The movie “Adventureland” is a story of post-graduate hope and fear, blues and romance, as seen through the eyes of a recent college graduate, but I relate to the story more if I think of its hero as a recent high school graduate. This is partly because the character’s sexual innocence and social ineptitude remind me more of a high school graduate than of a college graduate, but mostly because the film, set in 1987, has a soundtrack loaded with songs that take me right back to my own high school experience, which began in 1987, and so manages to be a great soundtrack for my own high school musical.

The songs in the film cover an impressive amount of 80′s musical ground, from Rush to The Replacements, Judas Priest to The Jesus and Mary Chain, and overall the music goes a long way toward helping the film achieve its sweetly nostalgic tone. Each song hits me emotionally in its own way, but it is the INXS song, “Don’t Change”, that rolls with the closing credits, that lands the most powerful blow. It is so simple, so hopeful, and so goddamn romantic that it manages to perfectly capture the youthful sense of promise in leaving one thing behind and embracing another, while at the same time embodying the youthful belief that something lost can be found again.

I like a song that can take me to such a place in my mind, if only because now, though I still recognize the promise in life, such recognition is heavy with the weight of countless promises broken, mostly by me, and as much to myself as to others. “Don’t Change” manages to remind me that the world hasn’t stopped being a magical place just because I’ve grown cynical enough to not believe in magic so much as I did when I was younger. It reminds me to not steep so long in the mistakes of my past that I become bitter with regret, but to instead remember what it was like to be a starry-eyed, hopeless fucking romantic and put a little of that into each new day.