#suburbia i've given you all and now i'm nothing

[stellernorth]

i spent this year as a ghost and i’m not sure what i’m looking for / i spent this year as a ghost and i’m not sure where home is anymore - came out swinging by the wonder years

double-knit scarf

[sentimental-boulder]

one of a kind embroidered hank denim shirt now available in my ETSY SHOP

dm for commission inquiries and check out more of my work HERE

[sleepingswift85]

A bit of TWY always hits when it’s necessary.

‘Someone keeps playing all the sad songs and I can’t help but start singing along’

[xxfunk1b3atxx]

If I were to get a tattoo of "I'm not sad anymore" with a tribal pattern next to it would it be super clever or mega douchey?

[burningcomputerpersona]

WELL I CAME OUT SWINGING FROM A SOUTH PHILLY BASEMENT CAKED IN STALE BEER AND SWEAT UNDER HALF LIT FLUORESCENTS AND I SPENT THE WINTER WRITING SONGS ABOUT GETTING BETTER AND IF I'M BEING HONEST I'M GETTING THERE

[chronotopes]

aivide the prequel albums:

hinges

love exchange failure

im wald

the record

hesitant alien

vital light albums:

expert in a dying field

gordon lightfoot and john denvers entire discographies

long time coming

autumn eternal

narrow line

yet-unnamed vital light tng story albums:

suburbia i've given you all and now i'm nothing

wearing out the refrain

continue as a guest

morbid stuff

the north

i could continue but i'm kicking myself out of doing this before i spend more time scrolling through my own spotify library than putting in numbers in the wordcount mines

[strawberryblondebutch]

girl (gn) help i'm back on my bullshit (listening to the deluxe edition of suburbia i've given you all and now i'm nothing (2011) by american rock band the wonder years and romanticizing the life i created by leaving behind my high school self and creating my independent existence)

[dameronscopilot]

You KNOW I’m gonna ask for 🥝 🥕🍄 on The Wonder Years!! 😤 also YES for Josiah and the Bonnevilles!! that man’s music absolute seeped into my soul over the course of a week and is firmly lodged there, so I’d also love to hear 🥝 and 🍄 for him! 🤎

AJ!!!!! 🧡🧡 I honestly just yelled because Josiah is SO underrated. I'm very very thrilled you listen to him, too 😭 He's wonderful.

--

The Wonder Years

Favourite albums:

Suburbia I've Given You All and Now I'm Nothing

The Upsides

Favourite songs:

Don't Let Me Cave In

Solo & Chewy: Holdin' it Down

Summer Clothes

Washington Square Park

Favourite lyrics:

"I hate the context clues you leave out of your writing Because I can’t find myself here at all"

"I’m trying to play the b-side to this awkward life of mine"

"I’m nailing shards of hope together To put something over my head Because you know here it’s always raining"

"I'm feeling homesick for things I know don't think of me"

Josiah and the Bonnevilles

Favourite songs:

Daisy

Easy to Love

Favourite lyrics:

"It ain't love but it's good enough" "I will follow you down till the sky drowns the sun"

-> MUSIC GAME ✨

[johnbazley]

Summer came on way too strong and the radio played all new songs

Ten years of 'Suburbia I've Given You All And Now I'm Nothing'

The saga of The Wonder Years, as it stands, starts in earnest not with the band’s jokey, nearly-satirical debut full-length, Get Stoked On It!, but rather with Paper Boats, or Some Poems I Wrote. Vocalist Dan Campbell’s chapbook of poetry written and released between that first album and the band’s revelatory, career-altering The Upsides, Paper Boats is out of print now and hard to find online, even if you know where to look. But one scan, widely-circulated on AbsolutePunk early in the 2010s, is signed—“I got a lot off my chest in this book. I hope it makes you feel something,” writes Campbell, his initials and three Xs below the inscription.

In the first poem, “Paper Boats (Or An Introduction to Some Poems I Wrote),” Campbell starts with a pseudo-invocation in block-text: 

My life stopped lending itself to poetry a few years ago and so I’ve manufactured my sadness in these factories that rose up all over my skin and had little neighborhoods form around them only to watch the industry fail and the buildings collapse and the neighborhood give way to violence and drug addicts. Alleyways you don’t walk down even in the broadest light of day. Yes, it must have been this way because I was absolutely sadder this past year than I ever have been before and the poetry never came.

