On friendship, what’s left, and leaving
This Is Why, Stick Season & Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Writing again feels like walking into a darkened room, there could be an audience or I could just be there alone. But I guess I’ll start, hi. Hello. How’ve you been? The last time I wrote was driven by Paramore (or rather Hayley’s solo album) so it only fitting that their first album in five and a half years is what’s compelled me to write again. The past few weeks of my life have somehow found the same throughline as the three main forms of media I’ve consumed: what it’s like to grow, leave people behind, return to them, but come back changed.
On Friendship:
The story of Paramore’s new record, This Is Why, is centered around the band’s three core members: Hayley, Taylor, and Zac – who left the band the band in 2010 and returned for 2017’s After Laughter. On the track “Liar”, it finds Hayley, as she told Zane Lowe, in her first healthy relationship (with Taylor) and one of the first examples of healthy love she’s witnessed in her own life aside from her grandparents. It’s followed by “Crave” which details the difficulty of missing the moment you’re in as it’s occurring because you’re too caught up thinking about the future. “Thick Skull” closes the record, which is what kicked off the process of creating the album and reflects her own insecurities brought on by both her own thoughts and the projections put on her by the media over the years. It’s my favorite three songs run on any Paramore album. While maybe that thought is only occurring because it’s been out for a single day, it does feel right at the moment.
What’s Left
What do you do when you spend the pandemic in your childhood bedroom with your parents? If you’re me, you spend 5 months binge-watching all of Grey’s Anatomy, questioning why you moved out of state in the first place, and grieving the new chapter of your life that no longer exists. But if you’re Noah Kahan, you write a masterpiece of a record, always deserving of being listened to in full and pulling at different emotions each run-through. It’s largely centered on what’s left of the places we find ourselves returning to, whether on purpose or through necessity.
Some of my favorite lines include:
Stick Season: “You must've had yourself a change of heart like halfway through the drive because your voice trailed off exactly as you passed my exit sign / Kept on drivin' straight and left our future to the right.”
Come Over: “And my house was designed to kinda look like its cryin', the eyes are the windows, the garage is the mouth / So when they mention thе sad kid in a sad house on Balch street you won't have to guess who thеy speakin' about.”
Strawberry Wine: “No thing definеs a man like love that makes him soft and sеntimental like a stranger in the park.”
The View Between Villages: “The death of my dog, the stretch of my skin it's all washin' over me, I'm angry again / The things that I lost here, the people I knew, they got me surrounded for a mile or two / The cars in reverse, I'm grippin' the wheel, I'm back between villages and everything's still.”
I could go on but I’m already long-winded and the album speaks for itself in a way I never could.
Leaving
The book Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin finds two kids forming a friendship out of both necessity and comfort and follows them through a 30-year storyline as they grow up and find their relationship with each other and those around them changing. It’s centered around a video game they go on to create (this feels like spoiling it but this information is also stated on the book’s jacket) and what happens when the people around you leave.
It is more powerful than I have the words to say. The book’s characters are so real, deep, and moving that I’ve had to put it down to cry at least three times now and I still have 100 pages left. It feels like watching a multi-season show that you’ve held as a comfort since childhood and never want to finish because that would mean the end. And having to find something new to fill that space in a way you don’t know how. I see so many elements of myself, my friends, and people I no longer know depicted in the book’s various characters that sometimes I truly forget that it’s a work of fiction.
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As I’ve consumed these three pieces of work again and again (and again), I’ve found myself learning the lesson that it’s never too late to return to your interests, connect with old friends, or, the thing that has always been the most troubling for me – ask for help.
The people your life is built around are there for a reason. I like to believe that pain has a purpose and that life is more of a spiral with moments that overlap and return rather than a circle that always cycles back the exact same way. I know I’ll never return to my old self in the same way but I do know that part of me is always there and sees the growth, even if my current self can’t yet.