Surrounded by familiar faces, the people that you love to see

 Or: I was born in the right generation

I hadn’t been inside the SM Skydome since I was 18. 

It had been about ten years. It was the venue where I got to cover my first concert with a press pass, where I got to see William Beckett from the front row in the most intimate concert I’ve ever attended—only hundreds in the crowd—and he acknowledged me from the stage. But there’s only ever going to be one band I’ll always associate with the Skydome, and it was the same reason I was there at that moment: The Maine. 

I hadn’t gone to a concert of theirs since their pivotal Pioneer Tour stop in 2012 because their newer songs resonated with me less and it got to a point where I’d become mostly unfamiliar with their setlists. But this was going to be the Sweet Sixteen Tour, to commemorate their debut album Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, and they were going to play the whole album on their second night in Manila, along with more deep cuts from their discography. 

My friends and I could not miss this. 

Having been fans of The Maine when we were in high school, we’ve naturally had plenty of time to evolve into different people and kind of grow out of that phase. We tend to joke that we’re “retired.” But as soon as the announcement dropped, it was like no time had passed. We immediately made plans, and for some of us, for the first time in a very long time, we were going to be attending another concert in a mall together—seeing the band that allowed our worlds to collide. 

There was no question to me that I would be getting two-day tickets, and closer to the show dates, I decided to treat myself and check in to the hotel connected to the mall so I wouldn’t have to go home only to come back the next day. Most of this might be personal myth at this point. I’d waited too long to write and I didn’t take many notes on my phone, and it was really just two great nights spent listening to the music of my teenage years live with the people I got to grow up with listening to them. 

It’s so freeing to have a band like The Maine that’s pure comfort. I didn’t have any expectations, save for songs I wanted to hear, because I’d already had such a rich history of experiences related to them. I’d seen them in their prime, I’d met them, I’d even gotten to interview them a number of times. Garrett had literally, at one point, used a photo I’d taken of him as his Twitter icon.

On September 27 we mostly watched from the right-side bleachers. They played over 25 songs that night, including “Diet Soda Society,” “Right Girl,” “Don’t Come Down,” “Misery,” and “Blame.” I’d been playfully livid whenever they’d play “Saving Grace” here and I hadn’t come to see them, but this time they played a beautifully romantic mashup of the song with “Whoever She Is” that had us all swaying. Camz and I kept screaming that it’s my song (being a Halloween baby) during “Forever Halloween,” a track I thought I’d never hear live. And “Another Night on Mars” was a great encore. It was funny how we’d go quiet when they’d play newer songs, then go absolutely berserk when it was time for the classics. 

But what got me crying, grasping the magnitude of the how-we-got-here-ness of the moment, was “(Un)Lost” and the back-to-back double whammy of “Love & Drugs” and “Like We Did (Windows Down).” I couldn’t help flashing back to 12 years ago, sitting on the floor outside this same venue with Mariel waiting in the queue to be let in for that concert, as the same two songs—“Like We Did” and “Don’t Give Up on ‘Us’”—looped over and over.  

September 28 was the Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop show, and we decided to plunge into the crowd for it. We all laughed seeing the band come out in the iconic white and gold suits (not black and blue!) they’d all worn as teens in the late 2000s, destined to be in the running for the new princes of pop-punk and eventually become something else altogether. “Everything I Ask For” will always get me on my feet, the ultimate girl-worship anthem where John comes off as a bit of a lovable loser. “Girls Do What They Want” and “Count ‘Em One, Two, Three” will never stop being good old call-and-response fun. “Into Your Arms” is the only song that will ever make me weirdly emotional during a line that tries to bait you into singing, She’s got the most amazing ass. 

John went into the crowd at one point. I think it may have been to start a mosh pit, or to join one. I’d said to Clarissa the day before that the concert didn’t feel complete without one of her signature condom balloons, and that night she actually delivered. 

I was so excited to sing “Love is a luxury,” she said during “This Is the End.” And the feeling of getting to scream 81! 23! Means everything! To me! during “We All Roll Along” is something indescribable that not everyone will get, but here it’s practically a love language, and few things are as powerful. 

And then there’s “We’ll All Be…” A song that goes on forever, but never long enough. My friends and I held each other tight as we declared, And for the first time, I feel less alone. For the first time, I can call this home. And later, We all have been degraded. We all have been the greatest. 

I had zero regrets about the hotel stay, even if it was a little pricey. I had a good breakfast, piling my plate with annatto rice and creamy chicken and fried dumplings and dry noodles, plus a little chocolate chip scone. And two consecutive days of concerts was a lot, but nothing I couldn’t wash away with a hot shower as soon as I got into my room. 

 

I spent most of both days with Camz, Audrie, and Steph—the three I regularly talk to the most, along with Cheska. But really the whole affair was nothing short of a family reunion: frantic waving and voices going shrill with excitement upon spotting these faces we hadn’t seen in years, some of which we never thought we’d see again. We sang along to lyrics that are probably tattooed on our minds (if not literally tattooed somewhere on our bodies), we laughed about old inside jokes and got up to old habits, we took pictures, we caught up over dinner, we sat down when we needed to because our joints did not work like they used to. “We’re so old!” 

I was especially grateful to have gotten back in touch with Kat and Clarissa, who flew out to live this great big new adventure in America not long after the tour. 

People express doubt all the time these days that you can meet friends online, particularly Tumblr, even more that you could manage to have them cross over to the real world. But as someone whose lifelong friends are from Tumblr, I’m just like, “Skill issue.” 

But of course these friendships are the absolute rarest gems from a bygone era, and I’m constantly being reminded of how lucky we are to get to have something this special. It felt extra real, looking around the Skydome and seeing them, feeling them, hearing them right next to me. These were people I met on a screen because we all loved The Maine a decade ago, and somehow they’ve become inextricable constants within my life. Nobody has ever oomfed harder than we have.

