When it comes to music, I mostly try to avoid nostalgia. The majority of my musical consumption — whether listening at home or in concert, as the subject of my writing or content of the occasional DJ set — is focused on what’s new and next. Even as anniversary tours have become the de rigueur way for bands with more than two albums to push tickets, I’ve rarely indulged.

But during the height of the pandemic, a confluence of factors had me embracing nostalgia like never before. I found new music difficult to engage with, as pandemic parenting occupied the mental space I’d need to take in and properly appreciate it. The usual way I orient my listening and music writing — concerts — had been cancelled, and I found livestreams to be a pale facsimile. However, I did manage to carve out some time for listening: during my son’s bath time.

Bath time quickly became an opportunity to replay some old favorites for a new audience: foundational rock records by Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins; my first forays into hip-hop by the Beastie Boys and Black Star; albums of various vintage by No Doubt, Regina Spektor and Kelela; and plenty of third-wave emo. That particular strain of punk was the soundtrack of a brief but crucial time in my life, and while I wasn’t surprised by albums by Brand New, Piebald, Taking Back Sunday and Thursday, I found myself returning to Dashboard Confessional’s The Places You Have Come to Fear The Most — an album I avoided when released.

Before I got into emo, my teenaged taste was unfortunate but not unusual for a young white guy growing up in South Florida in the late 90s: mostly post-grunge and nü metal, with pop and rap sworn off. The few concerts I had been allowed to attend were mostly shed shows like Ozzfest and Buzz 103.1’s annual Bake Sale. But in junior year, most of my friends and I started driving, which gave us the freedom to go to shows more regularly at since-forgotten venues in Fort Lauderdale and Boynton Beach.

Soon, bands like Bad Religion, Less Than Jake and Hot Water Music were on the agenda. In the summer before senior year, we caught Hot Rod Circuit and The Get Up Kids opening for Superchunk, and my path for the next few years was set: weekends spent sweating, screaming and slamming into each other in the pit, mostly to the emo bands of the moment.

I understand why third-wave emo is (mostly, rightly) despised: the rampant misogyny, the try-hard posturing, the Hot Topic fashion. But I was always able to distinguish the catharsis the music provided from its more unsavory aspects. Maybe because that first Hot Rod Circuit show came exactly a week after the start of a healthy high school relationship that lasted through and after college. Maybe because I wasn’t that big of an asshole to take the lyrics seriously or literally, even as a hormonal teen boy.

But maybe because of my hard rock roots, the catharsis I sought required something harder-edged than Dashboard Confessional (who I only saw once, mostly because HRC opened). The fact that Chris Carrabba grew up and launched his musical career in my hometown of Boca Raton, Florida didn’t help: Nothing from Boca could ever be good or cool (in recent years, I’ve changed this position thanks to Ariana Grande).

So while “Screaming Infidelities” was MTV2-ubiquitous and “Hands Down” (which would be released later) would eventually become one of “our songs” in that first real relationship, The Places You Have Come to Fear The Most was not on heavy rotation when I was in my emo phase, if I played it at all. So how did it end up as the sound of bath times with a toddler during a pandemic?

The Places… is a tight set that lives up to Carrabba’s moniker: 10 songs across 30 minutes that he wrote predictably and obviously after a bad breakup. It’s raw (perhaps undercooked) and straightforward, without the qualities that attracted me to other emo bands, like the bile of Brand New, the wit of Piebald or the tenderheartedness of Hot Rod Circuit. Plenty of open tunings, open chords, open-throated choruses meant for sing-alongs. Lyrics that read like lines jotted in journals and that seem more appropriate for teens than the 25-year-old who wrote them. But I’ll be damned if the 10-minute stretch of “Saints and Sailors,” “The Good Fight,” “Standard Lines” and “Again I Go Unnoticed” isn’t a flawless run of pop song craft that keeps me coming back, even in whatever stage of the pandemic we’re currently in.

The allure of nostalgia is obvious: that old-wound pain is familiar to the point of comfort. Why else would most people embrace the anniversary tours and livestream battles, the IP-generated movies and TV shows, if not for this period of envirosocioeconomic collapse that has hit its nadir (I hope!) with a global pandemic. Familiar pain beats [gestures wildly] the alternative.

My teenage years during the period coinciding with my emo phase were mostly fine and privileged: I had a circle of friends, a few garage bands with which to play, and a red ‘87 Camaro. I did extremely well academically and had my first real romantic relationship. But I also had my share of pain. It was during this time that my dad got sick, first with a spot on his lung that required surgery and a complicated hospital stay, and then with a brain tumor that would kill him within a year. Soon after, Brand New’s “Guernica” — about Jesse Lacey being on tour when his grandfather died — would become my new anthem.

Understandably, being nostalgic for that period is a little more fraught for me: which grass is greener? There are certainly albums I listened to back then that I’ve returned to over the years when the mood strikes; some even became bath time music. But by listening to an album that is more evocative of a period of time than tied to actual memories, I’m having it both ways. I’m able to share with my son music that I’ve come to love, that marked the time before the first real tragedy of my life, without totally harkening back to those trying times while surviving these trying times.

I have no nostalgia for my high school years (ask anyone who was there for my valedictory speech!), but there is something about those years of cry-screaming at emo shows that served as a demarcation between innocent youth and… less innocent youth. As traumatic as it was — and how grief-stricken I remained for many years — I finally have enough distance to appreciate some of the things that I took for granted back then. A place I’ve come to fear the most? Hardly.

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