For the better part of a decade, Dan Campbell has penned more tunes I revere than any other songwriter. I attribute this to the specificity of his lyrics—a welcome anomaly for a pop punk genre on this side of zeitgeist Fall Out Boy. As frontman for The Wonder Years, Dan regularly cites his real life friends or their actual watering holes or their intimate relational woes. Music this self-referential feels rare outside of folk or rap. In 2014, Dan subverted this technique for an ambitious and multi-faceted solo effort known as Aaron West and The Roaring Twenties.
The AW20 project is a work of fiction, but one that stretches the suspension of disbelief across chronological installments. They are concept albums. Though, the conceit even bleeds into their live performance. Imagine if Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had sequels, or if the Marvel Cinematic Universe performed canon on Broadway. In fact, theatre is perhaps the closest analogue here: Dan does not exist insofar as Lin-Manuel Miranda does not exist. There is only Alexander Hamilton the character, and there is only the eponymous Aaron West. We engage vicariously through Aaron’s first person narrative. His reactions, his memories, his onstage banter all inform the grander plot and vice versa.
The tale itself is a meditation on how we choose to cope with loss. Aaron embodies stages of the Kübler Ross model of grief throughout the story, and these sections especially tend to correspond to the four cardinal directions (or a lack of momentum altogether). I’d like to examine how the discography uses inertia to underscore Aaron’s arcs, tragic or otherwise.
Aaron, South
The initial album unspools a great deal of exposition over its first few tracks. We Don’t Have Each Other introduces us to Aaron in his Jersey apartment, still reeling from shock after his father’s passing and his wife Dianne’s recent divorce. He punches holes in the walls, breaks his cellphone, and questions his Catholic faith in the wake of their split. He quits smoking, but only because his ex-wife detested the habit. He begins to drink heavily. We learn that Dianne had become pregnant shortly after his dad’s funeral. Grief compels him to visit his mother in Queens, where she compels him to try and outrun that grief in turn. In the driver’s seat of his father’s old Mustang, bent on a fallacy that he’ll “feel better when it’s warmer across state lines,” he careens south toward Georgia. Along the way he picks flowers for Dianne, expecting to be welcomed back after some time and an apology.
The diegetic narration allows us to feel sad with Aaron, rather than simply sad for him. We understand his relationships with Dianne and his father because of this interiority, but we don’t feel sad because of their absence. We feel sad because we’ve felt their presence. It’s not that Aaron’s wife left him. It’s that Dianne left him. It’s that when Aaron fumbles “I’m trying to be half the man I know my dad is, or…was,” we feel like we lost him too. It is empathy over sympathy, and it is devastating.
Aaron regains a sense of control as he journeys south, further from the source of his pain. Album centerpiece “Divorce and The American South” abruptly halts that progress. Locking himself in a rest stop phone booth to wallow in patriarchal bullshit, Aaron whimpers “I won’t let go, even if you say so” into the abyss of Dianne’s voicemail. The second verse then tragically reframes our understanding of their divorce, revealing that the young couple miscarried. We finally comprehend how Dianne’s pain contributed to their fated split, and not merely Aaron’s own. He may have lost one parent, but she too lost the possibility of becoming one, and their fallout has everything to do with Aaron’s neglect. Pain has a way of revealing the ugliness we’d rather believe ourselves incapable of. To characterize his response here as anything other than selfish is to underrate the compulsion of young men to deny the agency of those who deny them love.
For all its trappings of pity, “The Thunderbird Inn” is actually a subtle respite from the gloom. Townies take down their residual Christmas decorations as Aaron finally begins dismantling his own denial, parallel ghosts of a dead season. He can now feel grateful for a friendly motel clerk or half tank of gas, though this won’t crystallize into a full blown maturity quite yet. After meditating on his changed relationship to Catholicism, the nature of his compatibility with Dianne, and Sundays spent with his father over football broadcasts, we arrive at the Carolina coast.
Aaron, East
The penultimate track confirms how little Aaron has actually changed. As if to manifest the angst of a plane wreck he dreamt earlier, he wades into the Atlantic and considers drowning himself for an ex. This is the same incongruous logic that plagued him in the phone booth, the idea that he could do something big enough to compel Dianne to attend his funeral (read: to demonstrate that she still cares about him). Like the cigarettes he quits long after the gesture would have mattered to the health of his marriage, it’s too much too late.
It’s telling that Aaron keeps reacting remarkably late to tragedy. Only when he is later forced to confront Dianne’s full personhood does he outgrow this static characterization. For now, he reaches into his pocket for one last smoke only to find the daylilies originally plucked for Dianne. He plants them seaside, trying to revive what will not be. On this record, Aaron is defined by his retreat from or assault on the finality of that flower, declaring “I’m not coming home tonight without Dianne by my side” in stubborn refrain.
It’s becoming apparent how Aaron’s inertia informs his placement on the Kübler Ross model. As he heads south toward Georgia, we understand his momentum is simply a veiled denial of his problems back in New Jersey. When he stays put in his apartment or the phone booth, he leaves behind an angry trail of drywall holes and voicemail messages. We’ll soon find him moving north into bargaining, but for now he wades east, staring into the ocean and depressively contemplating suicide. Aaron may or may not achieve acceptance, but trudging through these initial stages ensures the resolution can only be triumphant or tragic.
The actual last song of the album is a tongue in cheek cover of “Going to Georgia” by The Mountain Goats. For as much as the song’s narrator gilds his intentions with care, his malice is apparent in the fucking gun he brings to the doorway of his so-called loved one. Clearly, this is a final lampoon at the regressive coping mechanisms Aaron has chosen to employ.
