I Just Screwed Up My First Bikini Contest, That's All

After hearing that Andy Williams, guitarist of Every Time I Die, died last weekend, and upon seeing all of the posts on social media eulogizing him, I felt compelled to write something myself. I then kept putting it off and it feels a little strange to write something about that now, but perhaps that's a sign that rather than just leaving it, I should push myself to actually do that.

Got to admit that I haven't really listened to Every Time I Die for the last 15 or so years but I don't want to give the impression that the band is an old guilty pleasure or something I try to to erase from my musical past. There were two years or so in my early twenties that Brian, Pat, and I, but especially Pat and I, loved Every Time I Die deeply. I bought New Junk Aesthetic shortly after it came out at the Stone Road Mall HMV and that served as my introduction to the band. I wouldn't say that I was new to hardcore at the time at all, but I was very much still exploring and learning about different permutations of the genre. Metalcore had really not jived with me at all and I was skeptical of Every Time I Die because they were scene adjacent in the 2000s. That's certainly an association that is downplayed now, but absolutely was there then. My ska kid-based aversion to every associated with 2000s third wave emo and screamo drove me away, but I quickly found that Hot Damn! was really good and really hard.

Something else that was a huge part of Pat and I's love for the band was the party vibe that the band put forward in their DVDs, Shit Happens and The Dudes and Don'ts of Recording, and on their social media. Beyond that, the idea of being a boozy hardcore luthario was also in their lyrics and part of the image of the band. We didn't have any responsibilities in our early twenties and wanted to pound cheap beer like Keith and Jordan Buckley and call each other on shinfo and play the Shitty Snack Game. The two of us really adopted the party guy persona and had a lot of fun staying out late and trying to be silly. We both grew out of it fairly quickly, and I'm glad we did, but it would also be disingenuous to act like a big part of our youth was dominated by the band.

An obvious difference between me and the huge amount of people who eulogized Williams online is that they had personal relationships with him, from touring and playing shows, and I didn't at all. I don't want to act like I knew the guy in any real way, or even act like he had an impact in life in a real way. But the more I saw people posting about how kind and genuine Andy was, the more I realized that what I was actually moved by was everyone else's mourning and outpouring of emotion. I sort of knew already that the band, but especially Andy, were big for other people. but his death prompted everyone to show that in a material way. Hardcore is a community that loves to gossip and throw shit at each other probably more than every other in the world. When someone dies, people rush to say something edgy or be the contrarian that is brave enough say that a person sucked. That didn't happen in this case and maybe that alone is cause for celebration.

Was recently reminded of this album by the San Diego band The Cry.

I listened to it a bunch a few years ago and in researching the band, learned that they came and went quickly with almost no press or media footprint, which is increasingly rare with the internet giving us access to archives everywhere. What was cooler is that almost every person who knows them learned about them from H-Street's Hocus Pocus video and the band was closely tied to skate culture. Great stuff, and Anthony Pappalardo speaks about that with more authority here.