I wouldn’t even really called it a “reunion,” because we’ve all been here for each other all along, like the Skins cast. 

We’re so lucky. We’re so lucky. The timing, the people, the places. We got to be young at a time when these were the bands and these were the songs that were at their peak, living out our exhilaration, living through our angst, and living vicariously through them. Physical media and Astroplus release parties, music video premieres and waiting for surprise screen time on MTV, vinyl pre-orders and waiting two months to listen to the album until the record arrived and you could drop the needle. Microblogging when people weren’t afraid to interact and weren’t too cool to mess up their pages, so we just talked directly on our Dashboards through our posts and reblogs. 

A scene when being part of a scene meant something. You just truly had to be there. 

This kind of thing will never happen again, for us or anyone else. 

It wasn’t just our little corner of the internet—it was also a subculture and pocket of time that allowed us to meet in person frequently and really keep in touch. For a brief time concert producers actually took note that this is what teenagers were listening to, and they managed to bring these obscure-ish bands often enough. Think about it: even There for Tomorrow, even The Downtown Fiction. Many of us were also entering college, and it was just easier to make plans and keep seeing each other and hanging out.   

Live shows at Ayala Malls came to define a generation—our generation. They were common enough that they became unlikely markers of a specific era in my life, of my coming-of-age. Days when Fridays meant going to the mall after school to hang out at Timezone, or see the latest Harry Potter movie (I wish I could make a different reference, but I have to be true to the time), or try new toppings on frozen yogurt. It’s just that sometimes, you just happened to catch Cobra Starship performing their hit “Guilty Pleasure” live and in person at the activity center, and it felt like the most normal thing in the world. 

When the LIV3 Tour was announced to be kicking off for a four-day run in 2011, it caused a huge shift. We could look at how our lives had changed and pin it all on this one crazy week. Our post-concert emotions didn’t cease for six months, as the February show dates bled into high school graduation (for some of us, including me) and the summer and some of the following school year, until we had a new thing to focus on: embarrassing to admit, but it was the All Time Low concert in Araneta that would be taking place that September. And one of the acts for LIV3 was going to be The Maine, whose then-latest album Black and White had pretty much been a soundtrack of my senior year. 

It was pretty clear that while those of us in bandom listened to many acts, the center of our ecosystem and the band that tied us all together was The Maine. If LIV3 was the beginning of everything, Pioneer Tour was where all of it fell into place. Full fucking circle. 

I’m going to hand it over to 17-year-old Fiel from 2012 for a bit: 

You listen to a band for almost five years, and for the first three years you think you’re never going to see them live. You think you’re alone, all this time, listening to them, you think nobody else in your country gives a shit about them. Well, you know there’s got to be somebody else out there, but you don’t know how to find them. You think, “I’d do anything to hear this live.” You think, “Of course, it’s never gonna happen.” 

But somehow, unprecedented and unexpected, this band had ended up here, in my city, in my “hometown,” as pop-punk cliches go. 

You look around, and there are people who feel the exact same way you do, who love this band as much as you do. And you never thought this moment would ever come. 

And you’re there. You’re so lucky to be there. 

This was also around the time Tavi Gevinson launched her online magazine Rookie, which in turn inspired and launched several copycat youth-oriented zines—one of which was our very own Elision, ideated during an idle, random conversation we were having while waiting around for yet another Ayala Malls concert to begin. We were young enough to want to do everything and believe we could make it happen. On my blog I’d post stupid song lyric Picnik edits on pretentious pictures I took with my Nikon D3000, and for some reason they’d get hundreds of notes. As 13- to 16-year-olds we all had businesses selling one-inch wristbands, designing them ourselves and emailing suppliers to produce them for us… and getting detained by mall security for trying to sell them at a Good Charlotte show in Glorietta.

Yes, we literally made (most of) these

Now that I’m 30, I sometimes think about the Tumblr Ask I got when I was 16 that just said, You are so young. It was meant to be condescending, to tell me I didn’t know shit about anything. Of course, I only replied with a GIF of somebody blinking, unimpressed. But that was the best and worst part of growing up online, after all: getting to make mistakes, getting to start over, getting to put something out there and have it travel and reach an incredible amount of people, even if it’s not perfect. 

The whole world was my Tumblr Dashboard, and my Tumblr Dashboard was my whole world.

My online friends and I built our trust and memories as we kept seeing each other, hands held tight and moving our bodies in the dark to the backdrop of all the songs we loved, live. Gathered to share our voices and our elation and this experience that’s bigger than all of us. It went on for a couple of years, every few weeks or months. And it felt only apt to have the culmination of it be the 2013 Fall Out Boy show in Araneta, after they came back from their four-year hiatus. I had turned 19, and I was ready for something else. Everything else.  

I was at prime malleability when I was 16 to 18, waiting to be shaped into a person. I could become anyone. It was that age when the bands you listened to became part of your identity, and in my case, they literally wound up creating domino effects in every facet of my life, for the bad sometimes, but mostly for the good. My friends, my job, how I create and how my passion manifests, how I handle grief and depression. 

We were the ones who were always saying, “I was born in the wrong generation.” But years later, it feels pretty good to realize we couldn’t have been part of a more fitting, more right one all along.

Even if I was “over it all” by 2013 and we all started branching out to other interests, my online friends and I kept in touch, and it wasn’t just because we had our zine or we were still following each other on social media. We’d become IRLs, reaching a level of closeness that allowed us to know each other inside out and love each other—not friends from Tumblr or Twitter, but bona fide friends, period. Tied to each other for life by the blue-moon moments we’d been through, the way nothing else can and nobody else would understand. Organic, true, valid, although I know in my heart it’s always been that way. I had called it a scene, but it was much more than that. It was a community. 

