Everyone Asked About You, Cubed
by Jack Griffis
“Everyone Asked About You,” by Everyone Asked About You, on their album Everyone Asked About You, is probably my favorite emo song of all time, closely followed by American Football’s “Stay Home,” and Everyone Asked About You’s “Across Puddles.” I wrote the first part of that one cause I thought it’d be funny. But in all seriousness, EAAY is one of the hidden greats of the second wave emo scene, bringing Twee, small town earnest emotion to the slowly drifting Emo iceberg, as their two vocalists infuse each poetic syllable with waves of melancholy, nostalgia, and 90s teenage music-scene drama. Numero reviving the band, repressing their albums, and creating the compilation Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts, was an utter godsend after listening to kinda cruddy MP3’s of their first S/T off youtube and praying for a way to add it to my Spotify bummer playlist. I am of course, proud in my unyielding Neo-Hipster tendencies to proclaim I liked them before Numero picked them up, but at the same time I’m so joyful they have a wider outlet to reach people and start touring again that I can forget my childish territorial claims. If only they would come to Florida instead of just bouncing around the west coast.
Formed in 1997, EAAY was an Arkansas flash, there, and gone two years later. During that time they would record two EP’s and a full length album (which would not be released till 2012), play a handful of shows, and disappear forever– remembered only by avid Sophie’s Floorboard users and some scene locals. And so they sat dormant for a while, existing primarily online through youtube rips of their albums that were uploaded 11 years ago (the person who uploaded it has now edited the description stating that Numero picked up EAAY, excitedly claiming “good news!” which is a touch heartwarming that they remembered it after all these years. Once a emo always a emo). I was introduced to them in roughly the beginning of my senior year of high school, late 2021, by my buddy Liam who sent me a link to that very youtube video. I would spend that semester listening to their S/T EP over and over again, lying on my bed, just staring at the ceiling with the sort of youthful misery common those who have become 17 and felt (very rightly so) that the world is in fact very very cruel, and very very strange. Eventually, I’d discover that their later album was in fact on spotify (although the rest of their work wasn’t) and listen to that album in a similar manner– over and over, particularly the song “Taxi.” I didn’t think it was as good as the earlier S/T, but it was still in their neighborhood of style and fit well into the whole “awkward, sad teenage boy” thing I had going on (and I now know that said album, Let’s Be Enemies, actually rips just as hard as their first S/T). And so it went– Let’s Be Enemies got taken off spotify eventually, and so I was relegated to listening once more on youtube. And so it went– until suddenly, out of the blue in 2023, Numero announced they had nabbed up EAAY and would be releasing their collected work– and eventually, I was lucky enough to get a Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts cassette in the mail a year or so later. I was in love with the band, in love with their sound, in love with the sort of contemplative melancholy they drew out of me.
Such obscurity as their early years made it so they were somewhat exempt from the harsh criticism of early online musical outlets, and their belated release of a compilation made it so they once again flew under the radar– but the court of public opinion generally seems to ring in their favor. From a relatively even-minded SputnikMusic 3.5, to a 3.83 on RYM that comes with a fair smattering of five star reviews talking about the emotional rawness as the album (reviews I’m inclined to agree with). The general consensus from pre-Numero reviews is that they did solid work, with real heart, and disappeared before perhaps they could’ve made it big on an indie label. Such is the tale of a thousand other 90s emo bands. So why did EAAY endure over almost 30 years, through old youtube rips, to forum discussions in 2012, to now in their revival under Numero?
Why? Because EAAY’s sound is unique, beautiful, and a crossroads for the beginning of touchy-feely indie songwriting, the rising wave of tweeness that first rose with Pop-Punk (before falling away, very rapidly), second-wave Emo moving from its hardcore roots, and this rising sense of melancholy, a sort of post-modern teenage malaise that accompanied the end of the millennium. It was a natural fit for my time as an overly sensitive teenager, and even better for my growing into a more respectively cynical and melancholic adult. Like Carissa’s Wierd, there wont be another EAAY– But, they may release more music, even putting out an EP earlier this year. We won’t be focusing on that however– we’ll be turning our heads their compilation of earlier work, Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts, and the music contained within (mainly so I can classify it as “one album” for the sake of my criteria of choosing two songs from an album to review.)
"Everyone Asked About You": The Self Titled Song From Their Self Titled Album
The final track to an outstanding opening salvo of an EP- “Everyone Asked About You” is a twinkly, yet still focused and intense ending track that calls together the S/T EP’s themes- youth, loneliness, love, the awkwardness and miscommunication that is part of being a human being. It’s raw, fitting for a small time EP, with lots of that warm tape-recording sound present over the recording.
