AsterTracks 302: I went to therapy with four kids from Boston.
Despite missing Breakup Season’s initial release it became an all time favorite of mine. I used it to mend a broken heart over the summer and have clung to a lot of its songs for a year or two now. If you followed this blog last year you’ll remember the huge impression Deliberately Alive left on me as well. In a similar way to their releases, Future Teens is a band that means so much to me even though I sort of feel like I’m on the outside looking in. Boston was where I went to see basically all my live music when I lived in New England even though I was roughly an hour out and yet seeing a set of theirs somehow always eluded me.
Now their third record, Self Help, is here. As we’ll explore below this record is helping me develop my own methods of coping and generally managing my emotions. Between parents who were just as stressed as I was and an abusive high school sweetheart I never really learned or was allowed to manage my emotions. What I do know, however, is to use music as therapy and as a bit of a preview; I really needed to do this one.
The first single, “Same Difference,” made no huge impression on me in its initial release and to be honest? I don’t know what the Hell was wrong with me back then because this is incredible. The entire narrative of this track is actually something I contended with for most of my life and still think about losing every single day. It’s the desire to have that partner in crime, a soulmate you can share the entire journey with. In it Daniel muses on his past dealings in these very thoughts.
“When I found myself alone at school
Wishing somebody would think I’m cool
Enough to sit down across from me
Stare in my eyes and watch me eat
I thought it’d be easy to find someone as hungry”
And in assessing himself and reflecting on conversations about it he loops back around, resolving that;
“Spent so long beside myself
Couldn’t imagine me with someone else
Who’ll sit down next to me
Turns out I hadn’t saved a seat
It’s simple but isn’t easy
To make some room for somebody”
It’s so easy to make room for someone to love you, it’s hard to make that room to love someone else back. You have to learn to sit across from someone and get to know their needs, their wants and boundaries before they can scoot you over and sit down next to you. I also love how the line about Daniel’s sister takes on two meanings here depending on the context you hear it in. If you followed this album rollout you heard this song first. You hear Amy reminding Daniel to remember his sister’s words and then when “BYOB” is the second single it opens with them saying it again. It’s a continuation of that conversation. If you listen to the songs in context of the record you have that moment of clarity, what that moment meant to him and his own views of love and he’s putting that into practice on the record.
The next single; the aforementioned “BYOB,” I did love on release. In fact, I think it’s the single song that saved AsterTracks after the burnout that followed the MOTHICA episode. This absolutely blew me away. I have a rule generally about only listening to songs or albums once a day and yet this track made me forget all about that and I couldn’t put it down. It’s making even more an impact now that I can’t put the entire full length down. See, lately, I’ve been coming out of a severe head fog. All my life I’ve taken every high-tension situation between me and someone close to me as the first step toward a downward spiral. Like that’s it, I blew the connection and now have to go back out and find a new family. I’m one of those people who does the dangerous cliche of assuming when someone’s tone is different than usual that it’s a slight at me.
A lot of times I do think that I brought my own bullshit into something and no one deserves to deal with that. When it gets really bad I think I should be my own burden, turn around, go home and never bother anyone again. Then I have a nightmare about doing just that. I lost my job out here, I had to fly back home. I wake up next to her and she tells me I was breathing so heavy, that I seemed so scared. She holds me and tells me she’s going to take care of me, that I don’t have to go anywhere that I don’t want to. I don’t want to go back, I want to stay right where I am. I know that I have to learn to live in the moment and stop being so anxious. That’s going to take a lot for me to learn. I think it’s worth it though.
The next on the rollout was “Team Sports,” a track that saw Future Teens team up with Dan “Soupy” Campbell of The Wonder Years, something I found funny considering they both shared a release date of their upcoming albums. That aside, this is another tune I just adore. I love the guitar work especially on the verses, I love the slow and emotional instrumental that breaks down into a huge pop punk jam and then fizzles out at the end. Lyrically this ensured that this became yet another on-repeat Future Teens cut. In it Amy narrates the concerns of their friends asking if they’ve been okay based on their haircut and recent patterns and in response they begin a defensive, avoidant tirade where they beg everyone to drop it and leave them alone. They also promise to talk about it in therapy and that doing exactly that will make everything totally fine, which, been there. When I was in therapy I had two therapists in a row with a lot of logistical issues and as a result had a lot of canceled appointments over the course of a year. I always said I’d be fine, I’d make it to the next one, until one day I realized that it wasn’t a rough couple of months, it was a full blown mental health crisis.
