HYLI Vol. XXXVIII - The Hum Goes On Forever by The Wonder Years

Five things real quick about The Hum Goes On Forever from our good bud Thomas.

This week Pat and I are lucky enough to provide our good friend Thomas a small space to write about one of his favorite bands The Wonder Years and their newest album, The Hum Goes On Forever, while I change diapers and Pat is busy serving the Corporate Man before going on PTO. Please enjoy.

I

For over a decade now I’ve been writing something to the effect of how The Wonder Years are a band that are growing up with us, or how they illustrate some sort of quasi-subliminal difference between the bands we grow up with and the bands that grow up with us, or something along those lines. I cannot find the exact thing I wrote because the website that I wrote it on was deleted and it wasn’t even in one of the album reviews, which I kept for posterity. I’ve been saying this though, okay? I think the best piece about The Hum Goes On Forever so far is this one on Pitchfork by Hannah Seidlitz, who does an admirable job in expressing a similar idea, certainly better-written than this ramble will be. I have some thoughts but I don’t have the proper time to thread a single narrative through them, so this is divided into five parts. Also, the headline lied to you, there is simply no way this is going to be a quick read lol this will be the only piece of music writing I do in 2022, sorry you don’t have to read it if you don’t wanna. (Patrick: please continue reading thanks)

In any case, this is a foundational truth of my time as an adult; Wonder Years records have come at mile-markers in my personal life. These are albums that I feel an emotional stake in, more so than most of the albums that have come out in this past decade-and-change, even ones I’ve loved well. I don’t feel any sort of half-shame or trepidation in saying something like this, though I would have at various points in the past; I say it now being fully earnest, because The Wonder Years, their music, the community I’ve been part of in going to their shows across the southeast and the northeast, are one of a handful of core joys in my life. Why haven’t you grown out of that type of music yet? It’s a basis point upon which my life has been built to a certain degree; I don’t listen to nearly as much music as I used to, certainly not as much of that type of music as I used to, but it was in the fucking walls from the get-go, man.

And as I only get older and find myself more burdened with the really boring shit that my younger self would be ashamed of me for getting wrapped up into, I’m less and less concerned about whether the things that bring me joy might be a little bit childish at their core. To be clear, I don’t find any of The Hum Goes On Forever to be childish or frivolous or even casual or anything else that belies some other than urgent, essential; it’s quite a serious album lyrically and I can imagine certain segments of fans needing to be in the right sort of headspace to take a listen once the themes settle in. Why haven’t you grown out of that type of music yet? There’s been nothing to grow out of; this band has taken most of the steps with me.

Over a decade now, or more specifically the 4,623 days from The Upsides’ release in 2010 to The Hum Goes On Forever’s release on Friday, Dan & the squad took us from an inward-looking story about being depressed and trying to feel better, to an album almost fully focused outside the self, concerned with protecting loved ones, concerned with protecting children, with trying to make the world a better place for those who come next. Why haven’t you grown out of that type of music yet? You can trace a whole-ass adult human life in six albums. It doesn’t hurt that they’ve only gotten more interesting musically and more accomplished on-stage in this decade-plus.

The first album hit when I was questioning early adult choices, what to study and what to become. It nudged me down a different path. The third album hit a few months after I moved to New York to start another step of life down that different path. I actually started listening to it about two weeks after moving to NYC, living in Astoria with my friends Steve & Tara. I cannot listen to some of those songs without being dropped back into the 15-minute walk between that apartment and the 46th Street M/R stop. The fifth album hit a few weeks after I got married. Again, I started listening to that one a couple months earlier; that album, for me, is fully associated with not just my marriage but my best friends Matt & Ellen getting married as well (my friend Matt, who helped on the artwork for Hum, and who invented a whole-ass font in the process); that was the TWY album I listened to while driving a U-Haul from Park Slope to Atlanta to leave New York. Why haven’t you grown out of that type of music yet? I can trace my own life through a listen to the discography.

II

About that point about community. Merlin Mann says on one or several of his podcasts, this note about how he doesn’t really miss going to church in the sense of celebrating a religion, but that he misses the reliable and foundational community that a church can provide. A good church can be a fairly pure place in terms of that community; a good church can raise funds to help its members when they’re in need and can’t provide, it’ll feed a hungry community. This often amounts to people who aren’t exactly living grand lives donating just a little bit to help someone who might be just a little bit worse off than them. There are places you can find similar communities, but probably nothing is exactly like the community that accompanies a sort of platonic and admittedly hard-to-imagine-in-2022-if-you’re-a-Twitter-user ideal of a “good church.”

