I feel like a fourteen-year-old listening to Grand Theft Autumn for the first time, hopping up and down and unable to get enough of the words the beat the thrum, wanting to scrawl lyrics all over every available surface and say listen to this! listen to this! Like I said, fourteen. Which only means that baby, seasons change but people don't.
I love Marina and I love the Decemberists and I love the Stones even though I can't listen to a good part of their discography anymore and I love the Beatles like a cliche, but if it's a desert-island question probably Fall Out Boy wins by a hair, because sometimes you need to be bright and vicious and a scar away from falling apart but in a way that catches the eye and the ear and leaves something for someone else, something to remember. Because on a desert island no one will begrudge you the need for music that looks like the inside of your head on the bad days- and because you can determine whom to cannibalize first based on what they have to say about your pop punk. Because Fall Out Boy built their scene to counteract the misogyny and homophobia of the hardcore scene, but all you ever heard was ew, teenage girls like them, they wear eyeliner, ew.
Because I could be an accident but I'm still trying is my love song for the ages, because of am I more than you bargained for yet at fourteen and my pen is the barrel of the gun, remind me which side you should be on at sixteen and I only keep myself this sick in the head cause I know how the words get you at eighteen and all of the words, now, still, in a way that I would probably have found vaguely ridiculous and embarassing way back when we were making mitosis slides from onion roots in Champaca with Sir Espie and are we growing up, or just going down playing on someone's phone.
When I was fourteen I don't think I'd have expected to still be listening to Fall Out Boy at twenty, but that may or may not be because at fourteen I don't think I'd have expected to still be alive at twenty, so who cares, keep singing this lie, I am far more excited about this than any sane human being should be.