The Wonder Years - Me Vs. The Highway
Off the Punk Is Dead. Get A Job split
The bridge on this is incredible.
“And I remember me at 18, naked in your parent’s basement”
The Wonder Years: Royale; Boston, MA (March 12th 2012 - The Glamour Kills Tour)
Washington Square Park
Melrose Diner
Keystone State Dude-Core
It’s Never Sunny In South Philadelphia
Hoodie Weather
Coffee Eyes
Came Out Swinging
Don’t Let Me Cave In
Woke Up Older
Local Man Ruins Everything
My Last Semester
Won’t Be Pathetic Forever
I Was Scared And I’m Sorry
Logan Circle
And Now I’m Nothing
—
You’re Not Salinger. Get Over It.
All My Friends Are In Bar Bands (featuring Matt Arsenault of A Loss For Words)
Oh hey look, a full recent live set by one of my favourite bands. I will reblog this so it is easy to find when I want to watch it later.
Came Out Swinging by The Wonder Years
This is the attitude I will do my best to carry in to 2012.
“Came out swinging from a South Philly basement caked in stale beer and sweat, under half-lit fluorescents. I spent the winter writing songs about getting better and if I’m being honest, I’m getting there”
Thomas Nassiff on the Pop Punk’s Not Dead tour, featuring The Wonder Years, Man Overboard, This Time Next Year and Set Your Goals.
I wish this sort of thing happened more in indie rock. So many bands in Britain are still clinging on to this sort of 90s ideal hungover where they see music as a competition to be most successful. It’s better to treat your peers as comrades than as rivals. And I think there are some groups of bands that get this - the UK indie equivalent that springs to mind is Los Campesinos!, Sky Larkin, Johnny Foreigner etc. who tour together and always seem to be doing what they can to help each other out.
The other thing that’s fascinating here is the look at what happens to a musical genre when it falls out of the mainstream - yeah, you and I are going to be playing that Wonder Years record all year but that record peaked at number seventy three. The Blink-182 reunion record went to number one but it takes way fewer units to do that these days than in, say, 1999. “Enema of the State”* peaked at number nine and do you remember how insanely massive and inescapable that was? There’s something… I don’t know, comforting to me about the fact that pop-punk is no longer anything like a surefire ticket to fame or fortune (I’m reminded of all the kids on Absolute Punk this summer complaining that Warped tour was mostly metalcore etc bands) and yet you have bands that care about this stuff intensely who are putting out some of the best music the genre’s ever seen (seriously, this year’s Wonder Years and Transit records. Seriously) and I guess why that’s comforting to me is that at some point (and it’s a point that we are now SPRINTING towards) “indie rock” is going to stop being such a big fucking deal, and I like to think that it’ll go on in the same way pop-punk has. Shrinking perhaps to a scene or something like it, and in doing so inspiring a lot more camaraderie, and a lot more people doing what they do for The Right Reasons.
Being in love with a lot of quite different genres does odd things to your brain sometimes.
*In retrospect, I think the toilet humour was a large part of why I didn’t actually like this stuff in my teenage years.
| — |
Dan “Soupy” Campbell of The Wonder Years, talking to Indulge Sound. I FEEL YOU. I’m not quite this anxious any more - I quite like parties and dancing and stuff, but I’m also still frequently a nervous dude who is very bad at, for example, meeting new people. And sometimes I’m terrified on stage and sometimes I feel exactly like this. |
