Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

Tell All Your Friends

3) Taking Back Sunday, Tell All Your Friends (2002)

Part of what turns music you like into music you love is sharing it with other people. Tell All Your Friends is one of those albums that me and my high school crew all love. It’s tough to come across records like that, even among people who like the same type of music. As a consequence, every track incites Proustian remembrances of some kind of a good time. That’s a good album right there!

Tell All Your Friends is the debut album of the Long Island emo/pop punk outfit Taking Back Sunday. The band has put out several more albums since, with different lineups, and they’re all pretty good. None, however, matches that first album with Eddie Reyes on guitar, Mark O’Connell on drums, Shaun Cooper on bass, John Nolan on guitar and backing vocals, and the inimitable Adam Lazzara on lead vocals. That particular lineup only lasted one album, with the aforementioned Nolan and Cooper leaving to form Straylight Run. Oh well, right? Can’t complain about that turn of events, since it produced two of my favorite albums of the decade.

There’s a number of things that make TBS the band that it is. One is the superhuman pipes of Mr. Lazzara. Like a running quarterback that refuses to learn how to slide before getting laid out by a 250-pound linebacker, Lazzara treats his vocal chords as recklessly as if they weren’t the instrument through which he makes his living. Witness his transition from one-marble-in-the-mouth warbling to lung-busting screams to larynx-shattering wailing and back again on tracks like “Bike Scene,” “Timberwolves at New Jersey,” and “The Blue Channel.” I dunno how long the guy can keep it up.

The vocals would just be window dressing, of course, if they weren’t delivering great lyrics. Of all the albums on this list, Tell All Your Friends is by far the most quotable. If you’ve ever heard Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun say that you’ve got this silly way of keeping me on the edge of my seat; that if we go down, we go down together; that September never gets this cold where I come from; or that I’ve got the mic, and you’ve got the mosh pit, you have Tell All Your Friends to thank. And of course, this album gives us the most archetypically emo lyric in the history of emo music, the line that I would present were I asked to present one example that typifies the conceit of the genre, from “You’re So Last Summer”: “The truth / is you could slit my throat, / and with my one last gasping breath I’d apologize for bleeding on your shirt.” Gives you chills, don’t it?

Signature track: “Cute Without the ‘E’ (Cut from the Team)”

Ah, those four chords. I don’t want to harp about the scene, but among connoisseurs of this genre, those four chords are positively iconic. “Cute Without the ‘E’” is just one of those pantheon songs. The jukebox at Mary Ann’s (the worst bar in America, in sunny Cleveland Circle, the Times Square of Brighton, Massachusetts) had this track, and I would play it EVERY time I went there, in the vain hopes that some wicked emo chick, with a choppy haircut and some metal in her face, would should me a knowing glance and mouth the words “The only thing I regret is that I never let you hold me back.” Alas, it never happened. (And for the record, the lyrics that get bleeped out up there are “And will you tell all your friends / you’ve got your gun to my head?” The prudes at MTV need to figure out that there are far worse things on the Intertubes than reference to guns.)

This song encapsulates what I think is the best feature of Tell All Your Friends: the vocal interplay between Lazarra and Nolan. Later incarnations of Taking Back Sunday have featured perfectly capable background vocalists. On the first album, though, there are a fair number of tracks where John Nolan is more of a co-vocalist. The back and forth makes for a real dynamic tune, especially the harmonies toward the end. Also, if you think myself and the Official Bandmate of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun weren’t belting out this tune during our now-infamous trip to Long Island, well, you’re just fooling yourself.

Tags: "Tell All Your Friends", DD&UFAOTD:AMIMIFE, LIEWS, most emo lyric ever, Taking Back Sunday

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