Liner Notes (March 26th, 2022)

This week’s newsletter has thoughts on the Gaslight Anthem reunion, the passing of Taylor Hawkins, my love letter to The Ataris, and commentary on music I’ve been listening to (Caracara, Sigrid’s new one, Josh Ramsay’s solo album, Relient K, and more). Plus, there’s a playlist of ten songs I liked this week, and the supporter Q&A post can be found here.

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Review: Taking Back Sunday – Tell All Your Friends

Taking Back Sunday - Tell All Your Friends

It’s pretty amazing to think of just how much the music scene has changed in a short 20 years time. During the “emo boom” of the early 00’s, it seemed like every major label was falling over themselves in order to sign the next big thing in music and cash in on the interest in the punk/emo scene. There seemed to be a bigger buzz online in several key music website communities that you could sort of feel, or at least get a basic pulse, of when that next band was poised to make a big splash on the music landscape. As much as has been written about the tumultuous relationship Victory Records had with their bands and their contracts, I figured I’d focus the majority of this retrospective on the beauty of the music that Taking Back Sunday has left us with. Tell All Your Friends was one of those electric records that was destined to be huge, immediate, and make the listener feel like they were a part of something that belonged to them. I remember hearing of Taking Back Sunday for the first time in college when a friend of mine had just “discovered” a new band that he described as a mix between hardcore, punk, and anthemic pop that he thought I’d be into. What I wasn’t expecting was for this band to open up a gateway of possibilities of where my music tastes would gravitate towards for the foreseeable future.

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