I'm Already Gone
While Leave All The Lights On (also from Common Courtesy) is The Notebook of pop-punk songs. To me, it tells the story of a couple who’re struggling, the guy (perhaps Jeremy himself?) goes on a drive to be alone, and asks his significant other to leave all the lights in the house on so he’ll be able to tell if she still loves him when he gets back. ‘Leave all the lights on if I’m not worth letting go / Leave all the lights on, if you still care I need to know,’ he sings as I rip tissues from the Kleenex box.
Needless to say I listened to nothing but Common Courtesy for months when it came out (around the time of that break-up), and that’s because A Day To Remember’s music is so comforting and uplifting.
Theirs are songs that make people lose their shit just from hearing the first few bars of the intro. Songs SO powerful and driving that they FORCE you to feel something, even when you might feel nothing. Songs that almost know what you’re feeling. And that’s not something you can fake.
Perhaps it’s their lyrics that incite the majority of said feels – words that offer hope, and togetherness. That make you feel (CHEESE ALERT) that you’re not alone, and that if things are shit now? Well, they will get better. Case in point: We Got This from latest effort Bad Vibrations, a song aimed at fans who’ve ever felt ‘alone in a crowded room’. Jeremy offers the following line: ‘You’re just like me when I was your age / Things do get better, trust me, I’ve been there’ and, during that irresistible choral hook, he sings: ‘To anyone who’s alone in a crowded room, put your hands up high and sing it out of tune… we got this’.
ADTR have been through it. They know. They’re five normal guys, doing something extraordinary. And they’re doing it with so much attitude, and enormous balls (on and off stage). That’s how they’ve been thriving for the past 15 years, bringing fun and joy, positivity and hope, and massive fucking breakdowns to millions.
A Day To Remember – a band we’ll never forget.
WORDS: Jennyfer J. Walker