Everything that The Wonder Years would eventually realize in their music starts here: the manufacturing of sadness into art, the alignment of the self with the suburb, the urban decay of that suburb leading to self-reflection. The casual classism of a writer whose most important identity is “suburbanite” aside, it’s here in the opening words of Paper Boats that Campbell sets out on the journey eventually evolved into The Wonder Years’ third album, Suburbia I’ve Given You All And Now I’m Nothing, which turns ten years old today.

I was sixteen years old when Suburbia released on this day in 2011, but more importantly, I was sixteen years old when Suburbia leaked a few weeks earlier, in the final throes of a brutal sophomore year of high school. I was more depressed than I ever had been, starting to realize that my bad winters and weeks spent sleepless were maybe actually a problem worth investigating. I was skipping class, failing history, asking my teachers for a bathroom break and retreating to the library or a bathroom stall to have a brief, or sometimes long, panic attack, sometimes cry for a while, then move into the next act of my school day, walk to Geometry/Trigonometry, and convince myself that none of it had ever happened. On one of those days, I made it home and downloaded the leaked Suburbia, breaking a few promises to some friends that we’d all listen to it together for the first time on the way home from the music shop in my only drivers’-license-having friend’s car, and look, I don’t want to say that things got any better once that leak made its way onto my playlist, because they didn’t. 

Suburbia didn’t save me. It made my junior year of high school a hell of a lot easier, and The Greatest Generation sure made the summer between high school and my first tragic year of college much easier to miss when it was over. But the bad times always came back. The magic of Suburbia was, for a summer, convincing me that they wouldn’t, that everything was going to be okay, that no pit was too deep to climb out of with a little dedication, that if Dan Campbell could look the listener straight in the eyes and close “Came Out Swinging” with “I spent the winter writing songs about getting better / and if I’m being honest / I’m getting there,” then I could survive any number of library panic attacks.

The brilliance of the opening one-two of Suburbia is that things don’t immediately start to improve for the speaker after “Came Out Swinging” offers some little spark of hope and honesty—instead, things get worse first, as they often do. “Woke Up Older” details the night of, and more crucially, the morning after a landmark breakup. Campbell describes the image of “a Bukowski novel on a Blacklisted LP,” a callback to The Upsides’ “Everything I Own Fits In This Backpack,” which itself contains an allusion to Charles Bukowski’s “You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense” and Philadelphia hardcore band Blacklisted’s 2008 album “Heavier Than Heaven, Lonelier Than God.” Instead of shirking the image of “how this must look,” as he does in The Upsides, Campbell acquiesces: “This time / what it looked like / was just what it proved to be.”

It’s that reluctant acceptance where Suburbia really starts. Things need to get worse before they get better. You need to accept that things need to change before they ever will. I think that’s the kernel of Suburbia that resonated hard enough with audiences to launch The Wonder Years into relative punk superstardom. Simply put, as it is in “Local Man Ruins Everything,” “it’s not about forcing happiness / it’s about not letting sadness win.” Suburbia is not an album about rebuilding, but rather what happens before rebuilding, refocusing the myopia of a depressed, angry winter into something more outward, more grateful.

That gratitude is never more apparent than in the album’s interludes and finale, odes to hometown’s specific scars and folklore, which when combined restate the title of the album back to the listener. “Suburbia” calls back to the image in “Paper Boats” of an industrial small town in decay, opening with the all-timer of a first lyric: “The bowling alley burned down / They said it was a cigarette / almost believed it / there were burns in the carpet / everyone knows that / it was for the insurance, and / this is where you pick up the bus.” “I’ve Given You All” takes the tour to Memorial Park, where Campbell tells the story of a local homeless man’s unsolved murder before pivoting to the townies drinking by train tracks, “wearing starter jackets / for teams that haven’t / existed since the ‘90s,” ending in a hardly-sung “man, I’m sorry.” 

It’s local folklore like that defines the life in the suburbs. Here in New Jersey, I could take you on a similar tour. Here’s the best coffee in town. Here’s the other coffee shop that has WiFi and will let you sit around all day and write. Here’s the street where Bruce Springsteen grew up. Here’s where I went to high school. Here’s the good Dunkin Donuts. Here’s where I saw one of the Real Housewives of New Jersey once. Here’s the bad Dunkin Donuts. Here’s where I got into a car accident when I was eighteen. I’m still afraid to drive in the rain.

