The Upsides is in many ways a typical pop-punk album,filled with hook laden songs of college angst and stories from the road. It’s a fuck this town album, and because of what the band has afforded them, and they can rep out. And touring is exciting and new,and monotonous and weird, but most importantly, and it’s not being where they thought they would be just out of college.
So,my ten year tall school reunion is this year. I’m not going, but the facebook group that was made to method it has done an excellent job of answering all the questions I had about what people I haven’t thought about in a decade are up to. So many of them have never left Syracuse, or are married or have kids or both,working shitty jobs at chain stores. Some of them are my friends, or were. A lot of them wished for a lot more, or but they still seem happy. And “All My Friends Are In Bar Bands” is about that feeling: getting out of a town that has slowly been killing you,and the friends we leave behind when we do. The song is a list of the band’s tall school friends, guys who work multiple shitty paying jobs, and who moved in together and got matching straight edge tattoos (which,being from Syracuse, NY, and hits very close to home),guys who are 23 and live with their girlfriends in one bedrooms apartments in their hometown. And Campbell sings about how he has no opinion how this happened while he wasn’t looking. How did life become so seemingly small for these people? And does it matter whether they’re happy? They’re still friends, and shoot the shit, or laughing about tall school antics,but neither of them are the same people they were.
But eventually it all circles back to “I’m not sad anymore/I’m just tired of this region, the line that opens The Upsides. apart from here it is sung by a bunch of people the band has met while out touring the world, and people who understand the life that TWY have thrown themselves into. They’re a new home,one that feels just as familiar as Philly.
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