One of the closest things to that in my life was my time going to Wonder Years shows in the northeast United States for six years while I lived there. Specifically in New York and Philadelphia. I will be clear that I’m not equating this band with a religion; I’m just typing something that was in my head. There were probably a couple dozen people who I knew exclusively through this specific recurring event of watching this band rip gigs. Most of them I don’t talk to much anymore, but to be fair we didn’t actually hang out that much outside of these shows in the first place. Maybe a few times a year. Some of them, I’d only see whenever TWY was in town; we’d pick up in conversation as if I saw them last week.

It felt like a good space to me, it was a space I cherished, it was a space that the band actively tried to make safe; I hope that others have felt this, whether with TWY or other bands, or in other parts of life, whatever. I found a moment of it a few years ago in a surprisingly diverse wood carving class in Atlanta attended mostly by retirees, which was pretty unexpected. It wasn’t just about the albums, the music, the band on the stage, it was about the whole deal. I didn’t miss going to see bands during Covid as much as I missed the development of that community, though now I live in Atlanta and it’s not quite the same here (yet?).

III

One thing I found from the deleted website was an interview I did with Dan in 2013 around the release of The Greatest Generation when we premiered the track “Passing Through A Screen Door,” a conversation we had on the couch of me and Dan’s-then-girlfriend Alison’s apartment off the Classon G stop. A lot of things here that are interesting to resurface now, in I hope a not unfair way, in the context of the themes of The Hum Goes On Forever. And, interestingly, I actually could not find this from an original absolutepunk.net-related source, but I found it from an archived Tumblr page who copy-pasted the whole thing and presented it as their own content. TYSM!

Rather than presenting the questions & answers verbatim, there’s a bit of context followed by a quote from Dan.

On the band’s impact and fans’ emotional ties to hyper-personal lyricism:

A lot of times people say things like, you know, “I don’t know where I would be without you…don’t change.” And you kind of get worried because people change. That’s what happens, everyone grows. And what if I grow in a way that you don’t like? Not musically, not lyrically, just as a person it’s worrisome to me. I have trouble with it pretty often.

The next three are responses to questions about these lines from “Passing Through A Screen Door.”

“The first thing that I do when I walk in / Is find a way out for when shit gets bad”

It’s just this idea that I’m always expecting it to go wrong. In whatever capacity, whatever "it” is, I’m always expecting it to go wrong. And I always want to have a way out of it for when it does, because I don’t want to be there when it explodes. But like I said, a lot of the song comes out of fear. A lot of it is about being afraid about where you’re going to go in life. 

“I don’t want my children growing up to be anything like me”

That speaks to one of the ideas throughout the album that there are just hereditary things in my blood, the depression that runs through my family, and I don’t want to put my kid through that. And these are totally hypothetical people, these are things that don’t exist. I don’t have any children, I don’t have any plans for children in the near future. But even the idea of my hypothetical children, I love enough to not want them to go through that. That feeling of emptiness that they can’t explain or verbalize. You don’t want that. That’s huge, man, that’s just scary. 

“It’s all a lie, what they say about stability”

The thing is…it’s all projected out for you. It’s projected, you go to high school, and then you graduate, and then you go to college, and then you graduate, and then you get a job, and you get married, and by that point you’re stable enough to have kids. By that age, you should be stable enough to have kids, and that’s the way it is. But I look at myself in the mirror like…no I’m not. I’m not there yet. It’s almost like you’re being fed lies your whole life. Like I said, it’s about being willing to move at your own pace.

IV

For some amount of time now, I have known that the next Wonder Years record would either be about having kids, or be presented through the lens of someone who’s recently had kids, to some degree, whether it was the full album or parts of it, whether it was overt or the baseline upon which the lyricism was built. Dan & Alison are good friends for now also a decade-plus-ish, I’ve met their kids, I know the guy likes to write about stuff that’s happening, I can connect two and two.

I have also been selfishly worried about the lack of connection that I would have to that topic. I don’t have children and have no plans to have children; won’t write about the reasons why, since I don’t think it’s relevant and I also love all the children who my friends have brought into the world. I cannot say that “I love them as if they’re my own children” because that cheapens what I’ve seen now up close and personal to be the very real ways my friends have changed since becoming parents. It is next-level, mind-blowing shit. I’m in awe of being around it. These kids make me so happy, man, and it makes me wildly even more happy to see my friends in that state of being, playing with their kids, being with these little people who they love more than anyone or anything else.