That’s just it too, it doesn’t always matter who reaches out to you, sometimes you’re going to be in your own head and you’re going to do things to avoid your emotions. I have avoidant tendencies, all my loved ones do, it’s just how it is. The lesson to take away is that you can’t keep everyone out all the time. A big thing for me these past couple of months has been me learning what needing space really was. For fourteen years of my life I was in a relationship where needing space was considered a terrible thing to do to somebody. I’m also learning that sometimes I need space and I just never really knew how to figure that out. It’s a hard lesson, both learning to take it and learning when you’re intruding on the space someone else needs. When you do take the space, go out, do your own thing, you can arrive at conclusions like Amy does;
“We’re all just looking for a safe place to spiral
Why not make a team sport out of survival?”
Yea, why not? After you’ve meditated, why not go back and be with your people? Talk it out and let them know where exactly in your own head you’ve been. Then like Dan playing the role of concerned friend at the end of the song they can remind you that it’s okay to be alone, but you don’t have to be when it counts.
The song “Good Reason” was released the same week as the record and introduced Future Teen’s mascot; Helpy. There is simple, yet captivating guitar work on this one especially on that chorus and the licks on that outro. The instrumentation here in general doesn’t necessarily demonstrate the most intricate playing but it does show some of my favorite brand of indie songwriting; something where every side is strong and we spotlight nothing but the raw emotion. Lyrically this is a showing of how this band does not relent for a second.
“But it’s all part of the plan
Just try and do the best that you can
And know that everything that happens
Is for some goddamn good reason”
This section in particular reminds me of my own mother. Now, I give my mom a lot of credit, she lived through some hard times, but as I grew into adulthood she got this sort of deadly optimistic mindset. Any time something in my own life makes me upset, her usual response is to tell me everything is happening for a reason. That, quite literally, never makes me feel better. In fact the more I absorbed this message the more it stressed me out. I started to feel pressure to find the good in everything bad that happens to me. So yea, Daniel, I really feel you on this one.
“Doorknob Confessional” opens the record and what an opener it is. As I said above; I don’t go to this band or even genre for mind blowing playing, I go to both for strong lyricism and heartfelt performances and wow, am I eating on this intro or what? This one is packed with quotables, ones that bring me back to weirdly specific memories, including;
“Around four AM I’m hearing voices but nothing scares me anymore.”
That one brings me back to my childhood home, a place I and my entire family was convinced was either haunted or cursed. When I lived there as an adult, a miserable time by the way, I started to become hyper aware of this. Objects would move without explanation, I heard noises all night, I would totally lose money out of nowhere. Most nights it stopped bothering me, others I started talking back to the “ghosts.” Of course, now that I’m a decade removed from that place I know I was robbed by my then step brother and maybe there weren’t really any ghosts, just inconsiderate housemates, but still.
“Start projects left and right then abandon them tonight
This might not be what good feels like but at least I’m not so fucking tired.”
Dear reader, I am buried in work right now. My room has been half decorated for months and a colossal mess for weeks. Public transit adds roughly three hours to every shift I work at my day job. I have thirty plus, yes thirty, projects going as far as writing goes. All this and I of course find time to spend with my partner, my friends and try to call family back home. The point is, I’m tired. I just exited a depression due to having no time and being so exhausted all the time from waking up at five AM to get for work. It’s a lot and I feel like I miss out on living. I found balance, to a degree, but I don’t quite feel I’m there yet.
“Well Enough” is one of those songs that I can try but cannot truly impart the strength of with words alone. Colby and Maya are on fire with the rhythm section on this one with a slow and scene setting tempo that almost doesn’t even truly keep up with the song itself. There’s a very emo guitar structure that carries you through the vocal performances and makes the sections between sound huge and sparkling despite how subtle they truly are. It may just be the best Future Teens song ever.
