A truly great opening line is rare; the best stick around long after you’ve forgotten the finer details of whatever follows. “In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection.” “Desperate for changing, starving for truth.” “It’s Britney, bitch.” It’s rarer still to find it from a band whose most successful songs until that point rhymed “you” with, well, “you.” But in 1999, the Get Up Kids were on a mission to break out of their isolated scene in Kansas City. Their second album opens with a pick slide, and then another for good measure, before vocalist Matt Pryor asks a question with the bewilderment of a man in the twilight of his teens: “What became of everyone I used to know?”
It’s hard to imagine that album, Something to Write Home About, without its explosive introduction. In an instant, it defines the ethos of so many third-wave emo bands that would form in its wake: adolescent drama stoked into a theatrical wildfire, with layered guitars and Pryor’s pinched, melodic howl as its kindling. But early demos of that song, the electric barnstormer “Holiday,” reveal a shocking alternate universe where the album opens differently: “See you every year and yet we don't embrace.” (There’s also only one pick slide. Yeesh!) On a new reissue of the band’s breakout record, which includes a remaster of the original tracklist as well as a dozen demos from the time of its recording, the Get Up Kids take a roundabout path to pop, achieving emo greatness through careful revision.
From their inception, the Get Up Kids were unabashedly ambitious. Pryor had already fronted two failed bands and wasn’t going to risk missing on his third shot at success. Today, an artist might attempt to start a viral TikTok dance to promote their music, but it was 1996, so the Get Up Kids did the only thing they could: They sent demo cassettes to every rock label listed in the pages of Billboard’s Musician’s Guide to Touring and Promotion. The label that responded to their cold submission, Doghouse, might have later inspired one of the blunter anti-label screeds of that decade, but hey, a deal’s a deal.
By the following year, the band opened for emo forebears like Braid and Jimmy Eat World and released their full-length debut, Four Minute Mile, recorded (for $4,000, by Shellac bassist Bob Weston) in one weekend so that drummer Ryan Pope wouldn’t miss school. Even if that album had the rawness you might expect from an Electrical Audio disciple—full of tape hiss and unedited live takes, a record that guitarist Jim Suptic would later describe as “a missed opportunity”—the band’s maudlin anxieties and sugary hooks couldn’t help but emerge from the wreckage. After their contract with Doghouse lapsed, they fielded offers from Sub Pop, Geffen, and “probably every major label you can name,” as Ryan put it at the time, and landed on relative newcomer Vagrant. With their own Heroes & Villains imprint and a month of studio time in Los Angeles with producer Chad Blinman on the books, they started piecing together their follow-up.
The 1999 album’s original recordings, remastered for this reissue, still sound both singular and prophetic for the shape of emo to come. Pryor’s lyrics embody the way teenage relationships can feel huge and trivial at once: Summer didn’t just pass them by—on “Close to Home” it “swallowed us whole.” On “Long Goodnight,” he writes like an endearingly overeager AP English student in one line (”Lest I forget”) before insisting, “I’m not bitter, anyway,” in the next. The album takes its palm-muted riffs as seriously as its delicate piano ballads. “I’m a Loner, Dottie, a Rebel” imagines a world where multiple time signatures and headbanging breakdowns coexist symbiotically, the former doubling the intensity of the latter. Something to Write Home About framed the everyday problems of entering adulthood with the intensity of Victorian drama, performed with the zeal of a band who wasn’t going to miss another opportunity in the studio.
The demos included in the reissue offer hints of other paths the group could have taken. The band was already well on its way to the poppier side of KROQ’s rotation when James Dewees, a drummer for Kansas City metalcore outfit Coalesce, joined as the band’s keyboardist in 1998. Their final EP on Doghouse, Red Letter Day, had ended with what sounds in retrospect like a hint of things to come: On “Mass Pike,” Dewees taps out a clinking melody on the piano while a drum machine whirrs to life in the background. Whether or not they knew they were adding an Amadeus-loving pianist when they brought him on (Dewees had come to their attention for throwing a drum kit into the audience), the Get Up Kids’ second album would be indelibly marked by his chirping synths and piano runs. His impact—not only on the band’s sound, but on the sound of emo descendents like the Anniversary and Motion City Soundtrack—is starkly revealed in its absence: An early full-band demo of “Ten Minutes” included in the reissue sounds hollow without Dewees’ grounding melodies. Absent its opening piano, a 4-track recording of “The Company Dime” is charmingly humble but thin, just layers of guitar and Pryor’s voice, worlds away from the expansive version that ended up on the album.
Elsewhere, the demos reveal iterations of the band’s writing process: The original demo for “Valentine” stumbles through what Pryor called a “twangy” guitar riff before getting to the lamentations in its verses. For the final version, the band chose an intro that, with a close listen, recalls the Red Letter Day cut “Anne Arbour”: a bluesy step down the piano’s scale, backed by the drum of a military march. These demos unfurl the band’s parallel histories: For diehard fans, they reveal the unsteady process that yielded triumphant choruses, the false turns that could have cost them their shot at the big leagues. For those who, like so many critics, saw each refinement of their sound as a rebuke of punk values, it traces the dark path towards a brighter sound, one that would finally betray the band on its sluggish and melodramatic 2002 follow-up, On a Wire.
On its 25th anniversary, Something to Write Home About leaves a mixed legacy. It ushered in a cohort of even younger and brattier bands who would go on to define emo’s next decade—you can thank the Get Up Kids for the new-wave headaches of Hellogoodbye. At the same time, it’s a high-water mark for the band and the genre, a collection of surprisingly potent vignettes of Midwestern quarter-life ennui performed by a group of deceptively seasoned musicians. Upon its release, the record was criticized for sounding too commercial—but if you heard an early demo of Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity as you were getting ready to record your next album, wouldn’t you try to step up your game too? On “Action & Action,” Pryor might be talking about their own ambitions when he sings, “Overexposure is the key,” and then, “I finally found/The right formula.” These demos, where the band tweaks a riff here or a moves verse there, reveal the magic in their punk-to-pop alchemy.
