237. Song No. 3,551: “Forever Leaving,” The New Amsterdams
Para Toda Vida, 2002 (orig. by Tijuana Crime Scene, 2001)

The Get Up Kids are, even decades later, still an emotionally difficult band to revisit. Given that deeply personal hurdle I find even harder to overcome than directly addressing why Clarity remains a raw, beautiful wound, I’m a little surprised any side project from GUK frontman Matt Pryor has managed to elbow its way into remaining in rotation all these years later. (I’m gonna guess that always feeling a little alone in preferring this acoustic solo endeavor to the band that spawned it probably helped unstick The New Amsterdams from a personal epoch that cast its influence over so many memories of so many of this band’s more visible peers, tenuous proof that maybe sometimes having cultivated a musical taste gravitating to lesser-known acts can actually pay off after all.)

This song is one of those responsible for never letting The New Amsterdams stray too far from rotation, even if it’s by way of distilling three or four albums down to a cherry-picked handful of longtime favorite tracks rather than regularly trotting out any of those records in their entirety. “Forever Leaving” is absolutely a song that first stood out for how it sounds—that stripped-down musicality belying a complex tangle of emotions unceremoniously dumped from a proverbial purse for everyone to gawk at—but all that time together has shaped its lyrics into something relatably familiar across an array of character-development stages: a slash-and-burn approach to severing ties for good instead of peaceably parting ways, a demonstrative, inarguable end mark born of an unsuccessfully suppressed instinct to be ready to bail at a moment’s notice, never really allowing yourself to get comfortable or settle in because you’re always and forever primed for that cue to leave.

I wanna change the world
Nothing’s gonna change, believe me
Little love is lost
The memory remains
Time takes its cost,
I’m still the same

This song is the dawning realization born of that catalyst for change no one wants in the moment but we’re all better off for facing down and gaining a little self-awareness from once it’s safely in the rearview. We all have those beautiful stories that spectacularly wiped out in some explosive end that an otherwise incredible connection with another human being deserved better than, and the best you can do to honor their place in your past is letting them identify how you’d benefit from some personal growth in the future.

Whether it’s intentional or not, the lyrical flow from “Burn all your pictures / Still save the prints / Thought I’d feel better / I feel like shit” to “Maybe I should be sorry / Maybe it’s too late / It’s never too early” to the final lines of “I just seem to spend / More and more time again / By myself / It’s just so much easier than / Trying to understand myself” chart the course of an individual in limbo on that unintended introspective journey of performing a post-mortem on the person you were while trying to figure out what part of you is supposed to evolve or get left behind when you finally emerge from this chrysalis of transformative experiences as a newer, less dysfunctional you.

It takes a lot to get to that place of prodding at why you indulge in some deeply unhelpful self-sabotage like existing in that state of forever leaving, and it’s not the answer that’s the scariest part: it’s retracing the steps that got you there and bearing the weight of what can’t be undone with the fresh horror of experiential objectivity (and without the comfort of being in a Vonnegut novel), and figuring out how its jagged edges fit with the other pieces of your broken coping mechanisms largely wrought from fighting problems with bigger problems. To step back and look at yourself without the lies we tell ourselves offering even a shred of the necessarily protective delusions a fundamentally messy human being needs to keep existing in a fundamentally messy world is horrifyingly destabilizing if you’ve never gone through the ego death of surviving life’s foundation-shaking moments that introduce us to the catalyst unceremoniously launching us into that next chapter by finally thinking about why you’ve forever been the way that you are.