Never Meant (To Become a Sad Dad)

Blake might say, there are two types of American Football fans: those who discovered them in real time, rifling through the used bin at some college town record store that smelled like incense and regret, and those who found them later through a Spotify algorithm while studying for the LSAT.

I bought their first LP in 2000 at CD Central in Lexington, Kentucky, because it had one of the Kinsella brothers on it, and I'd loved Cap'n Jazz enough to follow that lineage anywhere. Even into what I didn't yet know would become the most devastatingly patient music ever recorded. Back then I still thought "indie" was the right term, before "emo" became the music for crying in your Honda Civic. Before it would eventually get slapped on everything from My Chemical Romance to Hawthorne Heights. Way before "Midwest emo" became a genre you could study in a college syllabus instead of something you just lived through in basements that doubled as practice spaces and accidental therapy sessions.

This was music that required you to sit still, which at nineteen felt like a radical act of defiance against a world that insisted everything should be faster, louder, angrier. Math rock played at the tempo of a midwestern sunset. Trumpet lines that wandered through songs like they were lost but didn't particularly mind being lost. Guitars tuned to some frequency that only people who've spent entire summers feeling nothing can properly hear.

I didn't know then that I was importing a time bomb. That these songs about houses and distance and the unbearable weight of being young would become the soundtrack to being old, to helping my own kids with their homework while that trumpet line from "Never Meant" plays in my head like a ghost of every version of myself I've tried to leave behind.

Watching this album go from a secret handshake between kids with 1-inch button pins from Jade Tree and Deep Elm on the strap of their messenger bag to a cultural touchstone that teenagers discover on TikTok has been like watching your favorite dive bar get written up in the New York Times. You're happy for the recognition, proud even. But there's something lost in translation when the thing that saved you becomes the thing that everyone knows. When the mathy guitar riff that you used to play on your dashboard becomes the background music for someone's Instagram story about their semester abroad.

Somewhere along the way, Midwest emo became sad dad music, though that's not quite right either. Because there are kids still making this sound now, still finding solace in those picked guitar lines and unconventional time signatures, still discovering that sometimes the most punk thing you can do is be gentle and complicated about your feelings. I remember being blown away that American Football got a Tiny Desk Concert. And I'm still surprised when I pull it up to listen to it for the 30th time and see the view count continue to climb. Now there are Vans collaborations. Mike and Nate and both Steves have become elder statesmen of a genre they helped invent without ever meaning to. It's disorienting in a way I don't have words for.

I don't think they knew they were making music for the long game. I don't think anyone at 22 thinks their band will matter when they're 45. But here we are, a generation of us who bought that album at college town record stores, now driving crossover SUVs to our kids' soccer practice, still feeling every note like it's 2000 and we're still young enough to believe that the right album could change your life.

And maybe it did. Just not in the way we expected.

This is music that grows up with you, whether you're ready for it or not.