I’ve written this so many times: We came to be in each other’s lives because we loved the same things, and now we love the same things because we’re in each other’s lives.

It’s funny and it warms my heart so much to think about how we used to joke about Ovation Production bringing ‘80s nostalgia acts, and now we were pretty much the ones going to nostalgia-bait concerts. But I’d be doing The Maine a disservice to call them nostalgia fodder, because even now, almost two decades into their career, they’re as experimental and relevant as ever. And even if I’ve moved on, they’ll never stop meaning a lot to me. 

The morning of September 29, I checked out and went home, my wristbands from the two previous nights already buried like confetti somewhere in my bag. It never stopped feeling a little strange, a little empty when the bands were gone and it was all over. “On the ride home I started to get sad,” I’d written in my journal the day after I attended some concert in 2014, ten years ago now. “I always do when [something great] ends and I get preemptively nostalgic.” 

In my room I dug high (the overhead cabinets) and low (the boxes under my bed) for any artifact I could find from when I loved The Maine the most, but I was an idiot and let them all go. I’d sold my signed albums, including the copy of Black and White I’d bought from their merch table at LIV3, when my mom had gotten sick, and the regret kind of stings. But at least I still have my autographs from the whole band—and one from William Beckett—from when I was doing my silly “project” where I collected musicians’ stripper names. This was the kind of crude faux edginess that was acceptable during peak bandom, okay!  

And I’ll always, always have that time after we’d taken our picture for the Pioneer Tour meet-and-greet session, when I was walking off to let the next person have their turn, and I hadn’t even taken a couple of steps when I heard: “Fiel!” 

I’ll let 17-year-old Fiel take this again (even though I can still pretty much recite it verbatim): 

“Yes?” I turned around and faced John, the one who had called me. By my flipping name. I was looking him right in the eye, not even aware of anything or anyone else.

“Fiel, right? How do you spell that?” John asked. “F…?” 

“F-I-E-L,” I said. 

“F-I-E-L,” John repeated with a smile. “Fiel. That’s pretty!”

I still scream into a pillow about it sometimes.  

I may not have had any expectations going in when it came to the Sweet Sixteen Tour, but it was cool to end up in the front row (off to the side, but still) during the second day. And, okay, let me just have this, but I don’t think I’m being delusional when I say that John had looked over and our eyes had met while I was singing along to “I Must Be Dreaming.” 

These photos are so bad but whatever

We locked eyes, and he pointed at me as if he remembered me from all those years ago. The sight line was so clear, and I don’t think it was meant for the rando in front of me. He’d done it before, too, during an event at the Mall of Asia in the latter half of 2012, and if my memory serves me correctly, maybe even at Fairview Terraces in 2015. 

And I honestly wouldn’t put it past him, because I know that’s the kind of sentimental person he is. 

It was so, so wonderful to watch him take the stage again and note that he’d grown up too, right along with us. I’d been a fan of his since he was 19, and he was 21 the first time I saw him live, 23 the last. He was 36 now, married, a father. A girl dad! It was crazy to see how his demeanor had changed. He took himself a bit too seriously in his 20s, like many of us do, weighed down, in his head. I wish I could’ve told him “I get it,” but it’s enough for me to have listened to his music and think, “He gets me.” Now here he was. More confident, more likely to tell dad jokes (so much dad jokes), a certain lightness to him. Like he’d finally seen what was on the other side, and he’d found that everything was going to be just fine. Still every bit the rock star. 

(It's been so strange as well to look back on these bands and realize that so many of them found success online right out of high school. They'd seemed like whole people already, but they weren't that much older than us, and they were also just figuring things out. These people were from small towns, 17 to 20, already living out of tour vans, already total pros, already writing music that will not just resonate but prove to stand the test of time. Again: that just doesn't happen anymore.) 

John at Pioneer Tour Manila in 2012

There was a tweet where a younger person was asking, “Can you imagine being a teenager in 2014? Was it really like this?” And someone had quoted it with something like, “It was great and you weren’t there and you’ll never experience it.” 

And they were being funny, but it made me stop and really reflect on it. The truth is, there’s something enviable about being a teen in every decade. I’ve missed out on so many things, and I’m only getting older, but it made me glad that this, all of it, this is what I got. 

Desire and reward; long term and short term joy

August 2

Never had my life been more akin to a whirlwind than when I landed at Changi Airport with nothing but a backpack that held two days’ worth of clothes and the barest essentials. 

Two weeks before, I had flown to Kuala Lumpur to see The Strokes at a music festival, and we had decided to make it a weeklong family trip. On July 22, it was announced that the rest of the music festival would be canceled after its first day. 

The Strokes were headlining the third and final day. 

I don’t want to get into it, but let’s just say I’ve prayed for the main loser from The 1975 to trip and fall flat on his face every day since then. I burst into tears in the middle of a mall, trying to come to terms with the fact that my one chance to see this band that has meant the world to me in over 10 years of loving them has just popped like a bubble. The KL trip had been fun, but this was why we were even there in the first place. These were their first Southeast Asia tour dates in their twenty-plus-year-long career, and now one of them had just been taken away by utter stupidity. 

I’d come home, gone back to work, and successfully held my tongue from any expletives in front of my coworker who’s a 1975 fan when The Strokes announced a few days later that they were adding a second show in Singapore to make it up to people who were supposed to see them in Malaysia. 

It would be insane, right, to spend an exorbitant amount on another concert ticket, another round-trip flight, another hotel (wait, no, not “another,” we literally stayed with my aunt) just for five men in their forties who changed not only rock music in the 2000s but also my life? 

Anyway, my flight was in five days. 

It was late when I arrived at my hotel in the chic neighborhood of Lavender. I still had a bit of a cold—the whiplash of making all of this happen in less than a week included overcoming a horrible fever that I had to deal with all weekend (with the help of my doting dad <3). 

