For context, I was wearing a Devil and God shirt in my main Tinder photo. We’ve been inseparable (and to many BN concerts) ever since 🖤

Edit: My response was, “I don’t know who you are…but I like the way you think.”

As for me, I listen to a lot of music and will rotate artists based on mood, but I really like:

- Flyleaf - find them really emotionally evocative, and love Lacey Sturm's unique and varied vocals. Their music has interesting light vs dark elements.

- Silverchair - a huge band here in Australia. Diorama is my favourite album and one of my faves of all time.

- Moving Mountains - underrated emo/post rock band.

- Paramore/Hayley Williams - though I don't listen to them as much as Flyleaf these days, I love the lyrics and Hayley's obviously a fantastic singer. Interesting genre changes in their later stuff.

And I've liked Avril Lavigne since high school, haha. Let Go and Under My Skin are nostalgic staples, and Head Above Water, although it's more adult contemporary pop, has some of the best vocals of her career.

I feel like Silverchair went through a comparable change in style and levelling up to BN, from more adolescent angst to mature songwriting, though they started from a post-grunge standpoint and and ended up more baroque pop/rock.

So in the internet community, this album is always highly respected. Not necessarily Radiohead level or so, but even people with picky taste respect this album. For example these are pretty fair statistics from Besteveralbums.com :

Top 10 albums of 2006 (7th)

 Top 100 albums of of the 2000s (70th)

 Top 500 albums of all time (437th)

However, I was surprised that it didn't received as great reviews as expected. Metacritic: 78, thus pretty mediocore reviews. Then, there is this overal mainstream dead silence after Deja Entendu that was already known to me and was probably influenced by the feuds with the label and thus weak marketing campaign and obviously, this album was just too dark to be mainstream hit, however I would expect critics and alternative music press appreciation of this album. I am not from the USA, nor I was old enough to care about music in that time yet, so I cannot probably fully understand what was really goiing on there. Was it simply because people were so shocked by the change of style from pop punk towards this mixture of Post-Hardcore and alternative rock and it took a little while to appreciate? Did reaction of media aligned with reactions of fans and was there some "exchange" of fans when many fans stopped listening but many new fans were attracted by the new style or almost all fans loved it immidiately?

In the past there have been many posts about bands that kinda sound like Brand New and this one kept coming up. The name is something like Foxes or Foxness or something like that. They have a pretty heavy song that in the chorus the singer (who is usually the guitarist) screams “Fuck, Fuck, Fuuucccckkk!!!!”.

Any help?

I’ve seen the guys play “Degausser” many times, and I’ve only just found this one online. I was really surprised by some of the “guttural” sounds Jesse Lacey makes—I think his voice even sounds hoarse at times or very deep; it reminded me a bit of Tom Waits in certain parts. Vin, as always, was giving it his all on stage, but here he does some moves that—wow—I’d never seen before, haha. As for Jesse, those moves he makes between 8:05 and 8:10 when he recites “Take apart the counting...” are amazing. A little later, around 8:25, when he sings “Goodbye,” it sounds very guttural—the first time I even asked if it was really him singing. And I think the key moment to wrap this up is when he sings “Rise against the wall”—it sounds like a rabid dog to me, and I love it.

Anyway, judge for yourselves and enjoy it!

I had mentioned that I would post a photo I took based off a lyric that got me into art school. I can't find the post so I'm just going post it to everyone. I hope that whoever asked to see it, sees this. I know it's not the best, but I was 16 and just learning how to use PhotoShop.

Obviously, Sowing Season but what else?

I had to explain the album to a friend but ended up doing a Ted Talk.

How would you summarise it in one sentence? Knowing full well that one sentence doesn’t do it justice.

I’ll go first

“I’ve never felt so hollow , I’m an old abandoned church with broken pews and empty isles”

Second was

“Is this the way a toy feels, when its batteries run dry “?