The thing to get to here, though, selfishly, is that naturally I did underestimate Dan’s ability to write extremely personal lyrics that can also have a more universal meaning. It’s only the thing he has done throughout his entire career.

“I’m low / And I’m scared / But I’m on your side / Your name’s the only one I like”

“I’ve never been more sure of something / I see it clearly in my dreams / I know I’m gonna be the one / The one who ruins everything”

“I wanna build, wanna build you back from memory / Something that can stay, that can stay here when you go”

“I'm finding hope in the pocket of my winter coat / With your gloves a reminder that I'm not alone / And you're brave, so I'm brave / Or I'm trying anyway / Put the work in / Plant a garden / Try to stay afloat”

I’ve found my own meanings for these bits, amongst others, though a summer of listening to this record while working extremely long hours on a particularly soul-sucking work project. I’m sure they’ll take on new meanings and continue to lodge into my heart and my mind as I get older and things change. You’ll find your own, too.

V

This record is heavy as heck IMO. There’s a traceable progression now, starting with No Closer To Heaven, that has seen this band get heavier and heavier musically. I did not think this one would sound heavier than Sister Cities! Which, to be fair, is not exactly a metal album or anything, but it sounds to me like a band that could open for the Foo Fighters or whatever as much as it sounds like a band headlining club gigs with Spanish Love Songs. To be clear, no hate on club gigs or Spanish Love Songs, who I like a lot. Tall guy frontman! I feel represented.

Anyway, there’s loads of lyrical imagery surrounding heat and fire, and I think Dan often sounds on this album like he’s literally got a fire in his throat. He’s shredding and my guy is gonna need a lot of tea on the tour. These lines say what I feel the record sounds like.

“I can feel the low persistent heat”

“You pull out a cig / Imagine the air in your lungs as gasoline”

“I wrote a song about how I’m drinking kerosene / To light a fire in my gut / And I’ll be coughing out embers for decades to come / I was seventeen with a fire in my gut”

“Lost It In The Lights” is a humid lightning storm for me. One of those 6pm storms in northern Florida where it looks like it’s 10pm outside and it’s not even raining yet but the sky is so fucked you’re not going outside. In “Songs About Death,” I am pretty sure that Casey, Matt and Nick have added concrete mixer into the guitar tone. That song sounds like Denis Villeneuve’s ᑐᑌᑎᕮ looks.

Everything in this fucking movie looks like it weighs 170,000 pounds.

The Wonder Years have, IMO, always been a band led by their rhythm section, but this is more true than ever on The Hum Goes On Forever, with Josh & Michael turning in their tightest, nastiest performance yet. These guys are very deep into the rock here. For me, it’s most obvious on “Songs About Death,” which musically hovers between a general foreboding sense of dread and, toward the end, an anvil hanging overhead.

Of course, there are the requisite ballad-ish things (“Summer Clothes,” “Laura & The Beehive”), and naturally one of those wrenches out as much or more emotion than anything else here, because why not, let’s just take a little breather oopsie doopsie we’re cryin’ again, and the bops that hide how heavy the base can be. “Wyatt’s Song” and “The Paris of Nowhere” and even “Old Friends Like Lost Teeth” fit that bill, but there are moments where they can’t help themselves — the latter-most of those tracks peaks when Josh & Matt trade off vocals over an absolutely cataclysmic car crash of a back-drop.

And while “You’re The Reason I Don’t Want the World To End” starts like a lullaby, it ends like an avalanche. Full-on catharsis in an album that’s been tense, had its moments of levity, sure, but it’s been weighing on you. The final lines may not be the lightest idea, but they’re a point of looking forward, hopeful, with a sense of potential control over outcomes, lines that will be the subject of tattoos, on me?, almost certainly, it’s a “scream-sing it as loud as you can get at the gig” moment on the best Wonder Years closing track to date (stiff competition, did not have “Funeral” getting ousted from this slot on my 2022 bingo card), on the best Wonder Years album to date. Put the work in. Plant a garden.

They sure as shit did do it again.

(Patrick: Thanks to Thomas for joining us this week. I enjoyed this album (specifically the songs about being a Dad, which I will be in about six months). I love Dad Rock. I enjoyed Thomas’ writing about it even more. I will be gone next week, as well, as my cousin is getting married in the mountains. Thanks. Hope You Like It)