The room was small and windowless, but cozy. I especially loved the black and white Brooklyn-style bathroom of my dreams, with brick-like tiling around the walls and gorgeous floors. I got settled and rested up for the night. 

August 3

I didn’t include this day when I filed my leave, so I spent until the afternoon working on my phone—I hadn’t brought my laptop, and I’d made sure to finish the major tasks before I left anyway. I walked around the neighborhood to look for breakfast, and I decided to stock up on food and snacks at 7-Eleven: chicken bolognese, an unagi onigiri, a rainbow chip brownie, and some really good instant mac and cheese in a cup.

It was also the time when “Planet of the Bass” was mega-viral, so I can’t think of this trip without being reminded of it. 

I met with Alissa at a coffee shop in Marina Bay Sands before the show and had a lot of fun just talking at length about all kinds of things and getting to know each other better. It was the first time we were hanging out and meeting in person, and I had a great time and I’m always hoping to get to do it again. 

Eventually it was finally time for me to go down to the expo hall for the show. I was near the back since I’d waited until the last possible second to go in, and that was just fine by me. As far as venues went, it was pretty cool: huge space, super high ceilings, but the stage was set against the center of it and it somehow felt like an intimate basement show. (Which, well, it kind of was.) 

I couldn’t think of a better song to start my Strokes show with than “What Ever Happened?” The title track of Is This It is a classic slow burn, but this was the track you wanted if it was about coming out swinging. The pulse of the beat, the anthem-like declarations of the chorus that made it perfect for shouting along to (I wanna be forgotten/And I don’t wanna be reminded), that rousing solo that signaled this was just the beginning—for the song, and for The Strokes themselves at the time it came out. 

I don’t really have a lot of specific memories attached to most of the set list, other than absolutely losing my mind every time they started up and I realized I was hearing them live, but I want to remember every song they played, so I’m listing them here: 

1. “Bad Decisions”
2. “Soma”
3. “Juicebox” (of course it was the most cathartic thing ever to scream along with the chorus) 
4. “Automatic Stop” (I loved swaying to this one) 
5. “The Adults Are Talking”
6. “Take It or Leave It”
7. “Under Control” (this is where I finally cried) 
8. “Reptilia”
9. “Call It Fate, Call It Karma” (literally the fourth time they’d ever played it!) 
10. “Red Light”
11. “Someday” (this is where I finally cried pt. 2) 
12. “Ize of the World”
13. “Hard to Explain”
14. “You Only Live Once” (truly one of the most flawless songs ever, what can I fucking say)

It’s well-established that The Strokes are absolute monsters live and their performances (the guitars!) are always phenomenal, and it feels so good to finally be able to state it myself firsthand. 

I heard the guy in front of me, who’s dancing in all of the footage I took of the night by the way, tell his companion, “They used to just be on TV, and now they’re in front of us,” and as I said in my tweet later when I was reliving the concert in my hotel room: SOBRANG FELT PO, KUYA. 

Julian asked Nikolai to say something, and he was so soft-spoken that Julian said he sounded “like the parents on Charlie Brown.” I couldn’t help but think back to 2014, when I was really falling in love with The Strokes for the first time after years of being a casual fan, and they were starting to play shows again and figure out what it means to be in a band together at their current stages in life after all the animosity of Angles and the uncertainties of Comedown Machine and everything else that came before. I would zoom in on a GIF of Julian patting Nick’s back after their Capitol Theater show and get so irrationally emotional like, “See?! They’re friends!” So to witness something as casual and sweet as this, especially between the oldest members who had known each other longest, was doing my head in a little. I’m so glad they’ve made it to a point where all of it doesn’t have to be such a big deal.

Nick grinned so wide at the Charlie Brown comment, and I wished this could be my life every night. 

One final anecdote: During “Last Nite,” just before the guitar solo, Julian went, “Introducing! Albert... Hammond... Jr!” (Fab, of course, was being his silly, ever unflappable self the whole time, and I loved seeing them all exchange smiles every now and then.) 

I booked a Grab to the hotel. I admired the view as it passed the Helix Bridge, and I couldn’t be happier.

August 4

I checked out in the morning and tried to find the nearest train station, which turned out to be very close by. I got a card that gave unlimited rides for the day and hopped around the city a little before I went to the airport, where I waited to board my flight at the Texas Chicken near my gate. I had salted egg poppers and these cheese fries that I still think about sometimes, with loads of sour cream and cheese and super flavorful large chunks of green onion. Hear that, Taco Bell cheesy fiesta potatoes? GREEN ONION.

I still can’t believe I flew to Singapore on basically a whim and took my lightest backpack and flew back home in two days. I would never recover financially. My eye still twitches when I think about what I had to spend because some man was so full of himself that he caused an entire music festival that people planned for months and was the source of multiple livelihoods to be canceled. (Where’s that class action lawsuit? He needs to pay me back.)  

But the truth is, it was all worth it. Even if my relationship with this band (particularly its frontman) has grown complicated over the years. I was impressed and touched that the band even chose to do an additional concert at all when they could’ve just shrugged it off, and that they managed to put it all together so quickly. It was nice to know they cared, when their entire brand has been foolhardy indifference. They even mentioned Manila when they said they would be back. 

It was a night I’ll never forget, I’d do it again and again if I could, and I got a good story to tell out of it. Even if they didn’t play “The Modern Age” on my show date. 

Tomorrow will be different, so I’ll pretend I’m leavin’

My undergraduate thesis was a stylistic analysis of The Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas’ lyrics supported by a corpus linguistic study centered on the word “wait.” This meant building a corpus — also known as a collection of words — out of his songs including his work outside the Strokes, tracking how frequently “wait” appeared in them, and breaking down the meaning of each track through a stylistic theory to find the relevance of the word to the songwriter, and to determine why he used it so much.