By Mike Rogers, CPA 🤘🥁 | MillennialMike7 | Meadowbrook135

Before the songs they wrote at each other, Jesse Lacey and John Nolan wrote songs together. They were teenagers on Long Island, friends before either had a record deal or any reason to believe people beyond the Island would care what they had to say. Recordings survived from that period, preserving the sound of two people before their friendship became a story strangers believed they understood. Nolan released several of those high school recordings years later, after both men had become known for the music that followed their rupture. [1]

Taking Back Sunday was not created by that rupture. Eddie Reyes was assembling a new band in 1999, and Jesse Lacey was there from the start. The surviving accounts do not agree on precisely how the founding lineup came together. In a later oral history, Nolan recalled that original singer Antonio Longo, a school friend, knew Reyes and suggested Nolan for guitar; other published histories describe Reyes and Lacey as co-founders. By the time the first lineup took shape, Nolan was playing guitar and Lacey was playing bass. Nothing about those early recordings or the band they briefly shared announced the shape their relationship would take in public. They were still young musicians moving through the same small Long Island world, before the bands acquired identities strong enough to divide them. [2]

Before long, Lacey would be gone. He would form Brand New with Garrett Tierney, Brian Lane, and Vincent Accardi, then write a song about whatever had happened between him and Nolan and title it after a biblical instruction to forgive, but the song itself would refuse. Nolan’s band would answer on its debut album, taking language associated with Lacey’s accusation and turning it back toward him. [3]

The answer did not come years later, after distance had softened the details and everyone involved had learned how to speak carefully in public. It came while the people at the center of the story still shared friends, rooms, equipment, and memory. Each song spoke with the confidence of testimony, even though the two versions could not be reconciled.

Listeners memorized both accounts; they chose sides, sent fragments of the songs to friends, put them in AIM away messages, and aimed them at people who had never heard of Baldwin, Levittown, or Amityville. Part of the lyrics’ usefulness came from the fact that listeners did not know the original story. They could take a line written inside one damaged friendship and place it inside their own, where it seemed to explain something they had not yet learned how to say. [4]

The closeness matters because the Long Island scene did not offer these musicians much distance from one another. This was not a collection of isolated bands moving through separate professional worlds, it was a small network of people and rooms that kept rearranging itself. Lineups rotated, musicians who left one group surfaced in another and the scene was small enough that breakups, new bands, and damaged friendships rarely remained private for long.

A scene begins when a group of people decides that the rooms available to them will have to become important. The city was close enough to imagine and far enough away to resent, sitting at the other end of a train line while the Island repeated itself in houses, parkways, shopping centers, and quiet nights. The bands made their own center because no better one was coming.

They played for people who knew them before the songs became records and before the records became identities. The audience might know a singer’s former band, a guitarist’s brother, the person a lyric was rumored to be about, or the argument that had divided a group of friends the previous week. Nobody arrived as a finished public figure. The musicians were still close enough to ordinary life that the people watching them could remember who they had been before the stage.

By the time the rest of the country encountered Taking Back Sunday and Brand New, the two bands could seem like natural opposites. Taking Back Sunday built songs out of interruption and collision, voices overlapping as though an argument had reached the point where neither person was willing to wait. Brand New increasingly drew its anger inward, making accusation feel colder, more private, and more deliberate. Once listeners learned there was history between the people involved, the records appeared to confirm it.

The opposition came later. Before the bands were placed on different sides of an imagined divide, Lacey and Nolan had belonged to the same small world. They had known each other before Taking Back Sunday and Brand New gave the friendship opposing names, and they had made recordings together as teenagers. Those recordings preserve a period before either man had a public version to defend, when whatever they were writing had not yet become evidence in a case assembled by strangers.

Years later, the recordings would offer no verdict about the rupture and no hidden explanation for the songs that followed. What they preserved was more ordinary and, because of that, more difficult: there had been a friendship substantial enough to leave something behind.

The songs that made the rupture public were not written by distant rivals who discovered each other through success. They were written by people who had already shared rooms, ambitions, language, and memory. Each knew how the other wrote and how the other might tell a story. When they finally addressed one another through songs, they were not shouting across an empty space. They were fighting over the meaning of a history they had made together.

The friendship is not background information attached to the feud. The feud is what happened to the friendship. That distinction matters because the story people tell about the rupture is much cleaner than the record.

