boardwalk

There are places you leave, and then there are places that never really leave you.

For me, the boardwalk is one of those places.

“BOARDWALK” grew out of memories of Seaside Heights, New Jersey — summer nights when everything seemed louder, brighter, faster, and somehow more important than it probably was. The windows were down before you even got over the bridge. The radio was cranked up. Traffic crawled toward the ocean while every other car had its own soundtrack blasting through the open windows.

And then you got there.

Arcade bells. Roller coasters. Pizza and sausage cooking somewhere down the boards. Salt in the air. Neon reflecting off everything. The Ferris wheel turning above the rooftops. Crowds moving in every direction. Music coming from open doors. Friends yelling to each other over the noise.

When you're young, you don't realize you're living inside a memory.

You think it's just Friday night.

That's why I'm posting this old Polaroid-style image with the song. A few couples walking the boardwalk sometime in the 1980s, laughing and talking, completely unaware that decades later a photograph like this would feel almost like a time machine.

Nobody's looking at a phone.

Nobody's documenting the moment for anybody else.

They're just in it.

That's the feeling I wanted in “BOARDWALK.”

The song starts with that rush:

“A minute over the bridge, we could leave it all behind,
Windows down, summer rolling, every station turned up high.”

That was the Jersey Shore to me. Crossing that bridge meant something. Whatever was waiting back home could stay there for a few hours. Once the lights appeared in the distance, the night belonged to us.

And like most memories from those years, some of it is beautiful, some of it is ridiculous, and some of it probably shouldn't have happened at all.

There is a line in the song about taking acid on the Tilt-A-Whirl.

Yes, that comes from the spirit of those years too.

Youth has a way of convincing you that you're indestructible. We were reckless, curious, stupid, funny, alive — sometimes all in the same five minutes. I didn't want to write a cleaned-up postcard version of the past. I wanted the real thing: the noise, the mistakes, the friendships, the cars, the girls, the rides, the ocean, and that strange certainty that summer would somehow last forever.

But “BOARDWALK” isn't really a song about being young.

It's about going back.

The person singing the song isn't that kid anymore. He's returning years later with the woman he loves, wanting to show her the place where some earlier version of himself once lived.

That changed the entire meaning of the song for me.

He thinks he's going back to recover something.

Instead, he discovers something new.

“I came looking for my younger days,
But with her beside me there,
The boardwalk felt brand new again
With summer in the air.”

That's the heart of it.

We spend so much of our lives believing that if we could just get back to a certain place, hear a certain song, drive a certain road, or stand under those same lights again, maybe we could briefly become the people we used to be.

But you can't.

And maybe that's okay.

Because sometimes the real gift isn't getting your old life back.

It's bringing someone you love into that memory and realizing there are still new memories left to make.

So when I look at this Polaroid — these couples walking beneath the lights sometime in another lifetime — I wonder where they are now. I wonder who stayed together. Who disappeared from each other's lives. Who still remembers that particular night. Who would give anything to walk those boards together one more time.

Maybe that's why old photographs hit differently as you get older.

At first you see the people.

Then you start seeing the time.

“BOARDWALK” is my love letter to those nights, those people, and that feeling of crossing the bridge with the windows down and absolutely no idea where life was going to take us.

Turns out it took us pretty far.

But every once in a while, you can still hear the arcade bells.

And somewhere in the distance, the Ferris wheel is still turning.

BOARDWALK
from American Twilight
Jake Petruska