We Take the Road Less Traveled On

The band We Are The Union recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund their forthcoming album Self Care. I was incredibly invested in this band's music when I was a little younger, so I though I would take the opportunity to promote their efforts in putting out some new music.

We Are The Union was my entire world for a couple of years during my undergrad degree. I discovered the band through MySpace just as I started school and immediately took to them, specifically their album Who We Are (available as a free download at the time), which dominated my listening that year and was my "Album of the Year" in a time before IMU existed. The music was a synthesis of things that were new and exciting to me at the time, like Mutiny!-era Set Your Goals and Self-Titled-era Lifetime, with the ska-punk I was already familiar with and will love for the rest of my life. It took me many babysteps to get into hardcore and those examples of SYG and Lifetime were the first of those. Finding a band that happened to be combining the things I was just getting into with what I was already comfortable with seemed too good to be true.

The lyrics on that record were also a huge part of why it resonated so much. There were angsty breakup songs that I loved because I was just starting to wade into the dating world and was extremely confused about that process, but what really stuck with me was the album's overall themes of self-reliance and anti-conformity. At a time of transition and self-discovery, that being 1st year university, those ideas felt empowering.

A quick sidenote: Being a good ska-punk band is a delicate balance. Every member needs to be:

• A good and capable musician. Moreso than most punk or rock band members.
• A true appreciator of ska music in all its forms. Even if you mostly like newer stuff and want to play 3rd wave, your band will mostly likely suck if you don't have an understanding of 1st and 2nd wave.
• A fuckin' punk. That level of energy and aggression and defiance needs to be there or everything will fall flat.

It's a hard thing to maintain. Even bands who absolutely nail it for an album or two don't maintain it for a whole career. We Are The Union nailed all of these.

Following the release of Who We Are, the band quickly became "my guys" and I hyped them up at every opportunity (here's a real bad post from the archives doing just that). I followed all of the members on Twitter and eagerly watched updates from their tours. In particular, I remember watching a livestream of one of their shows from Memphis, I think? Some small punk market. When they announced a follow-up record in 2009, my excitement was at a fever pitch. I was all over their studio updates and was trying to piece together what the album would sound like from brief unmixed clips playing in the background. In my mind, they were the best band working and the album would be the best thing put out that year.

Ultimately, I remember being a little disappointed by Great Leaps Forward. Not that it was bad, but that it didn't live up to the monumental expectations I had for it. In the years after that, my listening to the band gradually slowed. I still loved them and eagerly checked out new releases, but my investment wasn't nearly what it was when I was in 1st and 2nd year university. In the last couple of years especially, I haven't paid much attention at all.

When they started promoting the new Kickstarter campaign, I went back and dug out my vinyl copies of Who We Are and Great Leaps Forward, as my record player was serendipitously repaired for this listening. WWA still has a special place in my heart for how much it meant at one time, but I found that it didn't quite resonate as much as it used to. To my surprise though, I found Great Leaps Forward much more palatable now. It's fast and it doesn't let up for the whole play through. Maybe I've relaxed a bit about getting dumped. I'd like to think that I still care just as much about being who I am though. I don't think that will ever leave me, even if I've found different ways to say it now.

While I was re-listening to the records, I dug through my t-shirts to see if I still had my old "I'm Like John Cusack"-themed one. I still do, sort of, in that I cut the front out of it to include in a quilt of old band t-shirts I'm going to make. I guess that symbolizes a lot of the music I was into at that time: Maybe I've moved on a little bit from some of it and maybe I like some different things now, but I'll never let go of what this stuff meant at one time and the fire it lit inside of me.