I met Dan Campbell about a year ago when he walked into the shop where I was working. It was a slow afternoon, and we ended up chatting and he mentioned he had a show that night and that I should come out. I’ve wanted to have a proper conversation with him ever since. Now, with The Wonder Years set to play a show just blocks from my apartment, we finally connected before the show over email to talk about survival, grief, faith, and the strange comfort of keeping old songs alive.
The Wonder Years have made a career of setting that tension to music, albums that catalog grief without glamorizing it, that interrogate faith and failure, and that carry the same weight into questions of loss and belief as they once did into old wounds, and the stubborn ache of growing up. For a band that came up in pop punk’s most emotionally fraught era, they’ve managed something rare, aging with self-awareness, and without flattening the urgency that defined them.
You’ve described early albums as survival documents. When did you feel like your writing started to shift from surviving to unpacking? Do you ever worry about losing that urgency, or has growth just made the questions deeper?
I kind of still view them as survival documents. I think that, when you are afflicted the way that I am, and the way that a lot of our listenership is, the darkness is kind of always around a corner. That was, in a way, the major through-line of THGOF. That the low hum of sadness is always present, it just changes in volume. I am still here, so I am still surviving. I don't think it will ever be "survived."
There’s an ongoing tension in your lyrics between sincerity and self-deprecation, as if you’re apologizing for how much you feel. Where do you think that impulse comes from? Is it about humility, defensiveness, fear of sentimentality?
I'm not sure it's any of the three, honestly. It's more about making space in the lyrics for the full breadth of my humanity. I want to make honest songs, that are truly reflective of who I am, and self-deprecating is just a part of that whole. I don't always like me. I don't know anyone who does like themself all of the time. And so I think being open about that is part of what makes our songs ours. And yea, there's a little gallows humor in it too. And maybe that is in some ways a mechanism, but less for me and more for the audience. I think if anything, I'm trying to make it less uncomfortable to watch or to listen to.
Do you ever write lines for past versions of yourself? What do you think those younger selves would say if they could hear “The Hum Goes on Forever”?
I think my younger self would be proud that I am still here. And I think he'd be very excited about the music we're making now. Hum, to me, is the most fully realized version of The Wonder Years. It's everything I always wanted it to be and the only album of ours that I look back at and don't have at least some regrets about. And I do want the songs to always be in dialogue with one another. They're a document of my life, and so it's logical to me to think about old songs when writing new ones, and to consider the ways that my life and viewpoints have shifted.
Is there a song that still hurts to play, not because of the audience or the performance, but because you haven’t fully walked out of it yet?
The creation of the songs is for me. That's, largely, where I find the catharsis and process the trauma. Once they're written and recorded, I've often moved to a point of understanding with them. The live performance is more for the audience. It's meant to help illicit that same cathartic moment for them. And so, my focus is usually on playing the hell out of the song rather than on what went into building it. That said, yea, every once and awhile, there's a crack in that wall, and I find a song really difficult to play.
Sometimes it's on an anniversary, or at a specific venue. Sometimes though, it just hits me out of nowhere.
You’ve wrestled openly with faith, not always with belief, but with God as a metaphor for absence, loss, and blame. How has your understanding of faith changed, especially since becoming a father?
I'm a little less abrasive about it now. My beliefs haven't changed much, if at all, but I don't see a lot of value in shoehorning them into conversations. I do still see religion being used as a tool of colonialism, a tool of oppression, but I also recognize that it brings a sense of peace to a lot of folks, and peace is hard to come by right now, so I am not interested in taking that from anyone.
Is there a line or a song you almost didn’t release because it hurt too much? If so, what one and could you expand on the feeling surrounding it.
There's an original draft of Cigarettes and Saints with a line that I eventually had to change. It was written out of anger, and I knew that anger would eventually wash into sadness and then maybe even pity, and so I knew I couldn't leave it in the song. The song is forever and the feeling wasn't.
You’ve written about people you couldn’t save, but also people you never met, the funeral in “Cardinals,” the kid in “Cigarettes & Saints.” Where does your sense of responsibility to the dead come from? Is songwriting a way to hold vigil?
Mostly it's a way for me to process grief. I understand myself better when I write songs and I needed to write those songs to move toward closure. And also, it feels nice, performing a song every night that keeps someone's memory alive.