The Get Up Kids - Something To Write Home About 25th Anniversary ALBUM REVIEW
When you think of the pioneers of emo, one band to me has always stood out and that's The Get Up Kids. It's hard to believe that the band's sophomore album Something to Write Home About is celebrating its 25th Anniversary, and with that, the band is set to release a deluxe version of the record that has a whole new set of remasters as well as a set of demos of each track of the record.
I had the pleasure of watching the band perform this record from front to back this year at the 10th annual Four Chord Music Festival as they took the album on tour, and this was their Pittsburgh, PA stop of the tour date.
The Get Up Kids, and especially this album has always stood out and has played a significant part in my life personally, especially my adolescence, something I can attest to for a lot of “elder emos” around my age. I can still remember blasting the track “Holiday” on the back of the bus on a portal boombox on school functions or calling up girls in high school and playing the song “I’ll Catch You” on the phone to impress them.
For the four core members of The Get Up Kids, the album transports them to Mad Hatter Studios in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood, where they spent six weeks in the summer of 1999 recording what would be their genre-defining outing. “I can hear that studio that we recorded in,” says bassist Robert Pope. “A lot of it was the environment.”
Compared to their 1997 debut Four Minute Mile–recorded over a whirlwind weekend in Chicago on a shoestring budget–their follow-up was given the time and resources to be fully realized, thanks to a freshly signed agreement with Vagrant Records that concluded an arduous label search. “We spoke with nearly every major-label A&R person that was out in the world,” says Pope. “They had weird expectations for our band, and I think we aimed a little higher than the major labels did.”
The Get Up Kids’ goal at Mad Hatter was to surpass the first album’s songwriting and sonic qualities without losing the authenticity and energy Four Minute Mile encapsulated–and that the band displayed at every stop of their relentless tour schedule. “Our first record is what it is—its imperfections are one of the things that people like about it,” says frontman Matt Pryor. “But I personally wanted us to record something that sounded like a real band, that sounded professional and, you know, big.” Working for the first time with Chad Blinman, who co-produced the record with Alex Brahl, the band achieved the massive sound they sought.
Something to Write Home About captured the band’s growing musicianship–their playing pivots from aggressive to sensitive from track to track, sometimes even within songs–and featured keyboard textures from James Dewees that realized the band’s ambitions to push beyond stripped-down punk. “The record sounds bigger and more expensive than it actually is,” says Pryor, “which I think is a testament to both our ability as a band and to Blinman's ability as a producer.”Drummer Ryan Pope describes the “little magical moments” in the songwriting and arrangements, where maturity and nuance merged with the unexpected touches that sprang from the young band’s instincts. “It was pretty natural,” he says, “which is kind of how a lot of cool things happen–when you don’t overthink it too much.”
The record from track 1’s Holiday is just as I remember it and more. It’s remastered features are more crisp and clear which brings the record into that modern pop-punk punchiness of the here and now 2000’s era and even the demo stayed pretty true to the original track down to the melody and lyrics.
Action & Action will always hold a special place for me. I grew up playing keyboards in an 80s cover band, and when I got into pop-punk there weren’t many bands at the time that tapped into synth. That track was the first I heard which then got me into bands like Motion City Soundtrack and early versions of Four Year Strong. This track unfortunately didn’t have a demo attached to its deluxe version.
Listening to Valentine back to back with the demo is light night and day. The keyboard/organ part is completely absent from the entire demo. The melody too was almost different from the demo and the demo was way slower. Surprisingly all of the lyrics stayed exactly the same.
Red Letter Days is just as fast and hard hitting as I remembered it, hard hitting for a Get Up Kids song that is. The demo is raw and live sounding. It has a 90’s Seattle grunge vibe to its recording, but what do you expect off of demo recordings?
Out Of Reach was always this awesome, beast crescendo of a song that started off on this simple acoustic and ends in an entire band playing with harmony vocals and everything which I always loved, whereas the demo version of the song could be passed off as just a regular acoustic B-Side of the tune, it’s just a simple acoustic and vocal.
Ten Minutes is a The Get Up Kids staple in my opinion, and was definitely one of the tracks I was looking forward to see live. Live, remastered and demo are all slight copies of eachother in the sense that they’re not exactly the same, but they’re pretty damn close.
Company Dime as well as My Apology are both still very true to their their demos with Company Dimes only being a four-track release on just an acoustic guitar and vocals with My Apology being an entire full band demo. I can’t reiterate enough how crazy it is, especially being a musician myself, and how a lot of things change a lot in music, that these songs, for the most part stayed pretty true to the original demos as far as lyrics and melodies go. Watching them being built off a simple acoustic guitar and vocal track is pretty amazing.
One of the tracks that didn’t get a demo and was one of the ones that I most wish had was I’m a Loner Dottie, a Rebel. The jazzy style, driving drum grooves with that driving guitar sound and those “stop break” strumming patterns with the two-part vocal harmonies splattered throughout the track that so many bands from the early 2000’s pop-punk era later adopted accompanied, I’d love to have seen where that song first got its wings.
Track Long Goodnight is the perfect example of how a song can start out one way and completely go a different direction. The original four track demo of the song has almost and entire different vocal melody as well as completely different lyrics all together with the only lyrics kept in the entire song being “I’m not bitter anyway” in the chorus, along with the finished track extending over an extra minute in time with a predominant organ melody and different melody line.
Going back to the opposite end of that is track Close To Home which is another track like Ten Minutes, and Red Letter Days it’s that songs’ demos kept pretty simliar if not the exact same to the album version of the track.
Lastly, is I’ll Catch You as far as the original album goes. Night and day is the demo and album version of this track. The piano is completely absent as well as the final lyrics in the first or second verse which seem to have been replaced entirely. The demo version is also recorded on four track as well, so it’s just an acoustic and vocals and a backing harmony. Even though most of the lyrics themselves are gone, the vocal melody lines are still intact entirely in both verse and chorus, this track was by far my favorite one to listen to and compare demos to final album release.
A few more demos are also available on this record including One Year Later, a track from the band’s 2001 record “The EP’s”, a track that again, sounds just like the original, which you can find on any streaming service.
Another demo track dropped on this record is a song called Central Standard Time was put on a split EP in 1999 put out by Vagrant Records between a band called The Anniversary and The Get Up Kids. With Side A being Central Standard Time and Side B being The Anniversary track Vasil + Bluey. That version might be tougher to find , so it can also be found on The Get Up Kids EP “Eudora”, a collection of B-Sides and rarities which dropped back in 2001 which is on all streaming platforms.
The Get Up Kids 25th Anniversary of Something To Write Home About drops everywhere digitally on 8/23/24 and can be available in physical copy 09/20/24!
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