The familiar version goes like this: there was a girl, Nolan betrayed Lacey, Lacey left Taking Back Sunday, Brand New formed, and the two bands settled the matter on their debut albums. It has been repeated so often that the sequence now feels less like an account than an origin myth. The problem is that even published versions cannot agree on the central act. Some say Nolan slept with Lacey’s girlfriend. A 2004 New York feature allowed that he might only have kissed her. Nolan later described the woman as someone both friends liked. A 2019 Pitchfork retrospective reverses the familiar account entirely, saying Lacey was removed from the band after becoming involved with Nolan’s girlfriend. Accounts also differ on whether Lacey quit Taking Back Sunday, was dismissed, or left after a confrontation whose details were already changing by the time anyone outside the room heard about it. [5]

The woman at the center of these versions is rarely allowed to become a person. She appears as a girlfriend, a crush, or the girl at a party, then disappears once she has performed her function in the story. Her name, experience, and understanding of the relationships are missing. The retellings use her to explain why two young men became enemies, but they preserve almost nothing of what she might have said happened.

This does not mean that nothing happened, but it means the event and the story about the event are no longer the same thing. The original participants were young, the circle around them was close, and the account spread through a scene built almost entirely from overlapping friendships. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who had been there. Each retelling shortened the distance from rumor to certainty until people who had never met Lacey or Nolan could explain the end of their friendship in one sentence.

In a post on his own music blog about “Your Name Here (Sunrise Highway),” Nolan offered a simpler account. He said that he and Lacey had been best friends for most of their lives and had fallen out over a girl they both liked. They stopped speaking for almost a year, then gradually reconnected. His account does not supply the woman’s perspective, establish what understandings existed among the people involved, or explain why later versions hardened into incompatible stories. It does establish that Nolan himself remembered the rupture less as a clean act of romantic theft than as an argument involving feelings the two friends shared. [6]

What the record can establish is narrower. Lacey left Taking Back Sunday, formed Brand New with Tierney, Lane, and Accardi, and recorded an album. On October 9, 2001, Triple Crown Records released Your Favorite Weapon. “Seventy Times 7” appeared near the end, carrying the rupture beyond the small circle of people who had heard some version of it already. Whatever had happened between Lacey and Nolan now had a public form, pressed onto a record and available to people who knew neither of them. [7]

Another song on the album would become part of the exchange without necessarily belonging on the list of songs written about Nolan. “Mix Tape” contributed language that Taking Back Sunday later drew into its response. That borrowing matters because it helped listeners connect the two records, but it does not prove that the whole song addressed the same person. The distinction is small and necessary. Once an audience learns that two writers were speaking to each other, it becomes tempting to treat every repeated phrase as another piece of correspondence. [8]

“Seventy Times 7” gave them plenty to work with. The song does not sound like someone preserving an account for later inspection. It sounds like someone who has already delivered the verdict and is now discovering how much pleasure can be taken in the sentence. Lacey does not walk the listener through the disputed event or acknowledge that anyone else might describe it differently. The former friend enters the song already guilty, and the music keeps tightening around him until anger becomes more exhilarating than explanation.

The title places that anger against a biblical instruction about forgiveness. In the Gospel of Matthew, Peter asks how many times he must forgive someone who sins against him, and Jesus answers with a number translated as either seventy-seven or seventy times seven. Lacey takes a phrase associated with forgiveness and places it over a song that has no interest in extending any. The title does not soften the grievance. It makes the refusal sharper by keeping the moral demand visible while the song moves in the other direction. [9]

That is why the song does not need to prove its version. For the length of the record, grievance is allowed to feel complete. The person singing has been wronged, the person being addressed deserves what follows, and any uncertainty would only weaken the release. Listeners could enter that certainty without knowing the people or the facts because most of them were not listening for a reliable history of a Long Island friendship. They were listening for the feeling of no longer having to doubt their own anger.

