I started listening to New Found Glory in 2007. It was springtime when I picked up a copy of Sticks and Stones at a garage sale and after a winter spent nursing a broken heart, this was exactly the music I needed to bring me back to life.
New Found Glory became my soundtrack for springtime, the music I played each March and April as winter evaporated and it was suddenly warm enough to drive with the windows down. winters have always been difficult for me, but I could always count on New Found Glory to bring me back to life, all the way from.
Listening like this became an obsession, to the point of structuring what I listened to in anticipation of the moment it was finally warm enough for New Found Glory. (Something Corporate’s Leaving Through the Window starting on Valentine’s Day, then Motion City Soundtrack’s Even If It Kills Me in March, before proceeding to the main event…)
This is the first year in almost fifteen years I haven’t done this. They skies are clear, the weather is warm, yet I haven’t once felt the urge to put on Sticks and Stones.
If I’m honest, saving New Found Glory for spring had lost its flair in recent years. Even my affection for the band has waned; I stuck around long enough to be disappointed by 2017’s Makes Me Sick and by the time they dropped Forever and Ever x Infinity last year, I just wasn’t interested.
Finding myself no longer interested in a band that was once my favorite terrified me. However, I quickly realized that before we can move forward, we must let go of the past, even if it means boxing up those old CDs I don’t play so much anymore. I’m not the person I was this time last year, let alone the kid nursing a broken heart back in 2007. Perhaps it’s time my listening reflects who I am, not who I was.
As blink-182 sings, “I guess this is growing up…”
joshua chamberlain 