My pens paint people that I've proven wrong: An oral history of Get Up Kids’ Something To Write Home About

“Midwest emo” wasn’t a thing when The Get Up Kids formed in 1995. Sure, they hailed from the Midwest and played hardcore-adjacent and pop-punk-inspired indie rock, but people couldn’t even agree on what “emo” was when they released their sophomore album, Something To Write Home About, on September 28, 1999. This pre-O.C. time was also known as the late ’90s, and bands like The Promise Ring and Braid were attracting a more sensitive, introspective adolescent audience. To the young musicians playing the tunes, though, they were just doing what bands did. Kansas City’s The Get Up Kids weren’t looking to define a generation or a genre, but they knew that they had something to—well, you know. The rounds of record label roulette that kept the band locked into one bad contract as major labels tried their best to exploit their inexperience only emboldened a confident and capable Get Up Kids. All they needed was the right circumstances to let it happen. 

25 years later, Something To Write Home About still opens with fireworks, the iconic double pick slides seemingly heralding a new era of upbeat pop-rock. Each song sounds like a postcard from across the pond by the Dover peaks, with high-energy performances showcasing a band learning to communicate with each other and their audience, and that zeal is intoxicating still. The band sanded down emo’s jagged structures and ravaged screams, making it both more accessible and more sophisticated. Retaining the scrappiness of their youth, singer Matt Pryor’s angsty poetry and the band’s sly musicianship conjure the excitement and frustration of being in a hungry rock ‘n’ roll band whose members, all in their early 20s, still felt the pains of being young, introspective, and frustrated. It’s an album about standing on the edge of adolescence, ready to take the jump into a wider world. 

The band celebrated Something To Write Home About’s quarter century on Earth with a lengthy anniversary tour and a first-time remaster of the album that makes those infectious hooks even more soaring. The A.V. Club talked to Matt Pryor (singer/guitarist), Jim Suptic (singer/guitarist), Rob Pope (bassist), and Ryan Pope (drummer), as well as Rich Egan (Vagrant Records, manager), Kevin Kusatsu (Vagrant), Alex Brahl (co-producer), and Chad Blinman (co-producer/engineer) about the red letter days of the album’s recording, and what had to happen to get them in the studio. 

Despite becoming a seminal album in the genre, the group’s 1997 debut, Four Minute Mile, fell below the band’s artistic expectations. Recorded in two days, Four Minute Mile sees a band just warming up, unable to execute or even manage the ideas swirling in their heads. They knew they could do better and were already on to the next race. But a legion of kids in thick round glasses with way too many pins on their backpacks ate the album up. As they hit the road, the crowds grew bigger and so did the band’s ambition. 

Rob Pope: When we drove back from Chicago after recording Four Minute Mile, we put the cassette of the mixes into the van. Matt and I were sitting up front and we were both like, “We fucked up.” It’s no one’s fault. I don’t think we had enough time.

Jim Suptic: When we made Four Minute Mile, we snuck Ryan out of school early to drive to Chicago. We were kids. When you’re young and everyone lives together and you’re always around each other, you’re just constantly being creative.

Matt Pryor: I hate the vocals on it. That record came out in September of ’97. We started touring immediately. Touring was trial by fire. The whole band got better.

Rob Pope: Our shows were getting bigger, and we were also constantly writing anytime we were at home. We added [former keyboardist] James Dewees to the band. We would write a song, and then we’d be playing a show the next week, and we’re like, “Oh, fuck it. Let’s just play it.”

Ryan Pope: I remember us getting a new practice space with a mindset: “Okay, we’re making a new record or we’re going to start writing.”

Jim Suptic: We were playing with so many bands. That’s how the punk rock scene was. Everyone was inspiring. All these bands were coming from the same scene in a way.

As the band’s popularity continued to climb, so too did major label interest, but the indie they were signed to at the time, Doghouse Records, had an airtight contract with a $50,000 buyout. The band was eclipsing the label and needed someone with better distribution for their next. However, the buyout was preventing them from signing with anyone.

Jim Suptic: We had a lot of buzz. We could feel it. We wanted to leave Doghouse because we were growing faster than the label and we always heard people saying, “We can’t find your record.”

