I never had a job through high school—my parents said my job was to be a full-time student. Instead, I got a $ 40-a-week allowance to spend on whatever I wanted. So when I graduated high school and got around $2000 between graduation money and cashing out my childhood savings account, I spent like mad.
I blew through most of that sum by the fall, much of it buying up CDs from bands I had tangentially heard of. That included the legendary Mineral of course, but I must have heard of Chris Simpson’s side project The Gloria Record as well, because I listened to this CD all the time.
I spent much of my adult life trying to separate myself from the word “emo.” Sure, part of that was an effort to grow beyond my adolescent self, but the much larger part was a protest to how the word had been stolen by the guylinered mallcore bands of the mid-aughts that I had no interest in at all.
The seeds of my rediscovery of the Get Up Kids were planted in 2019. I was writing for a music review site, and the site owner messaged me asking if I was ever into the Get Up Kids, because they had a new album coming out and he needed someone to review it. I said that I listened to them a little bit, but wasn’t a superfan. He said, “that’s better than anyone else,” and sent me Problems.