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- Goodbye June Gloom
Hello new subscribers! There are quite a few new faces around here - welcome! Stick around for new issues of this newsletter each week.
You can catch up on my intro here, where I define what the word “emo” means to me and outline some of my goals for this community.
This week has been full of research. I’m teaching myself about self-publishing and learning the ins and outs of the different available options. There’s a lot to learn and am starting to feel so bogged down by all the information, as I keep chasing various threads of print on demand, ebooks, small presses, query letters, etc. Fortunately I know a couple people in the publishing world and I just need to narrow down a specific list of questions to approach them with.
It may be to my benefit to stop trying to teach myself all these things now, and get to work on my manuscript. There’s a vague timeline I’m aiming to work toward and it is about time I start to buckle down.
Missed last week’s newsletter? Read it here
🖤 Elisa
IT’S NOT A PHASE
Things found online this week, lots of new music to choose from:
FROM THE PIT
This week the Fall Out Boy tour arrived to Los Angeles. I went to both shows, excited to see The Academy Is… again and to see Bring Me The Horizon. BMTH was (surprisingly) not on my radar until I saw them last year at When We Were Young Fest, but their stage production value impressed me and I had been looking forward to seeing them again.
Night one, I had a club level seat on the stage right side. It felt like half of the people I know in LA were at the show! It was like a family reunion the way I kept running into friends or getting IG messages from people telling me the were also at the stadium. The different crowd reactions to New Found Glory and Bring Me The Horizon were interesting to see, but I’m glad both old school punk and new school hardcore are able to exist on the same bill. Our scene is stronger united.
Immediately following the show, I met up with some other friends who were also there and mentioned I sorta wanted to get a pit ticket for the following day, despite already holding a seated ticket. They encouraged me to go for it, and as soon as I got home I checked and saw pit tickets available. Of course I snagged a pair!
For night two, I was especially hyped for getting to see The Academy Is… from the pit. In Chicago our seats were obstructed by the tent over the sound booth so we watched the jumbotron the whole show. I love that even though its been years since TAI has regularly performed, they still sound tight and as high-energy as I remember.
The Academy Is…
Fall Out Boy’s night two setlist blew my mind. Sophomore Slump with William Beckett coming out for the guest vocal and then the live debut of Bang the Doldrums?? I was LIVING. There’s not much more fun in life than being in the pit during a great live band.
William Beckett with Fall Out Boy
Fall Out Boy
Here’s a fun fact that I didn’t get to flaunt in last week’s email: my former roommates directed the music video for “The Last of the Real Ones!” I remember one day coming home from work and there was a red sports car in the driveway and lama suits in our living room. I was accustomed to seeing random film production props and gear around the house, but this one definitely was what I considered to be the coolest!
NOSTALGIA BLAST
Since I also got to see New Found Glory this week for the first time in a long while, here’s a throwback to a performance on Steven’s Untitled Rock Show
FROM THE SHELF
Since it was announced, I’d been counting the days until I could read Geoff Rickly’s book Someone Who Isn’t Me. I was like, “you’re telling me, one of my favorite lyricists wrote a book? Sign me the fuck up.” Recently, The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle (another one of my favorite lyricists) released a couple of books that I loved, so I held high hopes for Geoff’s book.
Geoff takes the reader on a hallucinogenic trip. There were times I had to rest the book against my chest, look up at the ceiling, and take a deep breath before continuing. I knew I was sitting on my couch in my studio apartment in Los Angeles, but as I progressed through the pages - I was in a van with Thursday. I was in a New York apartment with a cat. I was traveling the United States, each city blurred into the next. I was in a clinic in Mexico. The words weren’t happening in the book, they were happening to me.
I felt like I was invading on someone’s life, as the story takes a magnifying glass to its subject, sometimes singeing the edges. Each thread of the journey was held together by the mantra “I don’t want to feel this way forever” until finally giving away to the revelation that “life is beautiful.”
As I wondered on my Instagram post, is it weird to feel really proud of someone you don’t know personally? Either way, I’m proud of this book. And I hope there’s more art still to come from Geoff Rickly.
CHEER UP EMO KID
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Rawr Means I Love You In Dinosaur
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