Welcome to the final long weekend of the summer, which for many people will be the last big trip to the cottage or cabin in the woods or just “anywhere but here”—an escape to somewhere quiet, relaxing, and far, far away. Of course, for those of us without such remote hideaways, we make do with what we’ve got. And it’s for those people that I bring what I think is Sarah Harmer’s best song to date.

Back before her first album got picked up by Universal Canada and she became a household name, Sarah Harmer was merely the lead singer of the mostly defunct Weeping Tile. For the teenagers who’d listened to the Kingston band throughout most of the 90s, Weeping Tile was one of those Canadian alt-rock combos that made few waves on a national scale but garnered its own small following. Luther Wright went on to form his own alt-country band, Luther Wright and the Wrongs; meanwhile Harmer decided she’d strike out on her own. Her first release was an album of covers recorded for her father, Songs for Clem. Released as an afterthought after friends told her it was actually quite good, Songs for Clem eventually led Harmer to try her hand at an album of her own material.

In the summer of 2000, Harmer announced on her website that she’d finished You Were Here. She was hoping a couple of stores would carry it, but in the meantime you could send her $15 and she’d mail you a copy. I figured it’d be a lot easier to mail her a cheque than wait for a Toronto store to carry the album, so I sent out my request and received in return a CD with an inkjet-printed cover illustration and a plain pink CD with the tracklist printed in purple. That album, along with a bunch of other CDs, came with me to a friend’s cottage up by Lake Erie, where we celebrated the death of our petty high school dramas and stared unflinchingly into the abyss of our impending university careers.

It’s there that I discovered just how magnificent “Coffee Stain” sounded when accompanied by the sound of waves splashing on the beach in the early afternoon; how “Around This Corner” livened up a bright, sunny morning spent lazily reading; and how “Lodestar” could bring you out of the deepest funk and tell you everything was going to be alright. You Were Here signifies, for me, that one week I spent pretending the world was nothing but deck chairs, sand, and calm water out to the horizon.

Not long after I returned from that trip, I packed all my things and moved to Kingston to start university (and perhaps find Tom’s Shoe Repair, the store that inspired a Weeping Tile song of the same name). Not long after I got there, Universal announced that because of the massive response to Harmer’s album, they would give You Were Here a wide release, and just like that you didn’t have to worry about finding it in stores any more. And though you’ll be hard-pressed to find the quaint, partially handcrafted album I hold dear, all of You Were Here’s charms remain intact on the glossy-booklet Universal version.

And thus endeth a month of songs with trumpets. Yes, a whole month. Did you notice?