I’ll spare you the details; the important thing here was that when I uploaded Julian’s lyrics to the corpus analysis software, I was able to determine that “wait” was, indeed, the word that occurred most frequently in his songwriting. (Minus the more common pronouns and articles, of course.)

And the point here is: waiting is kind of a recurring theme when it comes to the Strokes. Even when you’re a listener. Especially when you’re a listener.

Their sixth album came out this month, released four years after their Future Present Past EP, seven years after their previous album Comedown Machine, and almost 19 years after their groundbreaking debut Is This It. That’s a lot of time. That’s a lot of waiting. It began to seem almost mythical, like it would never actually happen. Wouldn’t it have been just like the Strokes to have their final track be a half-somber, half-mumbled ballad titled “Call It Fate, Call It Karma,” after a line from Ghostbusters?

But they continue to beat the odds. The nine-track album is called The New Abnormal, and in its greater moments, it showcases the best of the Strokes together and apart. Since they adopted a more collaborative (if initially volatile) songwriting process on Angles, certain Strokes tracks have been easier to pinpoint as the work of a certain member, from guitarist Albert Hammond, Jr.’s frenetic and unpredictable energy to drummer Fabrizio Moretti’s loopy but sophisticated deviations. It’s nostalgic but in the moment, familiar but something nobody else could have done.

Single “Bad Decisions,” in particular, is practically a mashup of the Modern English classic “I Melt with You” and Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself” — a perfect example to cite when mentioning the album’s laconic description, which is basically this: It wouldn’t be out of place on the soundtrack of Disney’s 2005 teen-hero film Sky High, and it kind of works.

You can’t say it for sure, but you can guess that the Strokes actually had fun with the creative process; it’s not just something to do for a paycheck. There are “New York City Cops”-style ad libs between the members left on multiple tracks. For a band that’s known for unaffected Manhattanite cool, it’s refreshing to see that the Strokes care. They care so much that part of the album’s promotions included performing at a Bernie Sanders rally. The guitars are intricately tangled as ever, complementing ‘80s synths and falsetto — but there are also instances of crystal clear vocals recalling First Impressions of Earth, to match the equally unfiltered lyrics. They border on confessional, which is something new for a band that’s preferred to keep it vague and esoteric.

Another thing that sounds just like The Strokes? The fact that after everything, they happen to have dropped their long-anticipated album in the middle of a global pandemic that has drastically changed how we live. They’ve always been stuck with generational labels and expectations pinning them to the zeitgeist, their work and existence always seeming to signal the beginning or end of something. And with such an aptly titled album, they might have just done that again.

The songs were written pre-quarantine, but some of the lyrics can’t help but hit hard: “I just wait for this to go into circles,” Julian sings in “Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus.” “And the distance from my room, is anything so necessary?”

At six minutes and 15 seconds long, “Endless Summer” is the longest track on an album that averages five minutes per song. Having been raised on new wave karaoke sessions, I instantly recognized its sampling of The Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost in You” in the chorus as Julian croons, “Summer is coming, it’s here to stay.” The familiar melody elicits a feeling of deja vu, adding weight to its overall effect of dissonance — the song sounds bright and full of possibility, but it’s actually more about feelings of ennui, of the pitfalls of boundlessness. This boundlessness is inescapable. You want it to be over.

Last I heard, only two members remain in the city that they arguably define as much as it defines them. Final track “Ode to the Mets,” which is just under six minutes long, cements the fact that you can take a Stroke out of New York, but you can’t take the New York out of the Stroke. It’s a fitting outro, and also a little too close for comfort in these times: “Gone now are the old times, forgotten, time to hold on the railing,” the lyrics go. “So pardon the silence that you’re hearing. It’s turning into a deafening, painful, shameful roar.”

When I was working on my thesis, my adviser told me to study the sociocultural background of each album I was analyzing, i.e. what was going on in the world at the time of its release? I didn’t understand the significance of it at first — the state of the world in the aughts felt like too broad a topic to include — but it ended up helping me make sense of a lot of the lyrics with the added context. And it’s helping me make sense of this album, at least in relation to what we’re experiencing right now.

There’s always been something vaguely apocalyptic in certain Strokes songs, like “Ize of the World” (young adults to modernize / citizens to terrorize / generations to desensitize … cities to vaporize) and “The End Has No End” (one by one, ticking time bombs won / it’s not the secrets of the government that’s keeping you dumb). They welcomed the new millennium with Is This It, and now they’re welcoming a new decade. Their music has seen their generation — and the ones that have followed — through war, and disaster, and collapse, and now this pandemic. Their Gen X nonchalance has grown the heart and spine needed for political dissent.

When I first heard that they’re calling their album The New Abnormal, it sounded contrived, commonplace. Old. But now it’s almost prophetic, in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way, of course.

I’d been wondering whether the so-called tradition of “wait” in Julian’s lyrics would continue with this new era. And when lead single “At the Door” was released, there it was: “Anyone home? Have I lost it all?” he sings. “Lying on the cold floor, I’ll be waiting. I’ll be waiting from the other side, waiting for the tide to rise.” Another few instances to add to my corpus. A continuation of a cycle I’ve never minded.

Listening to this album, in the house I haven’t left in over a month, I turn pensive, restless. It goes too well with the aimlessness I feel as the days blur together, slow and everlasting. But somewhere in there, there’s also purpose, drive, and just the tiniest bit of spite: we will make it past this, by sheer force of obstinacy at the very least. What’s “Ode to the Mets” about, anyway, if not rooting for the underdog?

As always, as ever, we wait.

Life don’t always sparkle, but it’s turning me to gold

 

In the pop world, some singers were meant to fade into obscurity — but others rise from the ashes and keep making anthems for girls and the women they’re growing up to be.

I used to be the kind of person who defined myself by the music I listened to. In a way, I still might be.

