Music Moots with Lauren Napier ("Say Days Ago" by The Used)

We are extremely back with Music Moots™, the blogseries where I ask someone to recommend me a song they like, and then I listen to the song and then write a little about it.

Today we have Lauren Napier, a multi-hyphenate artist who recently published a memoir, Tattooed, Pierced, & Fucked-Up: A Scene Memoir 2004–2008 through Dirt Books*. It's a recounting of Napier's experience with total immersion in a particular rock scene of the aughts—think AFI, Sugarcult, Escape The Fate—first as a high school student in Las Vegas going to shows in an "authentic vintage fedora" (an inside joke with a friend, "lost to the vestiges of time and lost intimacy"), then a young journalist interviewing bands for Smash Magazine, then an itinerant merch seller on the Warped Tour, and eventually a musician in her own right. Old diary entries are published with modern commentary, and some bands even show up to get re-interviewed, all of it bringing Napier's past and present together with poignance and wry humor.

I loved the early interviews with bands like Letter Kills and My Chemical Romance; Napier's passion for documenting the scene and boosting the bands she loves is infectious and relatable. It reminds me that the urge to become a writer, especially a writer about music, resembles a religious calling more than a career ambition. I read music magazines for years, and was totally obsessed with the concept of talking to people about making music...having intense and complicated thoughts about albums, and publishing them....making your entire life about music...but I was too afraid to make the leap when I was younger. Napier's early and sustained confidence, her belief in what she was doing, is so inspirational. I would like my daughter to read this book eventually!

Napier recommended "Say Days Ago" by the Used. "I did some listening. I had some trouble, vacillating betwixt and between whether I wanted to go down a lyrical route or a sonic one," she wrote. "The song is on an album that has always occupied a place in my musical rotation, hearing the tracks makes my heart race in the best of ways and I’m ready for the musical journey ahead. I recently got to hear it live in LA with my close friend, Kirsti. Hearing it live didn’t quite make me feel transported to being a teenager, but it affirmed my current being."

I love Music Moots™ because people always end up suggesting artists that I haven't delved into as much (or know zero about). Educational. I did dabble in The Used back in the day but they were never one of my big bands—I was more of a Fall Out Boy / Jimmy Eat World / Taking Back Sunday gal. (I guess I liked bands with three words in the name.) Of particular interest to me here is Bert McCracken's vocal performance: raw, desperate, obsessed. I think of what it looks like/I think of what it tastes like. A Genius user described "Say Days Ago" with a sigh: "Yet another song about his past crystal meth addiction." Can you say "yet another" when the song is on their debut record? Can't someone write more than one song about drugs? Come on, man.

Those searing vocals, switching effortlessly between melody and screaming, made me think about the harsher music I liked when I was an adolescent. I had a hard couple of years as a young teen where I felt misunderstood by my parents and alienated from my classmates. I knew I wasn't that strange—I was neither tattooed nor pierced, just mildly fucked-up—but my taste for darker music and depressing literature set me apart, which made other people think I was weird, which made me feel weird, which made my taste for weirdness get more intense, which kicked off the cycle of self-perpetuating weirdness anew. There was a time when a song like "Say Days Ago" would have precisely matched my inner emotional temperature, and being on the calmer side now, that feels surreal. The way I described this period of time to my childhood friend is that I was walking around with my skin on inside-out. Hearing screaming like that was...soothing. I was not alone...others were having a hard time too....

I listened to the playlist Napier made for Tattooed, Pierced, & Fucked-Up on a long drive and felt immersed, briefly, in the extreme emotions of this particular era of alternative rock music. It was actually still soothing! And thrilling, especially considering how the past decade of popular music has built this enormous defensive wall against cringe, which means emoting with your voice is not very stylish. That's why Cameron Winter hit everyone like a Mack truck—sometimes you do, in fact, need to sing like a maniac. The coolest thing someone can do right now is go bananas with their vocals. I declare: it is actually NOT cool to hold back.

(p.s. if this screed speaks to you, listen to Wasp Factory—this is a band I met four years ago, interviewed three years ago, and finally put out their debut album, which is bonkers. music, baby!!!).

Thank you Lauren! Buy her book right here.

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