Maybe knowing where the worst coffee in town is doesn’t seem like a particularly useful bit of information, but I still know it. That’s what sets me apart from the tourists who descend upon my little beach town in the summer, tripling its population between Memorial Day and Labor Day. That’s what grounds me when everything else goes wrong, through break-ups, anxiety attacks, pandemics, bouts of unemployment. I know the coffee shop to avoid. To quote “All My Friends Are In Bar Bands,” "I don’t know where I am / but I know where I came from.”

It’s clear that Campbell couldn’t see the journey back to gratitude when he sat down with a pen and jotted down the opening words of Paper Boats. That much is apparent from the closing words of “Paper Boats (Or An Introduction to Some Poems I Wrote)”:

If I could go back in time to when I wrote sad little poems, I’d punch myself right in the fucking face because it gets worse man. It gets much, much worse and the sooner we realize that, the sooner we can just start dying, and I know. I know—blahblahblah nobody gives a fuck about your broken heart, but you know something? Most days, I’m not even sure what I’m upset about.

And to be fair, just over ten years ago, when Suburbia leaked, I was misled too. I would have told you that everything changed the first time I heard that album, that Ginsburg spoken-word opening to “Came Out Swinging,” those massive drum hits that open “Woke Up Older,” that I would never be sad again because I knew now that it was simply just about not letting sadness win. But I’ve let sadness win a lot since then. I’ve let it win again and again over the past year, the worst of my life. I’ve let sadness wash over me, and I’ve spent days, weeks, months inside. But last summer, when I was more broke than I’ve ever been, more broken-down than I ever hope to be again, I kept sane by driving around town. Over the bridges between towns, along each highway, past my old high school, always stopping at the good Dunkin Donuts, past the roller-rink that burned down years ago, the old Asbury Lanes that I swore off the last time it changed hands, and here’s where you pick up the bus.

[kingkatsuki]

Thank you so much for the tag Marq and @threadbaresweater !

I put Marvin Gaye for you Marq and Nirvana for you Lin! (I’m pretty certain I’m at least 1mil of the views on the man who sold the world on yt for that😂 so fucking good)

Tagging anyone that wants to play and album covers under the cut💕

I’ll literally forever be thankful to the young and the hopeless it genuinely shaped my childhood and got me through so much rough shit and opened the door to so many amazing bands/shows.

hehe ty for the tag vile @hysterotic !!

rules: list your top 5 albums from your top 5 artists (can't have a repeat of the same artist) on a poll, so your followers can vote which album they think captures your vibe the best

tags : @rainyrindou @shoyoist ++ anyone who wants to <3

[tendernxss]

my life as rob gordon // the wonder years

[gods-last-gift182]

They say you’ve gotta fake it

At least until you make it

That ghost is just a kid in a sheet

[sleepingswift85]

What a banger, used to be a big TWY stan and I’m reminded why.

‘Suburbia.. stop pushing, I know what I’m doing’

[xxfunk1b3atxx]

Gonna listen to as much 2nd wave emo as my brain can possibly take this autumn then in winter listen to nothing but the albums The Upsides, Suburbia: I've Given You All and Now I'm Nothing, and What People Call Low Self-Esteem Is Really Just Seeing Yourself the Way That Other People See You

[lyralthebee]

I Look Out To The World None Of It Welcomes Me Not Since I Was Young

When I Was Little Everything Was Easier I Only Worried About Playing Pretend Everything Is What I Want It To Be

I Came Out Swinging Way Back When I Was Young, Dumb, And Careless Now I'm Just Writing About Getting Better And Getting There

But This Isn't Progress It's Getting Back On Track I'm Not Getting Better I'm Just Getting Older

Nothing Is As It Seems I've Ruined Everything This Time

Hang My Problems From The Trees Carve Open My Grief And Pray As I Burry Myself In The Casket For Eternity

If You Ever Find Me Again It'll Be As A Moss-Covered Skeleton If You Ever Love Me Again You'll Have To Tear Me Out Of The Ground

You Can Call My Name To The Wilted Flowers On My Desk They'll Never Remember Me Just Like The Rest Of You

Darkness Wraps Itself Around Me Like A Silk Cloak But The Fabric Is Torn And My Thoughts Are Not Kept

Everyone I Love Will Some Day Die And I'm Scared That I Will Not

Shaking, Crying, Never Sleeping Shaking, Crying, Always Dying

I Came Out Swinging But This Depression's Got Hands So Now I'll Pick Scabs And Pry Myself Off The Ground

[sagehaleyofficial]

“They smash and scatter and Bern out somewhere else without knowing...”

Follow @sagehaleyofficial for more memes every Monday!