No Saviors

I love getting folks to write for this column because they almost always introduce me to new music. This week Matt Mitchell takes the reins to tell about a song I already know and love, and he offers up a new way to appreciate it. We saw the same tour and his essay recalled to me vividly similar moments we both witnessed hundreds of miles apart. Music can highlight the connections we didn’t know we shared.

If you like Matt’s work as much as I do, check out his essay on Harry Styles and science fiction. It reaffirmed for me how totally wrong about pop music 17-year-old-snob-Carl was.

Carl

by Matt Mitchell

I am often thinking about the moments when we finally realize that our favorite song is our favorite song. For so long, I’d thought it was “Night Fever” by the Bee Gees. Then it was “Shot For Me” by Drake. Then “Heart-Shaped Box,” and so on. Those presumptions came in backyards and middle school hallways and detention rooms, only to fade like a flinch. But when I was inside the Agora Theater, listening to rush hour peak outside on a cloud-heavy autumn night in Cleveland, I watched the windowless auditorium steal light from the bar signs just beyond the pit. The air was spiked with cheap beer, fumes from hidden vapes, and sweat. Even in the heat that juxtaposed so jaggedly with the cold lingering across Euclid Avenue, I’d never felt so hopeful.

I’d gotten into the soundcheck as a VIP. This was long before I’d find myself on guest lists across the city, back when I had to pay for those things, when I was a freshman in college and trying to parse through a home life and friendships left behind. The Wonder Years have always been a band I turn to when the answers run short. Frontman Dan Campbell’s songwriting touches on both the universal and personal, and, when I’m caught in-between the two, I retreat to No Closer to Heaven, the band’s fourth album, in search of something to cull into my own orbit.

At the time, it’d been over a year since I saw Campbell and the band play. I was lucky enough to catch their Warped Tour set in 2015 and was champing at the bit to see them again. I’ve always been in awe of how Campbell commands a stage without taking up more space than his other bandmates. I take a hit of someone’s pen and it coils my stomach into a knot, as if a cement sidewalk stiffened behind my belly-button. I won’t lie, I was a bit of a lightweight in those days, stuck between phases of heavy smoking.

It was the No Closer to Heaven tour, so that performance of “Cigarettes & Saints” was one of the first. There was a choked lump in Campbell’s voice during the verses. If you’ve ever been in a pit at a show, you know the gist: never fall down. I failed after the band played “Cigarettes & Saints,” as the drugs I placeboed myself into thinking had already kicked in and the overbearing tinge of sweat accumulating on my clothes took me to my knees.

A man in a navy blue shirt picked me up. “Are you okay, man?” he asked. “Yeah, I’m cool dude,” I replied. So we stood side-by-side and stared at a Philadelphian part the sea of his people. The man put his hand on my shoulder as a branch of comfort. I never asked his name. But music is always a fraternity, not an estrangement. I remember trying to collect myself while Campbell took a moment on-stage, presumably collecting himself, too.

“My friend Mike has something to say to you guys,” he said to the crowd before walking off. A husky guy with a thick, black beard walked out, holding a woman’s hand. If a couple from the audience is given time on-stage, then the consensus rings immediately: it’s a marriage proposal. Whatever he said to his girlfriend, whose name was Emily, was inaudible until he dropped to one knee and asked her to marry him. I remember smiling and I remember her saying yes. I remember the crowd chanting Kiss her! over and over, at least seven times. I remember Mike didn’t kiss her and I remember laughing stupidly.

Mike and Emily were ushered off-stage as a guitar intro to “Brothers &” started. Dan stepped up onto the speaker and led us in a chant: “We're no saviors/We're no saviors/If we can't save our brothers/We're no saviors.” Over and over, as lights bounced off of wet cheeks and an entire theater stood on their feet. The guitar quickly transitioned into “Cardinals,” and my skin wrinkled into a tapestry of goosebumps.

At some point in the night, I would step out into the freezing cold without enough layers on. Night would blanket the cityscape as I’d return to campus and fall into someone’s arms. The light pollution followed me the whole ride home, but first a streetlamp gave me a moment to breathe.

I remember going to that show in hopes of writing a paper on it for my literary journalism class in undergrad (I did). I wanted to find the connection between the crowd and Campbell and learn why so many people, including myself, had long been so touched by the songs. As soon as I stepped into the pit, I realized it wasn’t about Campbell or anyone else, only me. That is the beauty of it, that a song about a friend dying from drug addiction can pull your deepest ghosts out. We go to shows to be close to the bands who keep us afloat, and, sometimes, we leave finally knowing why we love and grieve in the ways we do.

“Cardinals” is a song that is still tattooed on my arm. The bird rests on a branch above the gothic text. It was done poorly and cheaply, but it meant something. When I got it, it was not my favorite song. I’d thought the “We’re no saviors” line matched my angst towards my grandma’s bout with dementia that was stripping her down at that very moment. She’d die a month later. In retrospect, the “I know the devil you’ve been fighting with” line resonates much more now. I watched her starve to death because she forgot how to eat. We cannot save each other, we can only watch them fall away.

I’ve not cried at a show since. I’d not cried at a show before. “I know that I failed you / Woke up in a sweat,” Campbell sang, in anguish. He paused. “I want those years back,” the crowd sang at him as he stood with his arms outstretched from side-to-side. “Me too,” he said. The stage went dark, but the rest of us collectively decided to keep going. I rushed to the bathroom to wash my face.

Matt Mitchell is a poet, culture critic, and essayist from Northeast Ohio. He writes for MTV, Pitchfork, Paste, Bandcamp, and elsewhere. He’s the author of The Neon Hollywood Cowboy (Big Lucks, 2021).