There's Always Been a Table For Me There: Returning to The Wonder Years
An excerpt from our Summer 2022 zine that's still available for purchase
Hello, Endless Scroll Nation. To quote the immortal bards in Turnover: “It’s early autumn where you are/The air is cool but not yet cold.” We’re hard at work on the Fall 2022 edition of our quarterly zine, Where Those Two Things Intersect, which we began publishing earlier this year. Anyone who subscribes to the $10 tier of our Patreon gets every zine we make automatically mailed to them, and anyone else can buy them a la carte from our Big Cartel store.
To those of you who’ve purchased and read either of our zines thus far, we can’t thank you enough! To those who haven’t, perhaps because you aren’t quite sure what a zine made by a podcast might look like, we’re presenting you with a taste. The first hit’s always free, right?
Below, is an essay from our Summer 2022 issue (out now) that Eli wrote about his relationship with the pop-punk auteurs (Miranda loves when I use that word), The Wonder Years. It’s one of four brilliant essays (yeah, I’m sayin’ it) from the issue, which is also packed with other goodies like our Vinyl Cubby segment about recent wax pickups, an extended version of Michael and Eli’s rap column (formerly hosted on this Substack), our favorite summer songs and more.
Hopefully, this preview encourages you to see what the rest of the issue has in its pages. At the very least, we hope you enjoy Eli’s musings on a band that means a lot to him. Until next time….
In the last edition of this zine, I wrote an essay about my neurotic relationship with nostalgia and millennial music. I was perturbed by a perceived influx of people my age retreating into Good ‘Ole Daysy cultural consumption, content to be fed condescending slop like When We Were Young festival and a supposed rebirth of late 2000s “indie sleaze” aesthetics, as if the stuff we were subsumed in just one decade ago is deserving of a grand rebirth in the cultural zeitgeist. In reality, I think my frustration came not from a celebration of the music itself, but what the unchecked giddiness to prop up said music signaled. That my generation, a group of people who’ve been told our whole lives that we’re simultaneously coddled and undeserving, but also responsible for saving the planet from apocalyptic destruction, had, at least culturally, finally decided to halt the forward-momentum that was thrust upon us, plop down on the couch and let out a comforting sigh of resignation. We’re no longer the bright-eyed mover shakers we once were. Let’s relive the halcyon days of 2011 forever because that's when we felt most alive. Because that's when we were young.
More than anything, I was being a grumpy hater, but a grumpy hater with a mission. To do what’s best for my washed peers and point out the raging hypocrisy of criticizing our elders for being stuck in the past and then falling into the same traps ourselves. Then I listened to the Wonder Years, my favorite band throughout high-school, and caught myself snorkeling through a glowing reef of the same feelings I was scoffing at my peers for experiencing themselves.
I was preparing for a podcast episode we were doing about the Philly pop-punk band’s discography, so I played all of their albums across two nights of solitary, focused, detailed listening, either sitting in my living room or laying on my mattress with the lights out and my eyes closed. I held the sturdy vinyl packaging for their 2009 “debut”, The Upsides, and read along to the lyrics as I did when I was 16, hearing the same words and the same notes emanating from the same stereo that I sat before when I was young and enamored by songs like “My Last Semester” and “It’s Never Sunny in South Philadelphia.” Songs about feeling trapped by your surroundings and your social circle, about shitty streaks of bad luck and watching the people around you morph or, crucially, remain stagnant. My worst fear. But ultimately, the songs are about learning to appreciate what you do have. About not letting your neuroticisms and angst and anxieties and insatiable desire for some undefined “more” overshadow the little things like laughs at diners and late nights with friends and the small joy that a fountain being turned on for the first time in the spring can bring.
I had a thoroughly amazing time revisiting all of the Wonder Years albums, remembering what I loved so much about them in high-school and early college, thinking about the times I saw them play at Warped Tour when I was a teenager. Crowd-surfing and singing along to every word at the top of my lungs, jumping and jerking and thrusting while I lost my voice because anything less would be a blasphemous insult to the band and a waste of a perfectly great set. I loved revisiting the albums of theirs that meant the world to me, and I had just as much fun giving their latest album, 2018’s Sister Cities, a mature and faithful listen for the first time ever.
In 2018, I was a flailing half-journalist half-restaurant worker, wasting my time drinking too much and lacking the discipline to actually manage my writing deadlines. I landed a pitch at my local alt-weekly, the Pittsburgh City Paper, to interview Wonder Years vocalist Dan Campbell. My teenage idol. By this point, I hadn’t actively listened to the Wonder Years since I was in early college. Pop-punk was a genre I used to like, I’d tell myself (and often still do). That said, the Wonder Years were the only band from the early 2010s pop-punk scene that I could actually still listen to without cringing or picking out the flaws in the inherently juvenile, emotionally simplistic music I used to define my personality by. Lyrically, musically, visually — they were, and still are, several leagues above most any band they’ve ever been compared to.
The day I was supposed to interview Campbell, I overslept and woke up in a depressed haze. I hadn’t prepared my questions and had barely digested the new album I was supposed to be talking to him about. I scrambled to throw together some notes and went into the interview groggy and uninterested. He had already done many interviews that cycle and the general narrative was how the album was an attempt to break out of pop-punk and explore more “mature” sounds — post-rock, indie-rock, post-hardcore, and alternative rock. I didn’t like the album all that much, but I told myself I would and that I just needed to listen to it more before I wrote the actual piece.