Aaron, North
The interim Bittersweet EP and solitary single “Orchard Park” usher in Aaron’s bargaining phase. “‘67 Cherry Red” is a swift reversal of Aaron’s entire trajectory thus far. When a stranger answers his newspaper ad for the Mustang, he can finally let go of the literal vehicle for his obsessive gestures. He sells it to Robert undervalued out of duty to The Thunderbird and love for his mom, breaking the established pattern of self-interest. As he catches a bus back north, we pray he can learn to respect Dianne’s interests in the same way.
The most remarkable thing about Dianne standing in the doorway is that it’s not, and that some college kid’s standing in the doorway. Jesse, who appears to have filled the vacancy of their old home, unknowingly prompts what I consider the key inflection point of Aaron’s entire arc. Confronted with the finality of the locks Jesse changed, he realizes “I’m not sure what I’m looking for. I don’t know what I want. Do I want anything? I don’t want anything.” It’s a cathartic, syncopated cascade of realization—it’s over. He ran away and he crawled back and now that it’s over, he needs to find reasons to survive that no longer include Dianne. It’s not exactly empathy, but it’s the first step towards it. It’s titular, it is bittersweet.
The subsequent tunes offer the aspirational vision of triumph and soft moment of closure We Don’t Have Each Other withheld. I too will withhold their dissection; you deserve these moments as much as Aaron does. Instead, we move on to the second full chapter in his saga. Freed from the burden of coloring in backstories or introducing main players, Routine Maintenance can instead explore what Aaron is becoming. Given this narrative room to breathe, Dan achieves something miraculous in the spaces a first installment couldn’t afford to include.
Aaron’s smoking habits have been referenced exactly three times in the canon. Initially, with his self imposed switch to e-cigarettes to curb the coughing fits Dianne hated so much, and then as a metaphor for his selfish motives in the Carolinas. He now muses “why can’t I just like it?” and for the first time, he makes a decision rooted in his own agency, the same agency he was fighting so hard to deny Dianne. As he scrapes away harmful and weathered layers of himself in New Jersey, he finally gets to “smile in the sun” like he intended to in Georgia. I can’t help but smile with him.
Consider the way “Orchard Park” details how Aaron’s mother still tends to his father’s tomatoes after his passing, learning to let him go and “already seeing blooms” because of it. By signing his name on the divorce papers, Aaron accepts Dianne’s right to make decisions in conflict with his desires, finally reviving the daylilies he sowed long ago. Suddenly, we realize they were never for Dianne; they were for him.
The right things don’t always go down easy, however, and Aaron turns once more to drinking after finalizing the divorce, subsequently breaking his nose in a bar fight. He ruminates on a fourth member of the West family during his night in a jail cell, Aaron’s sister Catherine whose own family he mostly avoids. Believing himself to still be the “burden on everyone” he once imposed, he runs away yet again. This time though, Aaron earns his namesake.
Aaron West
With his eyes set west and California on his lips, he drives straight past his demons. Acceptance is the final stage in the Kübler Ross model of grief, and withholding it for Aaron until now is potent. After nearly killing himself in the Atlantic, “making new plans” to celebrate his birthday in the Pacific is a meaningful subversion precisely because of how perilous it was getting here. This is the strength of serialized storytelling. We’ve watched Aaron withdraw, run away, grovel, learn gratitude, backslide, readjust, stubbornly double down, despair, and ultimately make little progress. We’ve watched him fail, and fail with finality because Dan chose on the previous album not to cheapen his arc with a premature resolution. The journey toward real behavioral change is treacherous, so Aaron is no stranger to the gutter. It’s what makes his acceptance feel triumphant, and it’s what makes that triumph feel earned.
The second act provides the narrative with a lot of connective tissue. Aaron moves to Reseda. His roommate Rosa and her boyfriend support him in the small, meaningful ways he will soon learn to do for others. They encourage him to graduate from all the open mics and begin touring in earnest. His paid gigs lead him to back east to Philadelphia where he meets and recruits The Roaring Twenties. The band grows more successful over the years and finally Aaron, like the couch from his visions, has seemingly found something productive with which to overcome his vices. But, as we know, this is a story about his actual coping mechanisms. When tragedy strikes again, has Aaron actually changed?
“God & the Billboards” answers this question when he receives a call from a widowed Catherine: “so of course I’m coming home. Yeah, if you need me, I’m coming home.” Here, Aaron manifests his redemption. Instantly and without question, he takes up the mantle of caring for someone other than himself. We’re a long way from where we found him, and in gratitude to all the figures who have cared for him directly (Robert and Rosa), indirectly (dad), purposefully (mom), or on accident (Jesse and the Thunderbird staff), he runs with new purpose toward the nephew he once avoided. We can, in fact, elect not to indulge in our worst traumas. Even in grief, we can take care of others and ourselves.
“So I’m packing his lunch and I’m going to bed. I don’t want to see how dark the night gets.”
It’s Such An Enormous Thing To Walk And Listen
It comes as no surprise that this project runs parallel to Dan’s own marriage and recent fatherhood. In reality, doing right by our families is largely unrelated to the grand, romantic gestures we might be inclined to. Rather, it’s through the myriad of little acts of love that we prove ourselves. In resignation, Aaron offers this emblematic one-liner: “Things are looking up lately. I’ve got the band, they’ve got me. I’m not sure there’s a future there, or that there’s gotta be.” It’s a beautiful erasure of Aaron’s compulsion to control what will not be. He now understands that people will love you or they will not, but the only way to sell out your own funeral is to be there for your loved ones when it counts. It’s tedious work.
But it’s the most worthwhile work we’ll ever do.
Essays and Poetry from Migui Gallinadelapena 