It’s Kind of Weird That I’m Still Emo

Is it possible to outgrow the music that defined your teenage years?

Me with Ace Enders, frontman of The Early November, at a show in Nashville in November 2023. Enders, a heavyweight figure of New Jersey’s 2000s emo scene, was a hero; now he’s just a dad still rocking out despite the arthritis.

Not in the way I dress, really—barring the fact that I’m currently wearing a Jason Isbell tee shirt of crying adults at a backyard barbecue—but in the fact that emo music, and all its corresponding sub-genres, continue to make up at least half of what plays in my car, laptop, or headphones on any given Sunday.

Some of this is early, turn-of-the-Millennium stuff, like Dashboard Confessionals and The Early November—which I saw perform the entirety of The Room’s Too Cold at a 20^th Anniversary Show headlined by Armor for Sleep, which played the entirety of Dream to Make Believe, their hit record from 2003, last year in Nashville.

But right now, as I’m killing time before seeing Memoir of a Snail at Downtown West, I’m listening to a band called Microwave, which released its first EP, Nowhere Feels Like Home, in 2013. Before that, I was listening to Ben Quad, a Gen-Z iteration of the band Tiny Moving Parts, a Midwestern emo trio that I spent a lot of last winter listening to—because what genre is better suited for the gray dullness of an East Tennessee January than one whose songs are entirely about feeling bad for yourself.

I can list a dozen reasons why it makes no sense that I listen to these bands, both old and new. But the principal one is that, at 35, I’m no longer heartbroken about not kissing girls on the dance floor at a VFW Hall in the New Jersey suburbs. I am happily married with three children, a job that pays well, and, seeing as I moved out at 22, parents who aren’t squashing my individuality—which is a major bummer since parents preventing you from being you is like the leading cause of adolescent angst. Now, I have only myself to blame for my failings.

Before I started scribbling this column about emo music, I was writing about a Saturday morning spent hanging out with my two big kids, who I took to play tennis at Tyson Park. Afterward, we rode bicycles to the UT Gardens, where they frolicked for an hour until we hopped back on our bikes. On the return leg, I taught them how to interact with strangers on the greenway. The first, three good ole boys from Loudon, were magnet-fishing for lost coins and railroad ties in Third Creek. The second, two female grad students at UT, were cutting down invasive plant species and replacing them with native ones. Closer to the car, we even saw river otters.  

Alba and Enzo at UT Gardens.

Later, as the kids napped, I pulled the bikes off the car rack and washed them in the driveway while singing along to “Ohio is for Lovers” (Hawthorne Heights), “Jude Law and a Semester Abroad” (Brand New), and “Cute without the E (Cut from the Team” (Taking Back Sunday) from my epic Emo/Screamo 2002-2006 playlist on Spotify. Even the distorted guitars and soaring melodies couldn’t phase out the crushing awfulness of the lyrics.

Nevertheless, like good butt rock (see: “One Last Breath” by Creed and “Blurry” by Puddle of Mudd) and Jesus-loving neighbors who have political signs on their front lawns, I choose to practice cognitive dissonance. I can sing in anguish about a heartbreak that never happened, a murder plot against a lover who wronged me at 16, despite sharing a bed each night with a woman who’s seen me at my worst—and also naked—yet still makes me breakfast and gives me childless hours on a Saturday to watch movies by myself.

Nostalgia is a strange thing in this way. The surface changes, but below the skin, we’re much the same. Knowing that tendency, the challenge becomes not succumbing to the immaturity of our youth. Which, for me, isn’t easy. But I’m trying my best.

Words from the Wise

“Looking back on my younger self’s embarrassment over emo’s too-muchness, its excess of excess, I see that what really embarrassed me was myself. The music I listened to was a key part of my public identity, and I didn’t want my public identity—and perhaps not my private one, either—to include the very real fact that I, like everyone else, sometimes felt in danger of being overwhelmed by emotional chaos.”

Peter Baker, “When Emo Conquered the Mainstream,” The New Yorker, July 2023

Useful Trivia

The birth of emo predated the mega-popular bands associated with the genre, like Jimmy Eat World, Fall Out Boy, and Paramore. Rites of Spring and their self-titled 1985 album are credited with launching the genre. Frontman Guy Picciotto went on to start the post-hardcore band Fugazi.

My crew out at a Chinese buffet on a Friday night, pictured with random Jersey City chicks amused by the fact we dressed like morons.

What I’m Reading

One great story I read this week was “The Extra Mile,” about a 50-something married couple that runs 100-mile ultra-marathons together, an unlikely bonding strategy that began after the husband nearly died in a car accident. The feature by Maggie Gigandet appeared in The Atavist and is worth reading or listening to on the site if you like motivational stories that aren’t crap. The race that Gigandet follows them on is the 314-mile Last Annual Vol State Road Race, which was started by an eccentric from Bell Buckle, Tennessee, who goes by the name Lazarus Lake.

What I’m Listening To

One of the long broken-up emo bands I’m not embarrassed about enjoying is Thursday. Once, at a show for the band I Am the Avalanche at Maxwell’s Cafe in Hoboken, New Jersey, I met Geoff Rickley, Thursday’s frontman, at the bar. I was 15 and star-struck, and he was just a dude there to support his friends. Thursday had some mainstream success with 2003’s War All the Time, but my favorite tune of theirs—and one of the first heavier emo songs I’d heard after leaving Blink-182 in my rearview mirror—is “Understanding in a Car Crash” from their 2001 album Full Collapse.

What I’m Watching

Speaking of being emo, I saw Memoir of a Snail, a claymation tragicomedy that is definitely not for kids, and I thought it was so fitting for everything I mulled over in this column. Critics reckon this’ll be a clear favorite for next year’s Academy Awards in the animation category. And I was surprised that, on a Tennessee football night, there were a dozen folks in the theater with me. Amy Nicholson of The Washington Post calls it “a grubby delight, a stop-motion charmer that feels like falling into a dumpster and discovering an orchid,” which is better than anything I could write to get the weirdos among you who enjoy sad-happy stories to watch it.

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