Once the interview began and pleasantries were exchanged, I dove into asking him about being pigeonholed by the pop-punk scene his band came up in eight years earlier, and he became audibly annoyed, clearly irked that so many journalists had been not-so-subtly prodding him to disavow the bands he’s probably still dear friends with and play the part of the disgruntled, misunderstood auteur who’s sick of being known as the pop-punk guy. I think I just wanted him to validate my own feelings by answering the question the way I would’ve.
My brain was too flimsy to react in an intelligent way, so I apologized and pivoted to more mundane questions about the album that I already knew the answer to. He had perked up by the end of the interview, so I leveled with him and told him that his band was my favorite in high-school and that I used to love all those bands I was asking him to shit on. He seemed to understand, but the interview, not to mention the mediocre piece (by my standards) that I turned in, soured the band on me.
I felt like I spent so much time running away from the era when the Wonder Years meant so much to me, but also felt entitled to writing about it from the point of view as an on-the-ground expert. I felt a fierce sense of pride for actually being there as a teenager taking in those songs and delving in the way no journalist who only came to them on that new album ever could, but I also wanted to prove to everyone that that era of my musical past was far behind me, that I was the best person to speak about the Wonder Years despite actively harboring a superiority complex about having left that scene behind in search for greener, Pitchforkier pastures of musical preference.
I felt lost in between the pop-punk goof I was and the Serious Indie Journalist I had willed into existence, and all of that tension clumsily spilled over during that interview and the subsequent writeup. I wasn’t mature enough to confront any of this when it went down, so that's probably why I never listened to the band very much in the time since that interview. I was leaving something unfinished because I was too lazy, naive and indignant to snap the pieces back together.
And that's probably why I felt a weird sense of closure while listening to Sister Cities a couple weeks back. I was able to hear in the music what I refused to at the time (a deeply moving, commendably ambitious, creatively self-assured, grimly overstimulating, at times claustrophobic transcendence of their earnest pop-punk origins) and I was willing to engage with my long-held love for the band’s early material from a place of deep, almost spiritual reverence. I wasn’t listening back with an academic approach or with my journalist’s critical cap on. I was just a fan listening to my favorite band from when I was nothing more than just a fan.
My favorite Wonder Years album was always their 2011 LP, Suburbia: I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing. It’s the one that solidified them as my favorite band, and it came out when I was 16 years old. I think anything you develop a quasi-holy, identity-shaping connection with when you’re 16 years old probably stays with you forever. I never got a Wonder Years tattoo (thankfully, I don’t like band tattoos and I’m glad I’m not a Hank the Pigeon Tattoo Guy), but upon revisiting Suburbia this time, I felt like it didn’t matter that the ink isn’t etched into my skin. I’ll still be carrying this record with me for the rest of my life.
I could go on about every song on here. I love all of them. I love the way the whole album flows. I love the way the vinyl is laid out. I love resting the oversized lyric sheet on my chest as I squint at the undersized lyrical text, scanning the photos of weary suburban parks and attic spaces filled with old knick-knacks that evoke a specific yet also universal sense of dust-covered suburban stasis. I love seeing the picture of the band on the back and thinking about how I used to think they looked so old. That people in their mid-Twenties kind of looked like shit, and that I was glad I still wasn’t able to grow a beard because then I’d look like a flailing English teacher. This time, I looked at those guys and some of them looked younger than me, which they were when the photo was taken. That was kind of a trip.
But mostly I want to focus on one particular lyric that rocked me to my core in the most cliche way possible. It arrives in the song “Coffee Eyes,” a track I used to think was just OK when I was a kid. I could never pinpoint why, but looking back, I think it was because it was the one track on the album with lyrics that I couldn’t fully relate to (yet).
It’s about Campbell returning to a diner he used to frequent as a late teen, spending many caffeinated nights there getting into mischief and talking shit with his friends. The same waitress who used to serve him recognizes him and remarks about how lonely it is without him and his friends filling the place with youthful cheer. Back when I listened to Suburbia on a weekly basis, I was the teenager frequenting the same coffee spot with my friends every single weekend. I hadn’t yet undergone the experience of suddenly leaving a cornerstone of my youth behind — a place I went to mostly out of convenience, because there was literally no where else for kids to hang, not because it was particularly remarkable — and then returning to it years later, coming to the unexpected realization that it meant more to me than I thought it did at the time.
“There’s always been a table for me there, through all of the years.” That's the refrain of “Coffee Eyes.” It’s Campbell recognizing that this place he left behind as he darted out of town, desperate to go somewhere, anywhere, that wasn’t the place he grew up, was still a place he could return to. A place that actually remembered his face and greeted him warmly, which might’ve been one of the most cloying aspects of it when he was young, because it was a reminder of how small the town was, and he wanted nothing more than to stretch his legs and be consumed by strange faces and unfamiliar places. But after you do that for a few years, as I did, coming back can feel even better than going somewhere new.
I now understand and appreciate what the band was doing with the song more than I ever did, but more importantly, I now have my own interpretation of it. To me, that “table,” the one that’ll always be there for me, through all of the years, represents the Wonder Years themselves. A band I can come back to on my own volition, whenever I’m ready or willing. Not because I have nowhere else to go, not because my music taste is the same as it was when I was 19, but because sometimes, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.
“So you can try to forget or say it's the past/You know you'll always end up right back where you left,” goes the final part of the “Coffee Eyes” chorus. And for the first time, I felt comfort in that line.
Read the entire Summer 2022 issue of Where Those Two Things Intersect by purchasing it here or signing up for our Patreon here.