting on the mantel above the fireplace. It landed with a dusty crash, scattering its contents about the soft, worn wooden boards: photographs, slides, postcards and various yellowing notes. Her parents’ collected mementos covered the floor, forcing a wedge of silence into their squabble.

Kneeling, she began to collect the box’s evicted odds & ends. Here was a portrait of the grandparents in swimsuits before the old man’s Cadillac. Here was a lone beach ball on an empty length of shoreline. Beneath that a fuzzy color snapshot of her father somewhere on the old Vegas strip. Her eyes drifted to a photograph of herself, age eighteen, in Paris.

“Oh! Paris!” she exclaimed at the memories the photo unearthed. She’d gone one summer on her own and had become so enamored of the city that she returned two years later, this time with her new lover in tow: the man who now, years later, stood over her as she lazily drifted over spilled sentiments. “I love this photo of your mother,” he said, reaching for a blurry photograph of a woman posed before a hotel-room mirror. “It’s funny because my mother had that exact same dress. Even the same hairdo.”

They searched through more odds and ends, occasionally remarking at this person’s smile, this person’s demeanor, this memory and that memory. “Look. You and me there,” she said to him, reaching across the pile. “This is…five years ago.” In the photo she had her lips pressed to his cheek as he displayed an exaggerated frown with a protruding tongue. “You were always such a romantic!” she sighed through a half-smile. “I know it. You really lucked out when you got a hold of me.” She laughed & returned the photograph to the box. “Hey, do you want to go down to the water?” she asked as the last remnant was cleared from the floor. He stood, brushed the thighs of his jeans and extended a hand to help her up.

They spent the rest of the evening in the lake and laying on the beach, being lulled by the wan moonlight, the hypnotic metronome of the water’s waves and the accompanying din of the nocturnal wildlife.