I was 10 or 11 when I started learning that music existed beyond the songs I heard on the radio or the videos I saw on MTV. I was at a now-defunct music store in my local mall called Radio City when I found an album that would change my life — an auburn-haired, pouty-lipped teenage girl brooded on the cover, a green heart drawn around her right eye. Mismatched, chaotic letters spelled out her name and the title: Skye Sweetnam, Noise from the Basement. I had never heard of her, and I didn’t know a single song of hers. I bought the CD anyway. 

Skye Sweetnam was the first artist I ever discovered for myself, and she ended up becoming a blueprint for my adolescence. Her best known song is a passive-aggressive crush anthem called “Tangled Up in Me,” but my favorites were the ones about empowerment and nonconformity, like “I Don’t Care,” “Sharada,” “Unpredictable,” and “Smoke and Mirrors.” Her lyrics — she wrote or co-wrote all the tracks — taught me not to change myself in a contrived effort to get people to like me or accept me. That the only mold I needed to fit into was the one that embodied the goals and standards I set for myself, and the one that would make me into the person I wanted to be.

It’s funny thinking about the way Skye means a lot to me, because her solo career pretty much fizzled out after her second album. Sometimes I imagine I’m the only one who still knows all the words to her songs, maybe the only one who ever did. The 2000s were a heyday for pop princesses who were destined to fade into obscurity and remember-whens. Even Brie Larson, before becoming an Oscar winner and Carol Danvers, released an album in 2005 titled Finally Out of P.E. — and nothing else after that. (Unless you count Envy Adams’ cover of “Black Sheep” in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.)

I grew out of this teenybopper Radio Disney phase as the years passed, morphing into the kind of teenager who took herself a little too seriously and put a lot of stock into her so-called indie cred. I wanted to be cool, and cool meant quoting The Strokes’ documentary In Transit word for word, crushing on Cavan McCarthy from Swim Deep, and rolling my eyes at Arctic Monkeys’ “Do I Wanna Know?” because Alex Turner had finally drunk the Kool-Aid. I followed The Like’s Tennessee Thomas on Instagram and read Alexa Chung’s It. I was always keeping up with new acts from London or Chicago or New York.

When I was diagnosed with depression in my 20s, my relationship with music changed. It took too much energy to always be ahead of the curve, to still care about having a “music taste.” My obsessive tendencies led to heavy-rotation playlists of songs that either drowned out the sadness or wallowed in it, mostly Mitski, Big Thief, and Paramore’s After Laughter. After a while, though, I realized that there was comfort in pop music — maybe because it reminded me of happier days when I didn’t know any better, or maybe because the sweet mindlessness of the songs and the emptiness I felt were both complementary and dissonant, earnest and ironic all at once.

Whatever it was, it helped me cope. I turned to the forgotten pop stars of my youth; I looked them up on Spotify and was relieved and happy to find that tracks I thought were long-lost had somehow survived beyond Limewire and were right there, ready to stream. Not only that: some of them, like Aly & AJ and The Veronicas, were making highly anticipated comebacks and releasing new music.

There was also a freedom to choosing pop music. I was letting myself like what I genuinely like and enjoy what makes me happy regardless of the way other people feel about it. (Especially now that my definition of happiness is more complicated, holding more weight and more tension.) I was making this decision on my own, no longer so conscious or worried about being cool or different or a dud — the way I learned from Skye Sweetnam all those years ago.

It was at this point that I found my way back to Katelyn Tarver. When I was 12, her songs “Wonderful Crazy” and “Something In Me” were just for taking up space in my MP3 player and singing along to when I was bored. They were inconsequential, ephemeral. But her new music was refreshing, and it blew me away. The tracks were exactly what I needed to get through this difficult, scary period in my life. It was like reuniting with an old friend, or having someone read my journals back to me out loud — hyper-aware of time passing by, convinced every bad feeling would stay forever, lamenting if I knew then what I know now. Like Katelyn herself wrote on Twitter: “Depressing but still hopeful? My brand?”

What speaks to me the most is a track called “Don’t Let It Change You,” which goes, Do you remember how we used to be? What the world was like at 23? I was that age myself when I first heard it, and it’s become a theme for navigating my 20s and learning when to take charge and when to let go. According to Katelyn, it’s about “hitting that point in life where you thought things would look a certain way, and they don’t, and learning how to deal with that.” She adds: “But sometimes you just have to cry over a bowl of pasta in public and let it happen.” I’ve never felt more understood.

(I also learned while writing this that she is a Scorpio, like me, and all the world makes sense again.)

Mitski gets me like she gets anyone, but it’s different with an artist that I’ve grown up with, one that has seen me through the awkwardness of puberty, the dramatics of high school, the uncertainties of college, and the mess of young adulthood, even if it was just on the fringes, in the murky recesses of my mind. I’ve been listening to Katelyn Tarver since she was 16, and I can practically map out how she has evolved — the way I can trace my own steps and see how I have evolved in the same 14 or so years that have passed.

Somehow we both made it, somehow we’re both still here — and I believe her completely when she says we’re right where we’re meant to be.

Please get me home, though I don’t know where it is

Transcribed from a journal entry dated 07/11/2017.

Lately I’ve been crying for no reason. It’s fine.

It usually happens when I listen to Johnny Gallagher’s music—not from his album, but from the bootlegs people have been posting to Mediafire as though they were full-length live albums. I downloaded them all in one go one night and listened to them as I fell asleep. They faded into one another, and into my subconscious. It was like that night years and years ago when I became a goner for the Strokes and—I remember this so vividly—drifted in and out of consciousness with Julian Casablancas insisting, “You’re no fun, you’re no fun, you’re no fun, you’re no fun,” in my ears.

The recordings came complete with the little spiels Johnny would give between songs, so it felt to me like I was listening to him do stand-up, too. He can be pretty funny, and it could be comforting, too, to listen to him just talking.

