There's a love in all our souls & it shines like gold

music as a personal and communal experience, and the brightest day-glo flowers you'll ever see

Growing up, my relationship with music was always pretty personal. I downloaded weird stuff on SoulSeek in high school and happily went to shows alone in college. Most of my friends didn’t (and still don’t) have identical taste in music as me, and that’s totally fine with me. I don’t think shared interests and hobbies necessarily make a good relationship. Plus, there’s something so freeing about going to a show alone—especially in a city you don’t live, which was often the case when I was in the Midwest. You can just exist with the music. Nothing else matters.

Front row at a basement show, back when The Menzingers still played basement shows, RIP my youth

In college, I was listening to a lot of girly powerpop like The Dollyrots and Go Betty Go while working 24-7 on my capstone collection. The Bouncing Souls were one of only a few dude-driven punk bands I got into at the time. They’ve been a band since the 80s, but the kind of punk rock that was popular when I was a kid, where I was a kid, wasn’t really my thing. So I just assumed all of it wasn’t my thing.

The Souls’ songs are the kind of simple, four-chord tunes that get stuck in your head for hours, with optimistic lyrics reminding you it’s OK to romanticize your life and feel excited for the future. I moved to NYC after graduation and they pumped through my headphones as I roamed the city looking for my first apartment,¹ when I struggled with the intensity of my emotions while dating for the first time,² and when I wanted to feel like my dreams weren’t so out of reach.³

Then one night, I decided last minute to pay $15 at the door for a show at the Brooklyn Bowl.

And as the entire crowd sang along to every word of these songs that inspired me so much, I realized… Oh. This is good. This is where I wanna be.

A very excited, very drunk woman insisted on taking a photo with me after a Gaslight Anthem show because of our matching Bouncing Souls shirts. (This is funny because everyone at a Gaslight Anthem show wears a Bouncing Souls shirt.) Wherever she is, I hope she remembers this because it still makes me smile.

Since the Souls are from Jersey, they play NYC a lot. I’ve seen them at least two dozen times since I moved here in 2011.⁴ Over the years, their songs became the kind of songs that sound strange when I’m not singing aloud with hundreds of other people.

I even met a good friend because of the Souls—Not at a concert or anything, but because I recognized the shitty anchor-and-heart logo tattoo on the back of her arm at a mutual friend’s party. “Is that a Bouncing Souls tattoo?!”

“Yep!” And then we were friends, simple as that.⁵ (She had meant to cover it up—Imagine if she had!)

I still believe there’s more than music that goes into friendship, but when someone else loves this kind of band so much, you know there’s some kind of thread that ties you together, whether you’re a freak, nerd, or a romantic.

The oldest concert selfie I could find in my files, from 2016

Every December until a few years ago, The Bouncing Souls had a little annual festival down the shore in Asbury Park, NJ called Home For The Holidays. Four days of music, acoustic shows, craft fairs, and tattoo flash sales, with the Souls headlining every night alongside other East Coast bands like The Gaslight Anthem, The Ergs, and The Menzingers, the last of which pretty much changed my life when On The Impossible Past came out. I went a few times and found myself falling into this sing-along scene without even realizing it.

And while it’s not so fun to go down to the beach in the middle of December, I immediately fell in love with Asbury Park, too.
The frozen beach,
The cold wind off the Atlantic,
Empty snowy lots between dilapidated old buildings on the boardwalk,
Running past big old houses to get to the venue before your fingers freeze,
Flipping through boxes of records with three generations of music lovers,
Dancing in the snow after the show.
It’s the sort of thing that gives you nostalgia before it even ends.

But it did end, sort of. The gentrification of Asbury Park skyrocketed over the last decade, with empty lots turning into multi-million dollar beachside condos, as they are wont to do when a place is “cool.” Then, in the mid 2010s, the Souls stopped hosting Home For The Holidays and replaced it with Stoked For The Summer.

It’s a one-day outdoor concert festival on the beach with the same fun events and comradery as the winter series, plus the addition of lovely weather. And while I miss the specific brutality of visiting AP for a sweaty punk show in the dead of winter, I do love the beach…

There’s a lot of street art in AP, and this one makes good use of some Bouncing Souls song titles. I love thinking about all the people who take cute photos here without knowing the references, but finding joy in them anyway.

When I was younger (and broke-r), me and whichever friends could make it would take the three-hour train ride down in the morning and then back after the show, praying NJT wasn’t delayed, feeling sweaty and salty and horrifically exhausted by the time I got home around 2 am.

But I’m in my 30s so, nah, we don’t do that anymore.

We struggle through Penn Station early on Saturday,
Hike down Cookman Ave to get tofu burritos at MOGO,
Laugh at weird shit in the antique mall,
Check into an overpriced beach hotel,
Listen to sound check while lying on the shore,
Eat a snow cone on the boardwalk,
Head to the show after dinner,
Watch the sun set behind the band and sing along all night.

I still love going to shows alone, feeling the music and fully accepting the intensity of my emotions, thinking about all the paths I’ve chosen while these same songs play in my headphones no matter what. But being a part of something that’s meaningful to so many people, while creating your own traditions around it? That’s pretty beautiful, too.

Stoked For The Summer 2023 was this past weekend, and I found myself swimming in the ocean under a clear blue sky while the Souls sound checked on the stage a few hundred feet away. A song came on I didn’t recognize and my friend with the heart-and-anchor tattoo said, “It’s Burn After Writing!”

“Wrong band,” I laughed, thinking we had seen these two bands far too many times.

But it was Burn After Writing. We shrieked and splashed in the waves, singing loud and off-key to one of our favorite bands playing their cover of our other favorite band’s song in the perfect summer air.

“Give me a reason to care, I’ll sing along forever.”

what's blooming today

Here’s what’s blooming this week in the garden’s summer heat:

Swollen rosehips in all shapes, sizes, and colors,
Dayglo red flowers like they were bent and filled with neon gas,
Saturated rich purple petals that look more like wings,
Ground-covering flowers creeping into paths,
Greenery growing out so far in the humid air, it nearly crosses above your head.

1. “We are not alone, in this city that is our home.”

2. “I guess these things were meant to be, and there's no use fighting what's in me.”

3. “If I want to change the world, it's gotta start with me.”

4. This really isn’t that many times… They are such a steady fixture in the East Coast punk scene that most fans over here have gone to their shows for decades. And in researching this post, I learned that the Souls played Highline Ballroom the night I moved to NYC, which obviously gives me feelings about ~fate~ etc etc.

5. I got my own anchor-and-heart tattoo on the back of my arm a few years later, just like everyone else who loves this band. I am a cliche and it’s OK!!