Chicago Is So (One) Year Ago
Moving away from Chicago and remembering Fall Out Boy's "Take This To Your Grave"
Fall Out Boy Take This To Your Grave, released May 2003 Fueled By Ramen
For a quick introduction, my name is Amanda and I hold no personal musical talent to speak of but I am always talking about music. Nothing brings me as much joy, bittersweet pain, catharsis as music. Songs that aren’t particularly sad make me cry because they’re just that good. When I first started feeling a kinship with music that was being released at the time was in the early 2000’s with the wave of new poppy, emo anthems. With this page, I’m going to indulge in my lifelong love of fawning over the music of that time and hopefully continuing to find connections to others through it. So brush off your CD collections and your first generation iPods and let’s get into it.
In the spring of 2003, our Walkmans and bulky at-home CD changers were blessed with the full-length debut of Illinois’ own Fall Out Boy. I was about to be in junior high, and went to work with my mom in the mall for the day. To show up to the mall while all the roll-up gates were still down, smelling the first freshly baking Cinnabons of the day felt like owning the place. When I had spun on the swivel chair in the back office of my mom’s salon long enough for all the stores to open, I snagged some Cinnabon stix and headed for FYE. This was a couple of years before I’d start illicitly downloading songs on Limewire much to the dismay of my IT professional dad who knew exactly why my computer was crashing monthly but graciously kept repairing or replacing it with castaways from his company anyway. I walked the gray carpeted rows of CDs, flipping through the f’s until I found it, swooning over the handsome babyfaces of Patrick, Pete, Andy, and Joe. I remember eagerly taking it out of the plastic wrapping back in my mom’s office despite having no means to play it, and marveling at every aspect of the contents: the lyrics written on the inside of the cardboard tri-fold, the CD itself looking like a completely trashed vinyl record. At home that night I loaded it into the stereo in my room, and the unforgettable sound of the landline dial tone that kicks off track one punched through the quiet anticipation. I was hooked. I went back to that same FYE a week later and bought the poster with the cover image from their flip-display in the back to proudly tape up in my watermelon pink room.
Emo pop, pop punk, whatever genre you wanted to call it, Take This To Your Grave is an album laden with powerful, jagged chords and high-energy gang vocals. It’s full of absolute anthems about the seemingly simple realities of loving your friends and being scorned by your lovers: the complicated interpersonal struggles of our youth.
[Verse 2]
I'm all ears and I'm all scars
To hear you tell me, "Boys like you, you try too hard
To look not quite as desperate," I'm hanging on
But I still know the way to make your makeup run
[Chorus]
So, and when it all goes to hell, will you be able to tell
Me "sorry" with a straight face?
And when it all goes to hell, will you be able to tell
Me sorry with a straight face
[Bridge]
And when it all goes to hell, will you be able to tell
Me "sorry" with a straight face?
And when it all goes to hell, will you be able to tell
(Take this to your grave)
Me "sorry" with a straight face?
(And I'll take it to mine)
[Lyrics from the closing track, The Patron Saint of Liars and Fakes]
Rapid-fire drum beats and harmonies dripping with the kind of angst you can only feel when you’re drudging through or processing your teen years (the guys were 19-23 at the time). This was a monumental time for our generation to feel seen and represented by the music breaking into the mainstream that allowed us to showcase just how emotionally complex and difficult things were for us. There was a major camaraderie to be felt in that, with the musicians themselves because we felt like their life experiences were so similar to ours, and with the the fans and our friends who were latching onto the same brutally honest lyrics. We were feeling the weight of expectations and futures start to press down on us. We’d go through a breakup between classes or have a serious falling out with our best friend at lunch, and right away when we got home we’d march up to our rooms, log on to AIM, and stylize our away messages with “..*←said I loved you but I {*lied*} </3 OUT, leave me something..*→”
Here we were, in our pre-teen and teenage years talking adamantly about “the good ol’ days” and and holding grudges as deep as the damage we were doing to our poorly dyed hair. It feels like the biggest heartbreak when you’re living through it, without the perspective of all that will come after (hello, college life), but in that moment it felt comforting to know that someone somewhere was feeling what you were feeling, and chose to write music about it, right down to the classic pop-punk sentiment of needing to get out of your hometown.
I’ve truly never taken a break from this album. It has resonated with me over the years in different contexts: through breakups, 7am drives to high school carpooling all my friends who were probably tired of hearing it, 11pm lying on the floor of my childhood bedroom feeling the bass that my parents undoubtedly heard and were absolutely tired of, to late night bike rides home from my coffee shop job in Chicago in 2019 where I belted out “there’s a liiiiiight on, in Chicagoooo and I know I should be hoooome…”. Wherever that original CD is, it doesn’t play anymore. The back mimicked the front, all scraped and worn from continuous play.
When biking home along Damen Ave in Chicago those chilled, dewy nights it was blaring through my headphones (yes I know that’s unsafe). I felt some kind of undeniable energy from being in Chicago, wondering where they were in the city when they devised and argued over the lyrics and melodies. Something about that felt magical, historic.
I moved out of Chicago last September after eight years of bonding with the city. Coming up on one year away, I still feel a twinge about it. I still feel like a “Chicagoan” which is funny because that’s something I struggled so much to feel when I was there. Imposter syndrome is very real.
A part of me will always be in the space created by this album and will always feel the catharsis of chanting these lyrics, even if nothing in my current life resembles it.
I recently bought the limited edition silver vinyl pressing during an incredible sidewalk sale at Music Millennium in Portland, the Fueled By Ramen 25th Anniversary sticker pointedly obscuring Joe’s face. I started my record collection in high school which is when you’d think I would have first bought it on vinyl, but I was deeply elitist about collecting back then and if I didn’t find it crate digging at Used Kids in Columbus (back when it was on High Street, but after it had moved to the top floor space) then I wasn’t having it. What I definitely didn’t understand then was the obvious nod to the Blue Note stylization of the approved cover. It seems so clear now, especially with the update that added their names underneath the band name, but I was absolutely oblivious to it back then
The original cover was a staged photo from Pete’s bedroom that included memorabilia from all the guy’s rooms thoughtfully scattered around, leaning heavy into the nostalgia. It was ultimately rejected due to licensing issues with all the recognizable merch in the shot, but later showed up as the cover for the albums first vinyl pressing. You better believe I’ll snag one if I ever see it in the wild.
Where Are Your Boys Tonight? by Chris Payne (no, not “Hey Chris” from “Grenade Jumper”. But he is interviewed in the book, and was very randomly a regular at my coffee shop in Chicago for many years). This book has kept me rooted in the nostalgia of the time, where our generation’s emotions and experiences were celebrated on local and national stages, showing up on MTV programs like TRL and VH1 “spankin’ new” music videos. I will forever remember watching the music video for Grand Theft Autumn/Where Is Your Boy before school and realizing the depth of the crush I had on Patrick Stump. It was a beautiful time to be a self-declared emo kid. I highly recommend this book if you want to ruminate in that feeling again now that we’re all in our 30’s. It’s told through intertwined interviews of the heavy hitters of the time and those that bounced around in that stratosphere. Hearing about the experience of rising to recognition and fame from the perspective of those that we idolized in our younger years is unique if not somewhat voyeuristic, almost like when we were Tumblr-stalking them back in the day.