But the songs themselves, they take me someplace else. Not just because they’re live and raw so you feel like you’re in the room with that crowd. They’re just so heartfelt, and unfiltered, and real. I hadn’t really been listening to bootlegs for a long time, not since I was 12 and I had no other way to hear the Jonas Brothers’ yet-unreleased songs, particularly their cover of “Take On Me.” (I’m still waiting on a studio version.)

The Johnny recordings brought me back to that time of pure adoration and compromise: I would listen to imperfect, low-quality audio for you, because I love your music that much.

It’s interesting to me, getting to hear several different versions of certain songs at a time. I like being able to point out lyric changes, or shifts and hitches in his voice, or faster and slower takes. I especially like it when he makes a mistake and soldiers on, or when he has to start over. I’ve come to know the individual versions so well that I can pick out favorites—but parts of each of them are so endearing that I keep listening to them all anyway.

In his songs, Johnny’s a mess. He’s fucked up, and lost, vulnerable, self-deprecating. Lonely, heartbroken, and in love. He’s hard on himself. He’s defined by his mistakes. He’s in awe of the world around him. He’s sad and he’s going through something; he’s having the time of his life. He wants to be, he used to be, he is.

It’s the kind of confessional, open introspection that I’m always striving for in my own writing. Johnny has no problem admitting that he’s not always happy or that he has trouble holding his liquor most nights. And his melodies are deceptively simple, but emotionally complex and so beautiful. He’s mentioned that music is an extension of his identity, that he’d lose his head without it—and you can hear that feeling in him, even if it’s just him onstage with the guitar he’s had forever with the faded lightning bolt on the strap. He just has this way of putting words and lines together; you feel like you’re reading his journal and the writing is bleeding through the pages.

And obviously, I identify a lot with what he’s singing about, and it’s been helping me process some feelings and insecurities I can’t name. When I was first listening to Six Day Hurricane, I read some interviews where he talked about “Sarasota Someone”—how he’d written it during a time of inner turmoil and it became this escapist anthem disguised as a sunny pop song. “The irony [was],” he’d said, during one of his in-between talks, “I wrote this song in the summer, but it was winter, um, inside. So I was longing for a warmer place in my soul.”

I loved that. It was reassuring, the idea that he too has had that feeling of nobody loving him or caring about him, at least it seemed like. “No, don’t tell me who does,” he sings on “Why Oh Why Am I This Way?” which he’d written based off a note a friend had left in his apartment after staying overnight that simply said: Why, oh why, am I this way, why? It’s a song, he explained, about talking to himself in the mirror and questioning everything he does wrong—which can feel like all of them some days. And I think it’s the perfect companion song to “Imagine If,” where he’s tracking how much he’s changed, not knowing exactly when he did, and how much can still happen. That kind of ability to look inside yourself and be so honest about it is just something I can’t quite wrap my head around.

My favorite kind of writing makes use of concrete, ordinary details. The sublime, I learned in critical theory class, but it’s been so long and I’m probably bastardizing Longinus’ ideas. Point is, Johnny can deliver a one-sentence summary regarding certain moments in his life that led to his songs, and you can map them out and feel them unfurl in the music, and especially the lyrics.

“Those Wild Woods,” for example, takes memories from when he went with his family to Wildwood, New Jersey when he was 13 and lost his teddy bear Arthur, and combines them with reflections on a trip he made there himself when he got older. Cue vivid imagery of boardwalks, saltwater, and things burning down.

I don’t know. I guess I’m just so used to songs being esoteric, months spent stylistically analyzing Julian Casablancas’ lyrics for my (doomed) thesis, and all. Which must be why Johnny’s are so refreshing to me. I like knowing that “So Many Things,” which reminded me early on of The Academy Is...’ “After the Last Midtown Show,” is about unrequited love at a punk rock concert held inside a Unitarian church in 2002. Or that “Red Hook Romeo,” a.k.a. “Blood Orange Red Hook Baby,” is about a NyQuil-induced fever dream he’d had when he was down with a cold that wouldn’t go away. That “Came and Went” deals with being in your late 20s and not knowing what the hell is going on, or that “Jane’s House” is a love letter to an apartment he was moving out of and leaving behind. (“I’m a sentimental person.”) That “Constance” is a song he calls his most confessional, full of longing pretending to be contempt, about a time during which he made “no earthly sense.” That “Suburban Girl” came to fruition because he’d had a rough night he was wishing he could take back when he chanced upon the Facebook status of a family friend—a teenaged girl who was lying on the floor, playing with her cat—and, oh, how he wished things were still that simple.

I could go on forever, and, god, I probably have. My point (I can almost swear I have one, besides what has become an embarrassing show of devotion for one John Gallagher, Jr.) is: These songs have been moving me to tears when I pause and really listen to them, because, well, the obvious answer is I’ve been empty and lonely and sad and in need of an outlet, and I can’t write since everything feels pointless, so I’ve been letting what I feel (and can’t feel) out through them. Does that even mean anything? It’s like I’m living through John, who was able to process his hang-ups, and even though I’m consuming rather than creating, I’m able to understand myself a little and turn all this negative energy into something that feels like...something.

But I also cry because of secondhand sentiments of finality, aching, wistfulness, self-loathing. (Firsthand, too.) I cry because of his wisdom and because it amazes me how he can write so well. (I WILL NEVER BE OVER THIS.) I cry because these songs may be a little old, but they’re new to me—they’re so new. I cry because I want to express myself like that, I do, but I don’t quite remember how.

I cry because the songs make me believe in romance when I’ve lost faith in so much else. I cry because we seem to be equally lonely, but a little less so precisely because of the music.

I cry because he gets it, and I get him.

Can I stand in your light just for a while?