Five months later, on March 26, 2002, Victory Records released Taking Back Sunday’s debut, Tell All Your Friends. The title of “There’s No ‘I’ in Team” did not identify Lacey, but the response was recognizable to anyone who had heard Brand New’s record. Nolan and the band took language associated with Lacey’s accusation, including material connected to “Mix Tape,” and returned it from the other side of the friendship. [8] [10]

In a 2024 track by track interview with the Recording Academy, Nolan was asked about the falling out with Lacey that had inspired the song. He did not reconstruct the original incident or attempt to decide which version was correct. The connection is firm, but the event remains unresolved. There was a rupture between Lacey and Nolan. “Seventy Times 7” came from Lacey’s side of it, and “There’s No ‘I’ in Team” was written as Nolan’s response. Beyond that, the songs cannot tell us precisely what happened, what promises existed between the people involved, or which details had already changed by the time the story reached the rest of the scene. They do not close the gap in the record. They show how quickly the gap filled with language. [11]

“There’s No ‘I’ in Team” does not merely contradict the earlier song: it enters it. Taking Back Sunday removes Lacey’s words from the authority of his voice, places them inside another arrangement, and changes who appears to control their meaning. What had sounded final on Your Favorite Weapon becomes answerable on Tell All Your Friends. The point is not simply that Nolan denies the accusation. He demonstrates that the same shared history can be made to support a different emotional account.

That act of borrowing created the appearance of evidence. Listeners could put the songs beside each other, recognize the repeated language, and feel that they were hearing access to something private. One track seemed to unlock the other. The overlap confirmed that the argument was real, but it could not confirm which account was true. The songs shared references because the writers shared a history. To an audience hungry for a verdict, that intimacy looked like proof.

Taking Back Sunday’s arrangement made the reply sound larger than the person who had written it. Nolan and Adam Lazzara did not sing as a single stable narrator. Their voices crossed, followed, interrupted, and pressed against each other, sometimes making a song feel as though two people had reached the part of an argument where neither was willing to wait.

Lacey’s accusation had arrived through the authority of a single narrator. Taking Back Sunday’s reply gathered people around Nolan’s version. The memory became a chorus, and the chorus changed the balance of the exchange. “Seventy Times 7” offered the freedom of believing the person who hurt you no longer deserved a hearing. “There’s No ‘I’ in Team” supplied the feeling on the other side: the moment a private accusation meets a room full of voices and discovers that it no longer controls the story.

For listeners, that difference mattered more than the unknowable facts beneath it. The two songs offered positions rather than proof. A person could inhabit Lacey’s certainty, then move to Taking Back Sunday and inhabit the satisfaction of answering it. Plenty of listeners loved both songs, sometimes on the same burned CD, without feeling any obligation to keep their loyalties consistent. The feud was useful because each record supplied an emotion the other could not.

For Nolan, the original feeling did not remain at the same temperature. More than twenty years later, he said that the circumstances still felt real, raw, new, and emotionally intense during roughly the first six months or year that Taking Back Sunday performed “There’s No ‘I’ in Team.” After that, much of the immediate emotion died down. The song remained, however, and audiences kept arriving at the beginning. [11]

That is one of the stranger consequences of turning a private injury into a successful song. For the writer, the event moves farther into the past, becomes complicated by later experience, and loses some of the force that made the original words possible. For the listener hearing the record for the first time, none of that aging has occurred. The accusation has just been made and the answer is still urgent. A song can remain at the temperature at which it was written long after the person singing it has cooled.

The bands themselves did not behave as though the records had placed them in permanently opposing camps. On a short 2002 tour, the two bands sang each other’s callout songs together onstage. The two public accounts occupied the same performances, carried by people whom later retellings would arrange into cleanly divided sides. [12]

The onstage collaboration did not settle the old dispute, and it does not prove that the friendship had been repaired. It shows only that the relationship was capable of movement after the records had made the anger seem permanent. The people involved could tour together, sing inside one another’s songs, speak again, and change their understanding of the period. The recordings could do none of those things. Each time someone returned to them, Lacey was refusing forgiveness again and Taking Back Sunday was answering him again. The scene remembered the songs more clearly than it remembered the event.

