Routine Maintenance

Done well, a concept album, or series of albums, are a type of art nothing else quite reaches. You can’t just read the lyrics; to get the narrative you have to listen. Concept albums, for me, are the perfect distillation of my desire to watch a story unfold. To introduce characters and a story in the restrained space of songs is a technical feat. A work of literature.

The first time I saw Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties live was at the Dome in Tufnell Park. Less than a year before, I’d seen pop punk band The Wonder Years play the same venue (and they’ve played much bigger). But this time when Dan Campbell came on stage — lead singer of both —it was as the awkward, nervous, fictional Aaron, not as the lead singer of the much-beloved Wonder Years.

Initially, this was a character study, a way for Campbell to challenge himself musically and lyrically. He’s always been a poetic writer (in fact, there’s an old collection of his poetry called Paper Boats that every so often changes hands between fans for extortionate amounts of money) but the creation of Aaron is different, and more elaborate.

Like most contemporary pop punk-aligned bands, The Wonder Years write broadly autobiographical songs — but Aaron’s narrative is uniquely his own. It’s also profoundly bleak: 2014’s We Don’t Have Each Other relates his divorce from his wife, Diane, following a miscarriage and the death of his father. Eventually he finds himself staring at the ocean, contemplating suicide, and thinking about Diane. But it’s the attention to the small details that make up a life that draw his story together. When I saw Aaron, he was wearing a Buffalo Bills shirt, his father’s old team. He didn’t mention it. But we all knew.

The night at the Dome was a high wire act because it relied on those details being recognized by the audience: to enjoy the show, you had to buy into the fiction as it was being created and performed in front of you. You could argue that all live performances are fictional, but there’s something about a character who is unequivocally made up appearing on stage in front of you that demands you invest your time and suspend your disbelief. It would only take one person to break the spell. But no one did; we danced, we sang, and we listened to Aaron confess things to us about his life. An 18 year-old boy hit on me and nothing I told him put him off, but even that didn’t spoil the atmosphere while we heard Aaron fall in love with Diane:

I'm stuck on a memory of you dancing / In a backyard in North Jersey / You're holding sparklers and silhouetted / By the porch lights on a summer evening. / So while I'm pulling my gloves off with my teeth / It occurred to me you used to be happy.

We mourned the loss of their baby in ‘Grapefruit,’ and then winced at the fall, the moment when Aaron realizes just how far gone he is. By then he's living in his car, drinking the evenings away, deluding himself.

And outside, a homeless man asks me for change and I / I look him straight in his eyes. / He starts to apologize – / Tells me God's got a plan for me and that it'll be alright.

Campbell bantering with the audience in character before singing pieces of autobiography was like interactive theater scaled up; the fourth wall broke and then ceased to matter. There is truth in Campbell's songs — as there are in any songs, as there is in any poetry or confessional writing where the ‘I’ fades into the author. When Aaron cried for Diane, we did too: his loss was as real as any of ours.

2019’s Routine Maintenance, then, Campbell/West's second album, had a lot to live up to. I have awaited very few things with quite the same level of nervous anticipation.  And when it finally came, it was appropriately devastating. I made the mistake of listening it for the first time on my commute into work, and I sobbed on the tube. (Remember the tube?) 

The album was pleasingly self-referential. Aaron briefly forms the band The Roaring Twenties, and tells us about his music career. He and Diane get divorced, in "Just Sign the Papers." ("But honey, baby, please – shit, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to call you honey.") He leaves Brooklyn for California; he gets into a bar fight and ends up in jail. In Reseda, he finds a roommate, Rosa, on Craigslist and gets a job painting houses. Just as things are coming together, his sister Catherine calls: her husband has died. Aaron travels home to stay with her, her son, Colin, and their mother. 

Christ, you got tall / You've got your grandfather chin. / I guess your mom's been pretty busy / Why don't you sit with me a bit? / If you like that song / Then I can teach you it. / Come on over to the organ. / It's easy, I promise, I promise.