Nick Valensi: Sonic mastermind, guitar deity, 1/5 of the Strokes, scrabble enthusiast, bibliophile, American Literature dropout from Hunter College who wrote for the student paper, epicure, wine mom, born and bred New Yorker who left the city for love, stoner dad whose kids know Matilda primarily as a Roald Dahl book and not just a movie, husband whose idea of date night is a good old LA comedy show and burgers after, overall awe-inspiring human being. Ask anyone in the know, and they could probably tell you a thing or two about him.

But one thing that is sure to come up very seldom, if it even comes up at all, is his penchant for photography.

A couple years ago I was reading something Strokes-related and scrolled down to the comments section. Someone had written: "Whatever happened to Nick's photography?" I narrowed my eyes in confusion. What photography?

It's not very obvious, unlike Fab's art, but it's all laid out in plain sight. How camera-shy he was in the always heart-wrenching "In Transit" ("What, you got a fucking crush on me?"), but specifically how he'd hog the camcorder the other way and film his band and tour mates, for one. And for another, the immense archive of personal photos they used to post on their website (I always did love how DIY and hands-on and down-to-earth their approach used to be for things like their fan club and posting updates and everything else), quite a bit of which were taken by him.

I came across a compressed folder that has virtually every photo from the old Strokes website, circa 2001 to maybe 2005, and it even had a subfolder of grainy, lo-fi videos. Aside from the pre-selfie age 35mm self-portraits, some images stood out as undeniably his work. Ultimately, going through them was what got me curious about Nick's forgotten hobby. So I went digging.

If you Google "nick valensi photography," you're more likely to get results about his wife Amanda de Cadenet, who's been very accomplished behind the camera, being the youngest woman who's ever shot a Vogue cover and having come out with a photo book called Rare Birds. (She was also supposed to release a book called Just a Boy, which would've been composed entirely of photos of Nick, but it was shelved. Literally.) Doing research for this post, I had to come up with all kinds of word combinations just to find any evidence that he was into it. Eventually, I found the following.

From a feature on Julian Casablancas and Phrazes for the Young in Nylon:

From a news piece on NME about Nick working on Sia's We Are Born: 

A Strokes website update:

The site was given a whole new look (LP6 realness!!!) and might have changed servers a couple of days after I found the above post, so the link I had didn't work anymore, and while searching for it again manually, I saw another update addressing it:

Their old fan club "Forget What You Heard" newsletters also had collages that list him as the photographer.

I tried looking for more regarding those prints, particularly which photos they're of, to no avail. And neither Nylon nor NME (quadruple alliteration!) offered any real information regarding Nick's supposed foray into photography during the Strokes hiatus. Maybe it really is just something he's passionate about, and he doesn't feel the need to have that all out in the open. But honestly, he should at least make an Instagram because we're missing out!

I'll spend the rest of this post interspersing facts and comments with the photos I've rounded up; the real evidence in all this, of course. There's quite a bit of them, but they're worth the extra scrolls for sure.

First off: His weapon of choice. He wasn't kidding—the Contax T3 is pretty fucking dope (it's still super popular among people who take this kind of thing seriously, or even not-so-seriously), and it is pricey. More than "a bit," in fact. I've recently gotten back into film photography and was looking for cheap 35mm cameras on OLX, and the first result was this ad for a used T3. And it's P45,000. It stung like hell, like the universe was trying to spite me. Oh, the dream. And Nick had the gall to lose two of them?!      

A feature in the sadly now-defunct Elle Girl, circa 2006. (Click to enlarge.) A magazine that largely contributed to my self-discovery and musical awakening. They were pretty big on the Strokes, going so far as to feature Juliet Joslin in 2003 and putting Fabrizio Moretti (#50), Nick (#22) and Julian (#9) on their "50 Hottest Guys in Rock!" list. Fab made it onto the list another year, at number 29.

Okay. On to the real photos. I've divided them into three groups, and the first one, much like the introductory image, is composed of self-portraits or pictures where Nick is visibly holding the camera. He was quite fond of mirror shots, obvi.  

I know this is technically not a self-portrait, but that arm is unmistakable.

I love the composition of this one. 

This next group includes photos that have explicitly been credited to Nick on the Strokes website:

This one of the shoes wasn't credited to him, but judging from those infamous worn-out sneakers and the caption and the angle, this is definitely a Valensi. 

And finally, some photos that aren't Nick's for certain, but I'm putting here based on educated guesses: 

The picture above could probably count as one of the Nick-is-visible stuff because I'm pretty sure that's his reflection. Anyway, I figured the above five were taken by him, considering he experimented with black and white film a lot, plus the grain and focus felt like they were from a Contax T3. 

Also, Fab was pretty much Nick's muse. 

The next five colored images, I've included based on observations re: consistency and the overall feel of them. 

I love the composition of this one, too.

These last two are definitely from the same night as the picture with Jack White.

I find it adorable and amusing how slice-of-life and candid the above shot (particularly because Julian used to be so grumpy/moody then) and this one below (particularly because of how accurately it depicts tour life!) are.

The purpose of this post was to dig deeper into a somewhat long-lost facet—in the public eye, at least—of Nick Valensi that's mostly just been mentioned offhand and thrust to the side. In doing so, I found that, in the midst of the mesmerizing or the mundane, he had (and hopefully retains) quite an eye for the real moments worth saving, and was/is able to do so in a way that really commands attention and thought. Even if they were just "fucking around." But the fine line between love and hate photography for posterity/the heck of it and as art is visible, and these are all clearly on the more creative side. There's this quiet surge of life in them that makes them interesting, and not just because they're all of a rock band.   

(And they're all so beautiful, which made it pretty difficult to narrow the selections down!) 

You can see from his work how well he knows his subjects (and his surroundings, and his city) and what makes them who they are. They come alive even without motion. 

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that, whatever did happen, they continue to, even if we haven't gotten the chance to witness it in quite some time.