Brand New’s side had been saying for years that the public story outlived the private rupture. In a 2015 interview, Lacey said the situation had “cleaned itself up a lot sooner than most people thought it did.” He said that he and Nolan had realized that, even while angry, they would remain friends, and that fans continued clinging to the controversy after the two had buried it. By 2004, New York was already describing the feud as a story that had taken on a life of its own. None of that proves every grievance disappeared, but it does mean that the argument this article makes about the audience was also being made from inside Brand New. [13]

Not everyone allowed the public story to cool. Lazzara had joined Taking Back Sunday after Lacey left and had not been present for the original rupture, but his voice helped carry Nolan’s response into the culture. In 2015, long after Nolan and Lacey had begun reconnecting, Lazzara publicly called Lacey “a dick” and “not a good person.” The two men who had experienced the original break had moved through anger, longing, renewed contact, and distance. The singer who inherited the answer song was still speaking as though the fight remained current. His comments helped the institution preserve a feud that the friendship itself had already complicated. [14]

The familiar version of the story also depends on Nolan remaining in the band that Lacey left. It gives the feud an easy symmetry: Lacey departs, forms Brand New, and attacks from outside; Nolan remains in Taking Back Sunday and answers on behalf of the band. For a while the records supported that arrangement, but the people did not remain where the story had placed them.

By spring 2003, Taking Back Sunday had another damaged relationship inside it. Lazzara had been dating Nolan’s sister Michelle, and later published accounts connected alleged infidelity in that relationship to Nolan’s departure. Nolan initially explained his departure from Taking Back Sunday as exhaustion from touring, while later accounts described constant fighting within the band and the personal rupture surrounding Lazzara’s relationship with his sister. Nolan and bassist Shaun Cooper left, then formed Straylight Run with Michelle and drummer Will Noon. [15]

The pattern had inverted. In the first public story, Nolan had been cast as the friend who betrayed Lacey. But in the second, the alleged betrayal concerned Nolan’s sister and the singer whose band Nolan had helped build. This time the public received touring exhaustion before it received the intimate history. The stated explanation was not necessarily false. Bands can be exhausted, divided over credit, and damaged by personal conduct at the same time. But the gap between the public reason and the private injury was another reminder that a clean account is often what becomes available before a complete one does.

The departure made Nolan another former member carrying damaged relationships away from Taking Back Sunday, and it broke the idea that the original rupture had created two stable sides. The small Long Island world rearranged itself again, as it had always done.

Straylight Run did not sound like an attempt to rebuild Tell All Your Friends somewhere else. Piano moved toward the center of the arrangements, the songs opened up, and the voices were given more room. Nolan had not stopped writing about injury or absence, but the new band allowed him to approach those subjects without reproducing the same collisions that had made Taking Back Sunday’s debut sound like an argument happening in real time.

On October 12, 2004, Victory Records released Straylight Run’s self-titled debut, Straylight Run. It included “Your Name Here (Sunrise Highway),” but the song did not originate in 2004. Nolan said he had written it around the summer of 2001, during the same period in which the friendship with Lacey had become the subject of so much public anger. [6] [16]

Nolan described the song as the result of being overwhelmed by the simpler feeling beneath the dispute: he missed his friend. The chorus was addressed to Lacey as an invitation, using rough directions to the Long Island apartment where Nolan was living. The song remained unreleased for years because it did not fit Taking Back Sunday and initially remained outside the newer material Straylight Run was developing. [6]

That local detail brings the exchange back down to the size of the life from which it came. The earlier songs travel through betrayal, revenge, accusation, and forgiveness refused. None of those ideas requires a listener to know Nassau County. “Your Name Here” gives the listener roads. Sunrise Highway is no longer a name from the edge of the bands’ mythology but a route that someone could drive, past the commercial strips and intersections of the South Shore, toward the home of the person singing.

The directions do not lead to a venue or some imagined neutral ground where two public figures might meet and resolve their differences: they lead home. After the scale of the public exchange, that is almost disarming. The person helping to construct an answer to Lacey was also imagining that the former friend might still remember how to reach him.

Nothing in the song supplies the factual resolution that the origin story has always lacked. Nolan does not explain what happened, withdraw his account, or accept Lacey’s. The possibility it opens is quieter, and contact does not depend on winning first. The absent friend is no longer only the author of an accusation that must be defeated; he is someone whose absence has survived the argument.

Heard in release order, the songs appear to trace a clean emotional progression. “Seventy Times 7” makes the accusation public in October 2001. “There’s No ‘I’ in Team” answers the following March. “Your Name Here” arrives in October 2004 and seems to move Nolan’s public language away from rebuttal and toward missing the person behind it.

