"What became of everyone I used to know? / Where did our respectable convictions go?"
The Get Up Kids frontman Matt Pryor bellows those two questions as an opening salvo and tone-setter on "Holiday" to welcome listeners to the band's 1999 album, Something to Write Home About. The sentiment in those rhetorical questions and the album as a whole offer a succinct distillation of where the guys in the Kansas City-based band were when writing the record — the nebulous, often profoundly confusing and emotionally treacherous time in your late teens and early 20s when you no longer feel like a kid and certainly don't feel like an adult yet. When you're trying to figure out what to do with your life. When you're meeting a bunch of new people and dealing with people you thought you'd be friends with forever beginning to grow distant. When you're kind of a complete mess.
"Some of us were literally still teenagers when we were writing these songs, and I think we were singing about universal things," the Get Up Kids lead guitarist Jim Suptic says. "We were deciding to drop out of college to go tour and having to make these kind of big decisions for our future and our lives and breakups and all these things. So we were just singing everyday things that a 20-year-old kid is going through — where every emotion is the biggest, every breakup is the biggest ever — and they were listening to it at that same age. If the Get Up Kids are anything, we've always been sincere in our music... sometimes to a fault."
That sincerity seeps into every note across Something to Write Home About. With an iconic double pick slide by Suptic to start things off, "Holiday" launches into an angsty anthem for relationships growing ever further apart where one might "say goodnight / mean goodbye." Things keep rolling with the start-and-stop opening riff on "Action & Action," which showcases the sonic tightness of the full band — including Ryan Pope on drums, Rob Pope on bass and James Dewees on keys — and one of the best guitar tones of the era.
And while the frustrated and skeptical youthful edge comes across in tracks like "Ten Minutes," part of what sets the album apart from many of its contemporaries is the way it conveys soft heartache with a level of somber composure. Compared with other emo classics, it's not wrapped up in as much melodrama. Songs like the tender "Valentine," the sparse "Out of Reach," or the anthem for the heartbroken overthinkers that is "My Apology," the Get Up Kids had the ability to musically rip your heart out with a gentle caress.
To say the feelings expressed across Something to Write Home About resonated deeply with a wide swath of young folks who were into indie, pop punk and emo music (specifically, Midwest emo) would be a pretty big understatement. While the album was a success at the time of its release (selling over 100,000 copies), the longevity of its resonance couldn't have been predicted. The LP is now a given staple on any publication's "Best Emo Albums Ever" list. Like sentimental parents who don't want to change a thing about their child's old room, emo fans have kept Something to Write Home About's room in their heart pristine and untouched.
Perhaps most significantly, the album imprinted on the generation of similar bands that immediately followed in the early 2000s. Something to Write Home About is a foundational text for many of the artists that would take emo from an underground scene to an arena-filling genre.
Acts like My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, The Wonder Years, and Coheed & Cambria will go out of their way to heap praise on the Get Up Kids and what the band meant to them during their formative musical years. In a 2010 oral history of the Get Up Kids in Alternative Press, Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz went as far as saying, "There should be a 'How To Be a Pop Punk Kid' starter kit with bands like Get Up Kids, so kids would know whose shoulders bands like us are standing on. Fall Out Boy would not be a band if it were not for the Get Up Kids."
To mark Something to Write Home About's 25th anniversary, the Get Up Kids are touring in support of the record once again (including a Sept. 6 stop at the Knitting Factory) and playing the album front to back. While the band admittedly has some reservations with the navel-gazing aspects of anniversary tours, the timing just made too much sense.
"Nostalgia can be good and bad," Suptic says. "We never wanted to be stuck in nostalgia. So we've never done a full tour on this album. And we figured, if we're gonna do it, this is the time — 25 years. It's crazy that it still matters to people 25 years later."
Plus, there's a literal whole new generation of the Get Up Kids fans who didn't get to see the band support the album when it was released. Seeing rooms full of both 40-somethings and teens now passionately singing along with every word of a quarter-century-old album has been a thrill for the Get Up Kids, especially considering how incremental the band's success seemed during the era when it initially came out. After all, it's impossible to see the longtail of meaningful influence in the moment.
"It was like a slow burn kind of thing, really. Our success was always kind of a gradual hill," Suptic says. "I think there was a core group of Midwest emo/emo pop records that came out right about that time, before whatever is considered emo that we know now. Before My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy blew up, there was Jimmy Eat World Clarity; Braid Frame & Canvas; Promise Ring Nothing Feels Good; Get Up Kids Something to Write Home About. There was definitely this sort of sea change happening in the punk rock world."
With the Get Up Kids' sound dipping its toes in the punk, emo, pop punk and indie rock pools, it wasn't clear at the time exactly where the band fit into the rock landscape. But rather than feeling like total outsiders, the group's sound kind of allowed them to fit in with lots of various sounds, playing shows with hardcore bands like Avail and Snapcase or with Christian pop punk bands like MxPx.
"I think part of it was that we're from the Midwest, and we sort of didn't fit in the pop punk scene in Southern California or the kind of macho hardcore scene in upstate New York or something. We kind of took elements from all the punk scenes and created our own thing," Suptic says. "We had a lot of girls at our shows early on, so a lot of the tough guys were like, 'My girlfriend likes your band.' We heard that a lot. [Laughs]"
The band has remained tight after all these years — making it through a yearslong breakup in 2005 and another hiatus in 2012 — in part because they're just a bunch of Midwest dudes who grew up going to school together. While there have been points of burnout, that core has never fully soured.
"There's the LA trope of like, 'I'm going to go out to make it!' You put up an ad, and you meet guys because he's the best player or he's got this look," Suptic says. "We literally were just buddies who all got into punk rock at the same time and loved music and started that way, never in a million years thinking I'd be doing an interview 25 years later and touring the world on some music I wrote when I was 19, you know? So there's a purity and innocence to it. I think usually, the bands with longevity, that's usually how they start."
Something to Write Home About still resonates because it poetically nails the core of youth's romanized bliss, the tangible ache of feeling that begins to fade and the realization that some of those teenage emotions never go away despite our attempts to suppress them. To paraphrase "My Apology," We might now be old enough to keep routines, but we're still child enough to scream. ♦
The Get Up Kids, Smoking Popes • Fri, Sept. 6 at 8:30 pm • $30 • All ages • Knitting Factory • 919 W. Sprague Ave. • sp.knittingfactory.com
