253. Song No. 3,762: “Get on the Floor,” The Promise Ring
Wood/Water, 2002

The older I get and the more reasons I find to love Maritime, the more I appreciate this decidedly subdued Promise Ring album and the way it really does feel like the transitional phase between the band I first fell in love with and the one that rose nearly intact from its ashes. And, selfishly, I do love the timing of this album that came out the year I finished high school and started college, and the way it so neatly parallels how much I loved and lived inside Promise Ring’s songs during the former era and gleefully discovered and dove headfirst into Maritime’s ever-expanding catalogue during the latter.

Despite Promise Ring being such a beloved, impactful part of the music that got Teenage Me through high school, my first listen to Wood/Water, their last studio album, was a lukewarm experience at best. “Underwhelmed” isn’t the right word for how I felt when I first heard this record I had waited so long and so patiently for, but I think it best conveys a reaction combining that unexpectedly tepid reception, feeling caught off-guard by a noticeable tonal shift and simply wanting more of the two Promise Ring LPs immediately preceding it (30° Everywhere, it should really go without saying, both possesses a sound and exists in a class all its own) that I was not only hoping for but also quite honestly felt totally justified expecting. Wood/Water grew on me once I gave it a chance, but it was tough being presented with an album that was both more mature than and ready to grow before I was. It also had two mighty unfortunate truths working against it: I only gave it so many second chances because it was a Promise Ring album, but I also probably would’ve liked it more in the first place had it been offered up by literally any other band so my first impression wasn’t being gobsmacked by such a stark deviation from the palatable pop-punk they had been edging toward.

The nudge I needed to fully appreciate it was apparently a retrospective shove contextualizing its turning point that both a new label and a new sound (and also frontman Davey von Bohlen facing down some sobering real-life shit, like having a brain tumor removed not many years after the force of a car accident threw him though a windshield) should have demonstrably heralded on their own. But, hey, that’s what it took for me to stop being a stubborn brat about my music and to start looking at Wood/Water as a bridge rather than an outlier, a perspective shift that finally nurtured along the love it always deserved.

One thing it absolutely has in common with the rest of TPR’s pre-Maritime catalogue, though, is that I tend to like their albums as a whole, rather than loving a particular track leaps and bounds over its littermates. But low-key favorites and LP highlights always emerge, and a number of those standout moments converge in “Get on the Floor,” a fairly upbeat-sounding and exceedingly self-aware track crammed with lines that hit a little too close to home once I started listening to Wood/Water with renewed appreciation and closer attention.

But none of those lyrics, not even “It’s just nervous energy you’re sending to me” or “If it ended tonight, I’d consider myself lucky and leave” felt as keenly relatable as the recurring line “I feel paranoid, I get on the floor and I just freak out.” It encapsulates so much of what seems to be a feeling I’m doomed to repeat in a thousand different ways because there’s so much to learn from trying again rather than giving up, whether it’s by insisting on experiencing a thing that’s worth understanding firsthand while simultaneously not really worth the effort to sabotoging my own joy in spectacular ways for the bigger thrill of puzzling out a solution to a self-made obstacle. It may not invoke the best kinds of feelings, but knowing someone else can relate to and poke a little wryly self-aware humor at both wanting and not wanting to do the thing offers the comfort of mutual relatability, just as its penultimate stanza offers some peace amid the maelstrom of being a messily assembled human just grasping for some meaning or at least an explanation that justifies the effort:

We might be wrecked but it’s just the principle
We choose our sides, we raise our right minds
We spend our time, we feel alright