The writing chronology is less orderly. Nolan had already written “Your Name Here” in 2001, while the friendship was still damaged and before either debut album had fixed the argument in public memory. Missing Lacey did not come only after the anger had run its course. The two feelings existed beside each other. That makes the later release more revealing, not less. The records had encouraged listeners to imagine two men occupying cleanly opposing positions. Nolan’s unreleased song preserved a contradiction the feud mythology could not use: a person could want to answer his former friend and still want that friend to come home.

Anger did not simply become forgiveness, and an invitation did not prove reconciliation. People can miss someone while remaining certain that the person hurt them. They can want their own version heard without wanting the other person permanently erased. Directions can be left without knowing whether the person will use them. “Your Name Here” matters because it permits those feelings to exist together where the public records had demanded certainty.

Listeners rarely encountered the exchange in its proper order, and even the proper release order concealed the writing chronology. Someone might discover Taking Back Sunday first, then learn that part of “There’s No ‘I’ in Team” reached backward into a Brand New song. Another listener might find Straylight Run years later and hear “Your Name Here” as a later song about distance without knowing that Nolan had written it while the dispute was still new. The catalogs were available all at once, and the folklore surrounding them encouraged people to search backward and forward for additional messages.

Chronology resists that expansion without making the feelings neat. It does not reveal an endless secret correspondence hidden across three discographies. We are given a small number of supportable songs produced during the life of one damaged friendship. The first two records make the men sound certain of opposing truths. The song held back until 2004 shows that certainty and attachment were never necessarily opposites.

That is the larger reason the songs became useful to people who had no connection to Long Island. Most friendships do not end in one clean emotional state. Anger can feel complete while attachment survives beside it. A person can want to win an argument and still miss the only other person who remembers the life that existed before it. Years can pass, other relationships can break, and the person once reduced to a single dispute can remain the person who remembers an earlier version of your life that nobody else can reach.

The songs never recover the missing event. They preserve what the event became in public: an accusation, a response, and an invitation written during the same damaged period but released years apart. By the time listeners placed those words in AIM away messages and sent them to friends of their own, the original memory no longer belonged only to the people who had lived it. The facts remained on Long Island, while the language traveled.

By 2017, many of those listeners had been carrying the language for fifteen years. They no longer needed the original Long Island story to make the songs useful. The words had survived dead screen names, discarded CDs, old friendships, marriages, and the gradual embarrassment of becoming older than the people who had written them. What began as testimony inside one damaged friendship had been absorbed into lives that neither Lacey nor Nolan knew existed.

The old feud had trained listeners to look for correspondence. They knew how to place one lyric beside another, recognize the borrowed language, and experience the thrill of feeling that the records had admitted them into something private. A sentence written by Lacey might now belong to someone else’s memory of being seventeen, of leaving home, of ending a friendship, or of surviving a period when music provided words that ordinary conversation could not. The experience attached to the song might be honest even when the listener’s understanding of the person who wrote it had changed. Learning more about the writer could alter the memory, but it could not remove the years already lived inside it.

There was no single way to resolve that possession. A person could stop listening and still remember every word. Another could continue listening privately while refusing to defend the man who wrote it. Someone else might find the separation impossible, not because the song had lost its musical force, but because hearing the voice now summoned facts that had not been present when the attachment formed. None of those responses could return the listener to the earlier innocence of believing that the words arrived without a life around them.

The songs remained where old songs usually remain: available without requiring anything new from the audience. Listening to a record made in 2001 or 2006 did not demand a public decision about a current tour, a ticket, or a comeback. The music could be avoided, revisited, defended, or quietly retained without the band asking anyone to convert memory into a fresh transaction.

The choice facing the audience is therefore different from the one that made the original feud irresistible. Nobody is being asked to decide whether Lacey or Nolan wrote the more convincing account of the friendship. The feeling that a voice understood you is not evidence that you understood the person using it.

That may be the most durable illusion created by confessional music. Intimacy of expression can feel like intimacy with the writer, especially when the listener encounters the songs young and uses them before learning how carefully public selves can be constructed. Lacey’s lyrics seemed to make private damage available without protection. For many listeners, that apparent exposure became a form of trust. The public believes it has an understanding of the men who had written the songs. It was the value listeners could safely assign to the sense that they had known him through them.

