sing-along dirty-kid foot-stomping wide-eyed unrelenting feel-good folk-punk music as my raison d’être
if the ggd saved me in my childhood, than this other band has been my bandana-clad guardian angel in the past 5 years. i’ve yet to find a situation, experience, conflict, or emotion that they haven’t provided a song to accompany and because of that i’m both grateful and perpetually inspired. during my dark year these songs alone saved my life, literally. there’s no possible way to overstate the benefits of sing-along dirty-kid foot-stomping folk-punk bands on my mental health.
here’s one of my favorites and a link to download it:
defiance, ohio — “oh, susquehanna!” (printed with all due respect but no permission from defiance, ohio)
We walk at the paths at the banks of the mighty Susquehanna, with our feet made muddy by your tributaries that trickle their way to the Chesapeake. It’s like we follow I-83 down to harbor cities with strip malls and tar-mac, people swirling and teeming. It seemed so exciting, but now it seems like such a blight. I grew up near Kentucky’s Mountains of Zion, and all that was there was some old cemetary. All I wanted [was] to be able to walk to the store. Now I don’t live there but there’s too many stores, some apartments, and a Sunoco. And I wonder, what did they do with the bodies? Oh, Susquehanna! And I miss that place behind my house where I hiked and climbed and played, where I ditched this noisy century or just hid out from the decade. M-I homes thought it could stand to be updated, forced it all into a grid until it looked like the funny pages. With every trace of life, it seems, confined within a frame, the faces move from day to day but the strips all look the same. And the punchlines are resoundingly unfunny for those trapped in this architecture of easy money. And I feel like this could all come to no good. The kids who populate these culdesacs will never know what stood beneath their cookie cutter houses: fields and streams and woods. They’ll sit in cars and wait for mom to drive them out of this boring neighborhood. Oh, Susquehanna!
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