If This Was The Cold War, We Could Keep Each Other Warm.

Indie rock crushes have ruined me. It’s something I’ve thought for years, a realization I came to after I interviewed Tim Kasher from Cursive, a band I’d idolized since my early teenage years. It was an interview I’d expected to go horribly, an interview I expected to ruin one of the icons of my youth. I expected Kasher to drunkenly slur his answers at me, to tell me I was a good interviewer, but I’d be better if I took my top off, and to throw an empty beer bottle at me if I didn’t comply. Instead, the man I was confronted with was nothing short of a sweetheart. He was kind, he was gracious, and he even interrupted me at one point to compliment my shoes. And with that, I was smitten.

It made me wonder, afterward, how my fifteen year old self’s crush on Kasher had impacted my romantic choices. Had I inadvertently sought out men who projected the same persona in their personal lives that Kasher did in his professional life? The drunken Lothario unable to maintain monogamy? The more I examined my past, the more it seemed as if that were the case. In more recent years, my ridiculous desire to find a man just like Justin Townes Earle has gotten me mixed up in some real life nonsense but the older that I get, the more I do that whole strange “growing up” thing that I think I’m in the midst of at twenty six, the more I realize that is not what I want. And even if it is what I want, it probably isn’t what’s best. So, in true Amber fashion, I’ve defaulted to attempting to find a fella swathed in shades of another indie rock hero of mine, Josh Ritter.

The Temptation of Adam – Josh Ritter

Let’s face it, no one knows how to create a romance like Ritter does. He writes songs about mummies who fall in love with the archaeologist who unearths him, songs about nuclear scientists developing feelings for one another  whilst engineering a bomb to bring about the end of the world, and his songs are peppered with lyrics like “All the other girls here are stars, you are the northern lights.” Ritter is the kind of gentleman about whom you’d say “They don’t make guys like him in real life”, only he is real life, so where does that leave me?

It sets the bar high, listening to Ritter’s songs and wondering if anyone will ever write anything like that about me, or even think that about me. I used to think indie rock crushes had ruined me because they’d caused me to go after the kind of rough and tumble guys that got in bar room brawls and had hand guns. Now, I realize my indie rock crushes have probably ruined me in a different way. The tricky part is that I know guys like Ritter exist. I know this because I’ve met them. I just haven’t met the right one.

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