They had known the language. That was different. A song can become part of a listener’s life without giving the listener authority to erase the life around its creation. The private meaning of a lyric cannot function as testimony about its author, and the comfort a person received from a record cannot become evidence that the person who made it deserves restoration. Long before that audience existed, the story began with two friends making recordings together. What followed taught listeners to enter other people’s songs and use them as rooms of their own. They carried the language out of Long Island and furnished those rooms with lives the writers would never see.

The later history did not erase what the listeners had felt inside them. It removed the innocence of believing the rooms had no history. The songs had become theirs, but the absolution had not.

Source Notes

[1] High school recordings. Michael Haskoor, “Taking Back Sunday’s John Nolan Releases Old Demos With Brand New’s Jesse Lacey,” Diffuser, May 7, 2015. The report describes Nolan posting high school demos he had made with Lacey.

[2] Taking Back Sunday’s founding lineup. Mischa Pearlman, “An Oral History of Taking Back Sunday: ‘We’re Not Just a Band That Was in the Emo Scene. We Got Past That…,’” Kerrang!, May 20, 2019. Nolan recalled that original singer Antonio Longo, whom he knew from school, knew Eddie Reyes and suggested Nolan for guitar. Mark Jacobson’s “L.I.R.R. (Long Island Rock ’n’ Roll),” New York, December 3, 2004, identifies Reyes as the band’s founder. Other published histories credit Reyes and Lacey as co-founders. The article therefore treats Lacey as present from the start while leaving the precise formation sequence unresolved. The working Kerrang URL is the current non-/features/ address. (Kerrang!)

[3] Brand New’s formation. AllMusic’s Brand New biography identifies the group as taking shape around Jesse Lacey, Vincent Accardi, Garrett Tierney, and Brian Lane.

[4] AIM away messages and the feud’s cultural afterlife. James Rettig, “Taking Back Sunday/Brand New Beef Is Still Hot After 15 Years,” Stereogum, February 28, 2015. Rettig describes “Seventy Times 7” as an inspiration for AIM away messages and recounts how the feud continued to circulate long after the original rupture.

[5] Conflicting accounts of the rupture. Mark Jacobson, “L.I.R.R. (Long Island Rock ’n’ Roll),” New York, December 3, 2004, reported that Nolan supposedly slept with, or perhaps only kissed, Lacey’s girlfriend. Nolan later described a girl both men liked. Owen Myers, “Taking Back Sunday: Tell All Your Friends,” Pitchfork, October 10, 2019, published the reversed version in which Lacey was allegedly removed after becoming involved with Nolan’s girlfriend. These are presented as conflicting accounts, not adjudicated facts. (New York Magazine)

[6] Nolan’s first-person account and “Your Name Here.” John Nolan, “Your Name Here Isn’t the Song I Had Planned to End My Playlist With,” John Nolan Music Blog. Nolan describes the friendship, the dispute over a girl both men liked, their period without contact, the approximate 2001 composition date, his longing for Lacey, and the invitation contained in the song.

[7] Your Favorite Weapon and Brand New’s original lineup. “Brand New: Your + Favorite + Weapon,” Discogs release record, accessed July 17, 2026. The catalog entry identifies the United States Triple Crown Records release as October 9, 2001. Contemporary album histories identify Jesse Lacey, Vincent Accardi, Garrett Tierney, and Brian Lane as Brand New’s original recording lineup. (Discogs)

[8] Borrowed language in “There’s No ‘I’ in Team.” Andrew Sacher, “Taking Back Sunday’s Tell All Your Friends Turns 20: A Look Back on the Emo Landmark,” BrooklynVegan, March 25, 2022. Sacher identifies the song as Nolan’s response to “Seventy Times 7” and discusses its use of language associated with Brand New, including material connected to “Mix Tape.”

[9] Biblical reference. Matthew 18:21–22 contains Peter’s question about repeated forgiveness and the answer rendered in translations as either seventy-seven or seventy times seven.

[10] Tell All Your Friends. Taking Back Sunday’s official discography lists the album’s release as March 26, 2002.

[11] Nolan’s later reflection. Jeff Yerger, “Taking Back Sunday’s John Nolan Revisits ‘Tell All Your Friends,’”GRAMMY.com, October 18, 2024. Nolan described the original circumstances as real, raw, new, and intense for approximately six months to a year before much of that immediate feeling diminished.

