The Front Bottoms - Talon of the Hawk

On adult friendship.

Pat became my best friend somewhere around 1995. Pudgy sixth-graders, we wedged ourselves and our band instruments (a trombone and tenor sax, so not exactly freeing up space) into the same seat on the morning school bus and bonded in the way socially-insecure tweens do: by making fun of everything and everyone, ourselves included (or especially).

We kept on. Inseparable through middle and high school, we spent our first year of college two hours apart before I came to my senses and fled the monied enclave of Elon University for East Carolina’s more diverse population.

College ended as it does faster than you think it will when you’re trying to do the work, and since, it’s been trial and error like so much of adulthood is. There are texts and occasional phone and video calls and there have been periods where we see each other monthly and periods where we go a year without really talking. It’s hard to find the spaces for friends in adulthood; it can be lonely and isolating and sometimes just busy, either with actual business or bullshit.

At some point approximately 10 years ago, I found a through line: music.

When we were younger, our tastes approximated a Venn Diagram: I listened to jam bands, classic rock that belonged in the collections of much older men, jazz, and rap. Pat listened to a lot of emo — the Dashboard Confessionals and Get Up Kids and their ilk. We overlapped on Dave Matthews Band (we were white kids in an upper-middle-class suburb in the late ‘90’s, it was coded in us), some of the rap, and Reel Big Fish-ish ska.

I disdained the emo at the time. I didn’t like the haircuts, the almost confrontational emotional drama, or the vocals that swung between whisper and whine over acoustic backings. I got older, though, and whatever emo actually is did too: successive waves became more about being OK being a person with feelings and mental health issues instead of strictly about romantic travails, and I can get down with that as a person with feelings and mental health issues.

I’ve gotten to 40 without leaving being into bands behind. Sometimes, it feels like I’m sitting at the kids’ table when talking to other adults who laugh accommodatingly about how they just listen to “whatever Spotify gives me.” So as I keep finding new stuff, I kept sending it to Pat and sometimes he’d write back and sometimes he’d listen and I’m sure many times he didn’t or wouldn’t and whatever, but when I came across The Front Bottoms in 2013, he did.

The Front Bottoms embrace the juvenility of emo in some ways: the name, for starters, is hard to say in polite company without having to explain it too. Their songs are catchy and yell-along but also rambling and overshare in the way a late-night conversation does.

I sent a song from this album (or the album, I don’t know, it was ten years ago) to Pat and it stuck! He listened to it all the time and talked to me about them! And suddenly, we had an easy thing to come back to, again. TFB would put a song out, or a record, or announce a tour — or one of the bands tangentially related to them would, and I’d send it to him — and we’d have something to start off a conversation with, that could and would naturally flow along to what our spouses or jobs were up to or how we were doing figuring out how to keep kids upright.

I don’t thank the Front Bottoms for our friendship or anything, that is based in more than a band we’ve never met. But they — and this album in particular — were the start of a good rekindling over the last decade, one that’s been more valuable as we both wrestle with 40.