Somewhere along the line, I developed a profound interest in emotional (emo) music.  The term emo though comes across almost pejorative and it’s difficult to say it without wrinkling your nose. I remember as the word came into vogue in the earlier 2000’s and bands like Taking Back Sunday and Dashboard Confessional held the moniker of “mainstream emo”.  It felt wrong at the time and it still does now.

Not that emo bands, can’t be popular, but at its core, I just assumed that to write and truly enjoy the genre you had to be pretty misanthropic and torn by a continual assault of fervent internal conflict.  But here it was, kids clinging their hearts through their t-shirts and wearing Jansport backpacks while rocking back and forth, screaming their lungs out to the some of the most trite lyrics anyone could ever pen all on MTV.  But, who am I to judge, I like plenty of terrible bands.  Part of me was humbled that anything so insightful as emo, could be commoditized by the major label record companies, while the other half was excited to see folks who clearly deserved a break, get just that, a break.

My friend Matt in Simon Says was the one who first turned me onto to the genre when he played for me Sunny Day Real Estate’s LP2 and told me that it was Emotional music, which seems simple enough.  The music was chaotic, big and fast – the vocals had the typical nasally sneer to them, that so many of those singers have.  But it felt different than most things I had heard and I couldn’t quite place what compelled me to keep listening at the time.

So that leaves me with my video choice of the day. The Promise Ring was the proverbial emo band and  “Nothing Feels Good” was a record that I would find myself listening to throughout various points of my life and yet the feeling it emanated was almost always the same.