[12] Shared 2002 performances. James Rettig, “Taking Back Sunday/Brand New Beef Is Still Hot After 15 Years,” Stereogum, February 28, 2015. Rettig reports that a brief 2002 tour saw the two bands singing their callout songs together onstage. The article does not claim a specific reciprocal choreography or a single documented mash-up.

[13] Lacey’s account of the feud’s duration. Rebecca, “Interview mit Brand New,” AllSchools, June 2015, archived October 26, 2015. Lacey said the situation had “cleaned itself up a lot sooner than most people thought it did.” He explained that he and Nolan had realized they would remain friends, described both men joining one another’s songs on tour, and said fans continued clinging to the controversy after the two had buried it. Mark Jacobson’s “L.I.R.R. (Long Island Rock ’n’ Roll),” New York, December 3, 2004, separately reported that the feud had taken on a life of its own. The June 2003 Soul In Eyes interview with Brian Lane remains preserved in the internal reporting archive, but the article does not attribute Lacey’s quoted wording to Lane. (Wayback Machine)

[14] Lazzara’s 2015 comments. James Rettig, “Taking Back Sunday/Brand New Beef Is Still Hot After 15 Years,” Stereogum, February 28, 2015. Rettig reproduces Lazzara calling Lacey “a dick” and “not a good person,” while noting that Brand New appeared to have largely stopped discussing the feud publicly.

[15] Nolan’s 2003 departure and Lazzara’s relationship with Michelle Nolan. Mark Jacobson, “L.I.R.R. (Long Island Rock ’n’ Roll),” New York, December 3, 2004, reported that Lazzara had dated Nolan’s sister and was supposedly unfaithful, connecting that rupture to John Nolan’s departure. Mischa Pearlman, “An Oral History of Taking Back Sunday,” Kerrang!, May 20, 2019, records Nolan’s later account of constant fighting, fractured friendships, disputes over credit, and exhaustion from continual touring. Brendan Manley’s Taking Back Sunday: Tell All Your Friends (2011), pages 92 and 94, contains the more detailed account of Lazzara’s apology and Nolan’s conclusion that it was insincere. The public article does not cite or republish Michelle Nolan’s personal LiveJournal entry. (New York Magazine)

[16] Straylight Run. Scott Heisel, “Taking Back Sunday and Breaking Pangaea: Torrid Tales of Forbidden Incest!,”Punknews.org, August 5, 2003. Heisel reported that John Nolan, Shaun Cooper, Michelle Nolan, and Will Noon had formed Straylight Run and were preparing for their first tour. Apple Music lists the self-titled debut as released October 12, 2004. (Punknews) This article is based on contemporaneous reporting, published interviews, oral histories, public statements, catalog records, and primary source materials. Where published accounts conflict, the article identifies the disagreement rather than resolving it beyond what the available record supports.

Their lyrics tend to have a lot of references to religion, pop culture, other works of art, etc...

I'm curious to know what some of the favorites are or maybe the more unknown ones.

For example: in Millstone- "This ship of fools I'm on will sink" I always figured it was a reference to the grateful dead song ship of fools. Pretty sure Jesse is a fan.

Or sowing season- "Is it in you now

To bare to hear the truths that you have spoken

Twisted up by knaves in a trap for fools?

Is it in you now

To watch the things you gave your life to broken

Stoop and build them up with worn out tools?"

As a definite reference to If by Rudyard Kipling

Think they will have a 20th anniversary special edition vinyl for this tour? I really really really hope so.

Have there been other special editions of their vinyls released before?

I was instantly hooked the first song I heard ~23 years ago. I know one thing, for me, is that it seems that their music has matured along side me. I needed “Seventy Times 7” all those years ago. Now I need “No Control” or “Batter Up.” I can’t say that about all of the bands I grew up with. What is it for you?

Hot off the presses!

Hi guys!!! I found this today for 50cents (:

ok so i bought my ticket for pit for the grand prairie show on october 30th!! but im so nervous because the site said i wont get the tickets a day before the show 😭😭😭
should i be worried or like nah

A little red house with no one living in it.