As it happens, Routine Maintenance functions as a way for West to come to terms with his father's death, but it isn’t until the last song on the second album, "Routine Maintenance," that Aaron is able to directly address his dad. "I think I've found out where the light is," he sings. "I’m trying to be someone you can count on for a change."

***

In London, I’m self-isolating with my cat. The only human contact I get nowadays is Skyping my boyfriend (across the sea in Brooklyn), my parents (quarantined in Essex), and my grandparents (pottering around their garden in Wales). I don’t mind it too much, really, although I am afraid of getting sick and having to take care of myself. One of the benefits of a long-distance relationship is that I’ve already had practice in how to maintain connections with people who aren’t there.

Last night I cracked open one of my precious remaining beers to do a Zoom quiz with friends, in lieu of the in-person reunion we were supposed to have last month. I actually hadn’t been particularly looking forward to the reunion, and I was worried that Zoom would feel awkward and stilted, or just plain sad. Instead it was exceptionally good fun, and I laughed a lot more than I had since I was last with people. It made me want to do them more often.

In between video calls, yoga with Adriene, and thinking about what to cook for the next available meal, I've been returning to Routine Maintenance a lot lately. It was my most played album of last year, but I’d put it aside for a few months to fallow, the way you sometimes have to when you love a piece of music. I came back to it the day I was meant to be flying to Brooklyn, and what I found was an album the pandemic had completely changed.

It’s a comfort now, in this strange moment of connection and total disconnect, to listen to the song when Aaron recounts his life in Reseda — it's taken on new resonances. Aaron’s life with Rosa isn’t big or grand; it’s not Instagram-worthy, or even a friendship that might last a lifetime. It’s working late nights and making ends meet, sharing leftovers and smoking together.

And I play her the songs that I wrote last year when things got dim, / And her boyfriend's a real great guy, / He works down at the Jiffy Lube. / They teach me Spanish at night. / We eat what she takes from her shift.

At the end of the song, Rosa moves in with her boyfriend, and Aaron moves on. It's glorious. "When I so desperately needed a friend / Rosa was a friend." That line tells me more about what it really means to be a friend to people than almost anything else I can think of. It is sharing small comforts; it is knowing what someone's need feels like. 

I have lived in this flat in London for almost 3 years now but this pandemic is the first time I’ve ever really felt like part of a community. I'm helping the mutual aid group out, texting my neighbors and doing grocery runs for them, taking phone calls from people who are lonely and just want a chat. There are talks of meeting up after this is over, in the pub instead of Zoom, and I hope that happens. But when we are no longer needed, these networks will mostly dissolve, and we will become strangers who live in the same place again. And I think that can be enough.

Of course, the other reason Aaron’s story is so resonant to me now is that it’s talking about grief, loss, and death, and those are things that we are learning to live with in ways I think we have mostly forgotten. Aaron West's narrative is a straightforward one. He makes bad decisions, he hurts people, and he hurts himself again and again: grief can make us do these things, he teaches us, but that is not an excuse. 

This guy named Robert calls / And said he used to have that car at 23. / Last year his wife passed on / He’s got memories of love in the backseat / He takes the wheel and grins / He gets the same look in his eyes you always did / He can’t afford what I want for it / But says it was nice to see a car like this again. / But I know he’ll love her the way that you did.

The impermanence of beauty that Aaron writes about makes me feel better about impending loss. It is fucking horrible to lose people — to COVID-19, whatever. But that when the grief allows us to breathe again, there could be light there. And we could find it. 

I had tickets to an Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties show in May. It’s recently been postponed to September, and who knows whether that will happen. This is barely a loss; it’s just a concert. I know that. But when I think about what I miss most, it’s the feeling of being one body among many, crying with emotions that aren't fear, loneliness, or grief. 

A week or so ago, The Wonder Years started to raise money for healthcare workers to get PPE. Let’s all do our bit and donate.