The Roller

My favourite Against Me! song is "Even At Our Worst We're Still Better Than Most (The Roller)" off of the album Searching for a Former Clarity. Like most of my favourite songs, I have a vivid memory tied to it, which kinds of cements it in my personal pantheon of songs.

While living in Kitchener, my friends and I used to drive to a quarry halfway between Guelph and Kitchener late at night. We could only go at night, because it was private property and you would the cops called on you otherwise. Once there, we sneak through a fence, trek through a bit of brush and then go and jump into the quarry and swim. It was always dark and hard to see, which made it incredibly scary to jump into the water, but also made it that much better once you did it.

The water was always cold, but getting out and walking back to the car felt amazing. Everyone's hair would look a little silly because we had just gone swimming and we would be a weird bathing suit/band t-shirt crew. It felt amazing because we were doing something that we weren't supposed to be doing. It felt like we were part of the counterculture and that being part of it was what binded us together.

I didn't know many people when I first moved to Kitchener and these quarry trips were a big part of me becoming friends with people who I now treasure dearly.

After the first quarry jump of my first summer in Kitchener, we got into The Decay's van (which later became Beat Noir's first van) and I sat in the back row. Erik was sitting shotgun. We listened to Bleed American by Jimmy Eat World, but that had finished on the trip there. Erik picked up the iPod plugged into the stereo and put on "Even At Our Worst We're Still Better Than Most (The Roller)", which caught me off-guard because it is the 11th track on the album. We rolled down the windows and played the song at full volume while driving extremely fast down an small, empty highway at 2 AM.

My reaction to the music was absolutely visceral and physical, so I tried to hide any reaction I was having to it. Fortunately, it was dark and I was in the back corner of the van.

This type of thing has only happened to me a few times and I think it occurs when I hear the perfect song for a moment that also happens to be intensely emotional for me. One was "Chicago" by Big D and the Kids Table while walking home in the rain and also listening to "Felt Just Like Vacation" during a snow storm while walking down Edwin Street in Guelph while extremely sad. I guess they're all moments when the feeling the song stirs in me is overwhelming. They can be good or bad, but they're all equally strong.

For me, the song's lyrics are a testament to believing in your band.

We'll give the money back, to the record label. Fire the agent, fire the manager.

Let someone else take our place, let them be your entertainment.

You know they're waiting to tear us apart.

You realize at a certain point in being in a band that you either do things your way and stay unsuccessful, or do them somebody else's way and be successful. I don't mean this in the typical "sign to a major label and sell out" way, but it's more that you find that you're sort of forced to make minor concessions to a lot of different people along the way. A lot of very small things that seem inconsequential at the time add up eventually.

But fuck that. Stick to who you are.

You can also read the lyrics as a typical punk manifesto of "Fuck them all. Fuck their rules. We'll do it our way. We don't care if we fail." and I think the tropiness of that message combined with the fucking ferocious and perfect delivery of the song by Laura Jane is what makes this song perfect.

Fuck them all.

Fuck their rules.

We'll do it our way.

We don't care if we fail.

And, most of all, you can't stop us.

Some people would maybe look at that message as juvenile, but those are exactly the fucks who never really understood what they were being told in the first place.

I couldn't find the actual version of the song, which is why I put the kid covering it at the top of the page. I was expecting it to be a sub-par cover, as most acoustic videos on the internet are, but it wound up being great and I think that a young kid screaming the lyrics while playing his guitar speaks profoundly to the message I was just talking about.