Last night I took a trip to The Paramount here on Long Island with my best friend to see The Wonder Years. She and I saw them in NYC a year ago when they were touring a combined anniversary show for both their albums The Upsides and Suburbia I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing. I enjoyed that show (though admittedly my biggest takeaway was how amazing Origami Angel are) but neither of those albums were ever my favorites from TWY; I just enjoy seeing them live regardless of what songs they’re playing.
Last night’s show was a very different experience. My friend and I decided to purchase seated tickets which is an excellent choice for anyone who finds themselves of an age where the morning after standing at a concert you feel as though all of your bones are slightly out of place. Sightlines from our seats were amazing; The Paramount is just an all-around great venue to see basically anything. But having a seat at the back also means that you get to watch the audience on the floor as part of the show, which creates a powerful additional visual to the band - watching them jump when they’re commanded to, circle pits opening up in time with the music.
For me, the best part of the show was getting to experience something that is unique to The Wonder Years - the way they have referenced, honored, and confronted their own discography, the life lived in their previous music, within their most recent release, The Hum Goes On Forever. When that album dropped, I did something I don’t know that I’ve ever done before - I stayed up until midnight to listen to it all the way through the second it was available, and I was truly moved. As someone whose favorite album of theirs is easily identified as No Closer to Heaven, hearing callbacks to those songs overwhelmed me. But seeing songs like “Cardinals” and “Cardinals II” back-to-back felt profound.
Hearing these two tracks together made me think of one of the most human experiences there is, and one of the hardest to face: feelings don’t just go away. Sometimes, things that you think you’ve overcome swell up on you at the strangest, most inopportune times and you’re forced to confront your own fragility over and over again. I have been learning this the hard way as I swim the ocean of grief from losing my mother in 2022: there are days I feel as though I am standing on the shore and looking out over the sadness and hopeless feelings I confronted while she was sick. And then there are days I know I am still lost at sea. Perhaps this was not TWY’s intention when writing “Cardinals II”, perhaps they just wanted to take another swing at the first track - but for a random person sitting in the audience who knows that a powerful emotion like grief never ends, that you have to keep fighting it and finding new ways to cope and move forward with the emotion, hearing a band (and a lyricist like Dan Campbell) face that head on was almost too much for me in the moment.
There is so much to love about The Wonder Years recent string of albums (note: they did play two tracks off Suburbia and one from The Updsides; they’re not insane) and the concepts they tackle: my personal favorite is “the only love song we’ll play” as Campbell stated before quietly opening “You In January”. I am not a partnered person, so the song has a completely different meaning for me. I first heard it just before moving to Washington, D.C. and moving away from a new friend I’d made who’d gotten me through the painful transition of going from taking care of my Mom to taking care of myself. Sometimes I think of the lyric “you were the one thing I got right” as a motto for the time I was back living in NY; I made a lot of mistakes, and maybe I put my own life on pause, but meeting her made it all worthwhile and she continues to be a beacon of light in my life.
If you’re a person dealing with grief, going to see The Wonder Years is either the best or worst idea you could have. The band is going to hold up a mirror to you, whether you want it or not, and it can be equal parts heartbreaking and cathartic. Songs like “Saints and Cigarettes” and “Songs About Death” are not going to let you be a passive member of the audience - they will grab you by the throat and say “this is what it means to be alive and in love - you will lose, and it will hurt and you’ll have to keep going. Somehow.” The sea of people below and around you give their physical form over to the music - the thrashing, dancing, shouting, flailing wildness of being human taking over the room.
The good news is that the six humans who make up The Wonder Years offer us a reminder on why we keep going: the last song they played before their brief encore is also the last track off the new record, and it’s called “You’re the Reason I Don’t Want the World to End”. Like the second song of the night, named for Campbell’s son Wyatt, it is easy to think the answer we’re being offered is specific. When I saw No Earbuds founder Jamie Coletta write a powerful thread on Twitter about this track and her own journey as a parent, I actually thought I was going to feel completely disconnected from this album. I’m not a parent and I have no plans to be. How could I ever find commonality with someone talking about finding hope in this at-times-hopeless-feeling world through his children?
But as I listened in the dark at 1am, I was reminded of something we often forget: I am someone’s child. Someone out there was challenged by a different world, one with its own challenges and horrors, and they still found enough hope to have me and raise me and help me become the person I am now. In the song, Campbell sings about finding his son’s glove in his coat pocket and it helping him to not feel alone. Every fall, I reach into my coat pocket for the first time and come up with a few dollar bills that I left there in the spring - a tradition my mother made to help bring joy to her future self, and in turn, to me. I am the thing she left behind in a coat pocket, a garden my father is still tending, teaching me how to go on and how to be good to the people around me who will remember me when I am gone.
There are those out there who may read this and think “you got all of that out of a song?” And the answer is: “yes.” Because I try to be open to these things, when the universe wants to send me a sign, or fill me up. I come, unfortunately, from a line of a women who aren’t allowed to keep their own memories up to the end. So I try to enjoy the moments when they happen because there might not be a chance to relive them. And I write about them here in the hopes that just one other person out there gets to read them and goes into an experience like a concert or a film or a party or a bike ride along the water with an open mind and lets themselves be moved and just be fully present, wherever they may be.
Put the work in, plant a garden, try to stay afloat.