In 2024, hours after his wife and kids embarked on a cruise for Thanksgiving week, Pat Flynn received word that his mother had died. Alone at home and unable to reach his family adrift in the Caribbean Sea, the Fiddlehead vocalist broke down and shared the news with his bandmates. Two days later, he answered the front door to find guitarist Alex Henery and bassist Nick Hinsch on his Massachusetts stoop. They had flown across the country to support their friend in a time of destabilizing loss, and guitarist Alex Dow and drummer Shawn Costa drove over to do the same. Instinctively, the band turned to writing music to help Flynn work through his grief, free of expectations and without any end product in mind.
That story of support is steeped in emotional post-hardcore and alt-rock on “The Dogs,” which opens Fiddlehead’s Baby I’ll Change EP. Written in the moment as Henery and Hinsch consoled their friend, the song’s lyrics are so straightforward they verge on seeming underdeveloped. But Flynn’s forthrightness is ultimately disarming as he addresses his bandmates by nickname and thanks them for rushing to his aid. When he sings, “I just miss my mom and dad,” what’s most striking is the uncharacteristic bluntness from one of hardcore’s most famously poetic frontmen.
Months before that emergency assembly, Flynn had wondered if the band had run its course. After three albums exploring the ways death and grief influence their lives, Fiddlehead had found themselves at an optimistic stalemate: What more was there to say on the subject? Is there another record’s worth of material in them without a heavy loss to parse? That’s the thing about death: You need to believe it will pause, that it’s reached its limit, if only because of how difficult it is to repeatedly endure it without giving up. Even Flynn, a high school history teacher whose curriculum recounts the cyclical nature of wars and revolutions, needed to believe in that possibility of a reprieve, despite reiterating death’s inevitability in the classroom.
On “Porchlight,” Flynn recommits himself to staying present for those around him. Henery and Alex Dow’s guitar riffs steal the show, supporting his words through a wistful, heavy bridge. It’s the EP’s title track, though, that best captures the relentlessness of death, as glimpsed through the eyes of an addict struggling to outrun it. Lifting its refrain from the late Jimmy Flynn, a beloved Boston hardcore promoter who proclaimed “Baby, I’ll change!” at parties while drinking himself to the grave over a decade, the song swirls with guilt and desperation as its troubled protagonist tries asking for help before swearing to leave friends alone.
Fiddlehead wait nearly three minutes to burst into full volume, switching from minimal instrumentation to a searing, shoegaze-styled crescendo that sparks with crackling percussion and bass. As if pressing gauze to the song’s bleeding heart, it concludes with a voicemail the late Flynn left Dow. It’s one of the most beautiful songs in Fiddlehead’s catalog, a radiant moment of catharsis up there with Springtime and Blind’s “Widow in the Sunlight” or Between the Richness’s “Heart to Heart.” An emotional buildup isn’t new for them, but the clarity with which its alt-rock grandiosity is captured is—a result of trusting producer Alex Farrar, at Asheville’s Drop of Sun Studio, for the first time.
Flynn once kicked off summer break by quoting philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: “World history is not the soil in which happiness grows. Periods of happiness are empty pages in it.” While strife begets growth, Flynn makes a strong case on Baby I’ll Change that so too can friendships. That’s what’s so affecting about Fiddlehead’s songwriting and what grows purer with each consecutive record: In recounting his grief for loved ones lost, Flynn inches closer toward peace, borne aloft on the makeshift wings crafted by his bandmates. In these three songs, they sound lighter than ever before.