Opening up with some raw, restrained screamo-riffs, before returning to the wind-chime guitar so associated with Midwest emo, “everyone asked about you” is the perspective of a youth at a party wondering about her counterpart: where is he? No one’s heard from him for days, weeks, what feels like months- at that party, that show, he said he’d be there, but he never was. It was not common practice to take a computer out of your pocket and pester someone over 5 different apps if they didn’t show up- they just didn’t show up at all, and no one knew why until they did decide to show. There’s a certain melancholy, a breakup perhaps fast approaching, punctuated by increasing gaps of silence. This is the nexus of the Teenage angst at the heart of the the EP, a great focusing crystal that brings the feelings of loneliness and uncertainty together into one overpowering shout- “EVERYONE ASKED ABOUT YOU” cries singer Hannah Vogan, fighting with her guitar to be heard. It’s abrasive almost, sounding on the verge of tears, yet every subtlety is washed away by the years of compression and cheap studio recording system into a perfect Lo-Fi mixture of melancholy. “Each moment passed slowly and cruelly” is a bit of simplistic yet heavy emo poetry, turned into a haymaker of a line by Vogan’s passionate and somber-twee shouting.
The song to me is an ever present reminder of just how ephemeral the burning passions of our youth can be, just how quickly flames can be snuffed out– in the back of my mind, I’ve always held that the subject of Vogan’s singing died in a car crash that evening, and everyone mills about, unsure where he is, never knowing the terrible truth. It’s never mentioned in the song, there’s no verbal evidence of any to note on the interpretation, but for some reason it feels like such a tragic sort of song– even if the reason for the subject’s absence is as mundane as a breakup (also unspoken, but with somewhat more evidence to support it), there’s a depressive absence that hangs over the entire track like a ghost, an unseen figure, someone forever gone, not just from the party, but from the life of the singer itself. Maybe the subject left town and didn’t tell anyone, moved out of their cheap apartment to find greener pastures. Maybe the subject died. Maybe there’s a breakup fast approaching on the horizon, a train that neither wants to admit, that’ll crash between them and detonate like a 90mph emotional atom bomb. It’s a anthem for youth, not the rose-tinted memories of parties and skipping classes, but the dark spaces between those fervent bursts of joy, the equally fervent lows and sudden, unexplained endings to friendships and relationships that never give resolve or closure to either party, because at the end of the day both are just teenagers– flawed, emotional, unable to communicate the feelings they wish so desperately to communicate. Surely, why the subject of “Everyone Asked About You” is absent from the party is unimportant to the structure of the actual song, but the mysterious, open-ended nature of the absence is what gives the song such a heart-striking tone. Plenty of people, offline and on, have left, without a word– the dead of night. Suddenly text messages just stop going through, DM’s don’t send, you don’t see them around anymore. Baker act. Moving quietly. Hospitalization. Dead parent. Social Scandal. Maybe, like Colm in the Banshees of Inisherin, they just didn’t plain like me anymore. But whatever the case, someone is gone, and everyone asked about them. And yet no one could come up with an answer.
Somehow, the specific memory I associate with “Everyone Asked About You,” isn’t of mourning the still living, missing an absentee, or anything of that nature. It’s bouncing back after a miserable year. My first semester of college was spent moving in and out between my house and dorm, seeing doctor after doctor for health issues, psychological woes and struggling through every day. It was one of the hottest autumns in my recent memory, and the dread about the climate was palpable, weighing on me and dragging me into depths of misery previously unplumbed. The entire world was bleak and pointless on a scale I had yet to comprehend at 18 years old, in a way that was pushing me to almost completely detach from going to classes, seeing my family, or talking to my friends. Yet somewhere along late November, I suddenly began to pick up the pieces of my life. I passed my classes well enough, got back in contact with the people who hadn’t heard from me for a while, and got a little spring back in my step. Admittedly I had already burnt up the semester in a haze of different medicines and their side effects, wasted days lying in bed so sick from panic I couldn’t move, and classes skipped in the name of going in and out of sleep on any number of prescription sedatives because it was less painful than being awake. But there was still hope for me, hope that maybe next semester I might bounce back. I remember feeling that hope in a very palpable way, one early December evening, right before the semester had ended.
It was 40 degrees out, raining, that cold sort of heavy rain that’ll get down through your clothes and give you the shivers, but if you’ve got a decent rain jacket on it just feels like you’re just getting peppered with little dots of concentrated freeze. I had to make a both-ways journey home to get some documents I had forgotten at my parents house, and on the way back, through the night and the thick rain, I saw the red neon sign of the local publix-attached Chinese place I had hit up countless times throughout high school, and even more when I first started driving around the summer of 2022. I hadn’t eaten there since college started. The inside looked warm, appealing– a cashier sat idly by and looked out at our shared, chill-soaked world, waiting for any sort of business before they could finally close in two hours. For once, I felt decent enough to eat some restaurant food, and the heat of Orange Chicken was alluring under such inclement conditions. I ordered, waited around for a while, before driving back on the emptied out 9B, unbothered by the downpour as there was no real risk with few other drivers out on the road. The thermostat read 42, 41, then dropped to 40, and for a brief moment I felt peace– a false peace of course, its not like a low evening temperature meant much had changed and the world had suddenly amended itself, but still it was peace that was rare in those days. Parking my car, I got the steaming hot chicken out and covered it with my body to prevent it from getting rained on too hard, and popped my headphones on. Numero had just finished publishing the entire first EP on spotify, so I didn’t have to fiddle with youtube and keep my phone on in my pocket. I just slid it in my jacket, and let the twinkly guitars of “Everyone Asked About You” run through, hearing faintly the tapping of rain on my jacket hood, and then eventually the roof of my dorm. Outside the window streetlights danced under the torrent, and I watched as headlights passed by, obscured under darkness and rain. The world remained a cruel, bleak place, yet inside my dorm, there was hot chicken, solitude from my roommate, and a window to some strange roadside beauty. For a brief moment, there was peace, and “Everyone Asked About You” was its soundtrack.