On the narrative side Amy is angry and intense on this one that they’ve allowed themselves to get this far into their own habits. They yell over their friends playing about not eating, wandering aimlessly in the local Target and coping by drinking scotch that they don’t even like. I get it, when you get into spirals like that, well, it sucks! You do something little to cope with a bad day then a bad day becomes a bad week. Until all of a sudden it’s been a bad year and your little cope that one day has become a full blown destructive spiral. I personally never had a drinking vice but I did have an overeating problem so bad that it caused about three years straight of acid reflux attacks so intense it nearly destroyed my esophagus and it happened just like that. I had a bad day, I ordered a ton of take out then bought a ginger ale at a CVS to settle my stomach. Then life was bad, so I kept doing it. I would buy a twelve pack of Canada Dry a week and it would cause me to throw up constantly. Who did that help exactly? It made me feel ill all the time. Do I still eat a ton when I’m depressed? Sometimes, yes. The point is I can hear Amy’s self hatred here and when they sing about that “self care” spiral and how there’s bottles they “don’t want to waste” as an excuse to let their vices own them it rings loud to me.
“Stress Dream” is a really good one conceptually. The main concept is being home and spiraling. You keep sulking and sinking deeper into your depression all the while the entire day feels like a dream. The opening lines are just “get out, get out” as if Daniel is telling himself to just stop stewing in misery and go outside already. Some days when I feel like that I go outside and stand on my front steps. I take a deep breath and look at the skyline, the trees and houses in the distance and I try to convince myself that I should go for a walk. I think I do this for two reasons; first of all I live in a basement bedroom with very tiny windows and the fresh air probably does me really well. The second is because I feel cooped up and isolated and don’t want to be in my own head. The track goes even deeper into this with every few lines being some totally sporadic thought. Daniel walks us through looking up if all the Lawrence brothers are alive and eventually finds himself having prepared and eating a meal in his kitchen with no recollection of how he got there. That’s truly just how it is some days. You become unconscious, your own body taking control and shutting your mind off. This despondent and uncaring sense of carrying yourself is brilliantly demonstrated in the instrumentation. A slow song is occasionally turned on its head for mere seconds with a bass drop or fast drum beat as if to emulate moments of intense anxiety that you feel before drifting back into the ceiling above. It’s such a masterful design because it feels like you’re just there forever with no way out.
As I draw to the end of the record I start to find that I do have a way to cope with and manage my emotions; making AsterTracks. Every note taking session for every episode in this series is also a therapy session. After the outline for this was done I felt totally out of my head for the first time in weeks. In a similar spirit of closure Amy and Daniel combine forces and share lead vocal duties on “Going Pains.” At the ripe, old age of twenty-eight it takes a lot for me to be impressed by this very stripped down, acoustic only delivery but this song really does it. The chord progression is impressive and these two’s vocal chemistry is something to behold. The song also really, eerily narrates my final month in New England.
“It’s gonna feel so good to miss you, to have this bed to myself
To go somewhere new and do something cool
And know you’re all set somewhere else.”
It did feel good to have the bed to myself, it felt good to miss my ex, it felt good to go on little adventures that I was allowed to plan because no one was there to be unenthused about what I wanted to get into. It felt good to worry about her in the way that I worry about her hurting herself or more people and not worry about the trouble she was absolutely going to get us into that week. Sometimes I think I still miss her to a degree but then I realize I miss New England, not her, she was just always there. She always made it stressful.
“Burritos again it’s the third time this week
Might as well just get take out when I’m only feeding me”
This line always gets me because it’s another place I’ve been. During the entire month I was constantly tempted to order food for myself instead of cooking the food I had to use up before I was out of there. When I did cook I was still in the habit of cooking for two so I made enough for dinner for two and leftovers for both the next day. Leftovers that I would eat and she wouldn’t. Then I realized I was the only one around left to eat them. That was okay though! It saved me time and money in the busiest time of my life!
I still hear my ex’s voice in my head. She tells me all the time that I’m transitioning wrong, that I dress like a stupid kid. She tells me that among the three people in my found family I’m the least important. Some days I believe her and start to feel like I’m sabotaging it somehow. She tells me every time someone doesn’t hear me and talks over me by mistake while hanging out in a group that it’s because they don’t really like me. They don’t at all care about what I have to say and that I should stay quiet tonight. She’s not here anymore but her ghost is. These are things she would say about herself and project onto me and everyone we knew. It’s how she interacts with the world. Her insecurities are not mine to worry about, I know that for sure. I need to, however, learn how to grow out of them.
I’m glad I have people to love and be patient with me while I do, because it’s a lot to grow from.
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