Thank You For Showing Me This Song and Walking Me Across The Water
The full length album Let’s Be Enemies, later compiled into Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts, has two tracks that I think would’ve been perfect ending notes, beautiful and tear-jerking such that they would’ve been the slam dunk to a (recently unearthed) hidden gem of an emo album. The first is the magnificent “Taxi,” a song built on the small tragedy of goodbyes that comes very early on in the album, and “Across Puddles,” the antepenultimate track that feels equally predisposed to a farewell. Bearing a much more spiritual feeling than the prior Taxi (with the line “walking me across the water” feeling almost as though a veiled reference to the exploits of Jesus), “Across Puddles” strikes a chord as miserable, teary-eyed farewell between two people, one of whom will fare much worse after the split. It sounds amazing on Cassette, and sometimes can still bring a tear to my eye when I’m in a certain mood.
Combining the atmospheric, two-tone guitar they’ve refined throughout the rest of the album with a simplistic but still heavy-hearted drum backing, and a maraca that gives the entire track a rhythmic chest, alongside the always ecstatic bass work of Matt Bradley that fences in the sound and gives it a real narrative. Sonically my favorite off of Lets Be Enemies, right next to Taxi. There’s a real journeyful sense of sorrow that calls to mind an image of two people walking together, step by step, before parting– a parting that wounds both deeply, but one more so than the other. It’s a heaviness that sticks with the drum section, in its sluggishness and bass-heavy nature. There is a distance that will never, ever be bridged after this parting, emphasized by the dissonant radio static intercut with reversed and chopped recordings of songs from earlier in the album. It all seems so faint, so distorted by time and distance, just like the relationship between the two figures within the song.
To me, the song is and always will feel akin to an admission of death or the more mundane realization that you may never bounce back when certain people leave your life. “Thank you for holding my hand/ and walking me across the water/ But now/ I’m alone, struggling for air,” calls to mind a vision of a struggling body, drowning within the water. I would not go so far to call this a suicide note of a song, but rather finding that someone critical to your life, a pillar of your being, has walked away, that you collapse without them. There’s no blame, no pointing the finger and stating their absence lead to this– but you both know their presence was what was keeping you above the water. Like “Everyone Asked About You,” “Across Puddles” is made open-ended and almost ethereal by the mysterious nature of the two figures– there’s less elaboration between them even in the former; no party mentioned, no prior commitments, simply the image of two figures walking across water, and one falling beneath the waves. It’s a powerful symbol of the crippling weight of loneliness, of the pain that the absence of certain people in our life puts on us. Even sans the imagery of a large body of water, “Across Puddles” makes frequent usage of water as some kind of metaphor for distance– it opens with “I didn’t realize/ it was raining till you walked away,” itself a powerful piece of imagery, reminiscent of noir films and the splitting of two tragic hearts. One must remain behind, alone, standing under the rain as it soaks through clothes and gets in the eyes, intermixing with tears as the one who leaves retreats into the cover of fog and mist.
I find myself not returning to perhaps a specific memory in regards to “Across Puddles,” rather, like the distorted howling at the end of the song, it is a greatly mixed composite of disparate sections of memories, combined together into a howling mass of what no longer is. I think of when Kyle and I stopped hanging out in 4th grade. When I stopped hearing over email from someone I knew in elementary school. When I kept thinking that I had the number of my best friend’s mom from elementary school, and that surely, when he moved away in 6th grade I’d reach out through her and get his contact info– but never did, and kept thinking about it years afterward as the years passed and the gap became more impenetrable, and now, with his somewhat generic name, he is impossible to find. The old online groups that I was part of that just gradually disintegrated. The friend group in the first half of high school I’m no longer connected with, that I spent so many hours out by rivers, at our bud’s house, out by firepits, when the weather could still feel cold out into spring. I still get a sting of burning on my face when I remember certain faces, remember the person I was when those faces were still acquainted with me. Thank you for holding my hand, and carrying me through these years, everyone I’ve ever known; but now I’m alone, struggling for air. Although my plea may never reach a single soul, I still think of those I knew in glowing terms.
This has been Twin Falls: Music and Memories, and I’ve enjoyed going over one of my favorite emo bands. I’ll see you next week with another review, and I hope you have a good weekend. And as always, catch my radio show Jacksonville Vice, airing on Spinnaker Radio, 95.5 FM WSKR, 11 AM every Monday.
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