Rob Pope: No one had the faith to put into us—certainly not as much as we had in ourselves. In order to navigate those major labels, we hired Rich Egan to manage us. We felt like, if we’re going to be swimming with these sharks, we’ll have our own shark.

Rich Egan: I’m an honest shark. I’m not going to let anybody fuck with my clients. It’s probably why I’ve never been offered a job at a major label in 35 years. 

Rob Pope: The major labels had no idea what to think of us. They kept requesting we re-record a song off Four Minute Mile. “Well, that one’s a hit if Matt sings it in key.” 

Rich Egan: They kept insisting they re-record “Don’t Hate Me.” Dude, it’s not going to happen.

Ryan Pope: That was a long, insane process for young kids. We were flying to New York, flying to LA. Meeting with all these record labels. They’re promising us all this, telling us how great we are and how we’re to be big stars.

The band almost signed with Mojo Records when a new prospect appeared under their noses. 

Rich Egan: They’re fighting with Doghouse. They wanted to go to Mojo. I’m like, Really? The Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, Goldfinger, and The Get Up Kids?

Rob Pope: Contracts are on the table, pens are out, and we’re going to knock out the last few items to negotiate over, and those two fucking sharks sharked at each other.

Matt Pryor: Egan was like, “This is a shit deal. You’re going to get screwed here.” We probably would have signed it if we hadn’t had him.

Rob Pope: Ryan did sign a copy of that contract.

Matt Pryor: We talked to Egan and he was like, “I got this crazy idea.” We’re just like, “That’s the stupidest. No.”

Rich Egan: Fuck it. Why don’t we put it out on Vagrant? You got these songs done. You guys are going nuts. We got to get on the road. Let’s just put it out on Vagrant. It was literally like an afterthought. My partner’s parents took out a mortgage on their house so that we could sign the Get Up Kids, but they more than recouped their investment.

Matt Pryor: We knew what we needed to do. We had never done it before, but we were confident we could pull it off if given the opportunity.

Rich Egan: Matt was sending me demos. They had just gotten James in the band. They were poppier. They were more structured. Every song he sent me was better than the one before.

Rob Pope: I love the Ramones, but I want my bass to sound like John Paul Jones. I never liked the thin, gross pop-punky bass sound. I was starting to grasp what I wanted the bass to sound like. This was the first record where Ryan and I, we could look at each other and be like, “We’re the fucking rhythm section. Let’s knock it out.”

Ryan Pope: Every drummer’s thing is like, “Let’s figure out how to make this sound like a professional record and not like a bunch of kids in a basement.” I had spent time before going in, rehearsing with the metronome, and I had never done that in my life.

Jim Suptic: I just wanted to walk away happy. Not, “Oh, I wish I would have played that part better.”

Matt Pryor: I had a book of lyrics that got stolen from our rehearsal space. Some of those songs, I had to start over from scratch. I don’t know exactly what. Maybe it made them worse. But having the time and honestly hyper-fixating on it and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting [was beneficial].

Alex Brahl: It wasn’t anyone being like, “I don’t hear a single.” It was an important record for Vagrant, too, but there wasn’t really any pressure. They had written great songs, and Matt had written great lyrics.

Jim Suptic: I’d never lived outside of Kansas City for longer than a few weeks. We were there for a month and a half living in LA. 

Alex Brahl: We were crashing at our friend Kevin’s house while we were making that record, sleeping on the floor.

Kevin Kusatsu: I went on tour maybe two days after they showed up.

Jim Suptic: His poor roommates, they must have hated us.

Kevin Kusatsu: I don’t think I… maybe I talked to them about it. I’m not really sure. It wasn’t a big deal.

Along with their tour manager Alex Brahl and engineer Chad Blinman, the band entered Mad Hatter Studios in Los Angeles in June 1999. The album had been perfected over two years on the road. 

Alex Brahl: The band asked me to come, and I don’t remember what the job was. Just help do whatever, hit the space bar.

Matt Pryor: He was with us to make sure Chad didn’t fuck it up.

Rob Pope: If it wasn’t translating in the studio with this stranger, we were going to look to Alex to make sure that it was. 

Matt Pryor: The only thing we knew of Blinman was that he was an industrial goth who’d worked with Face To Face. We don’t want to sound like either of those things. 

Chad Blinman: I wasn’t hired as a producer. My role was not to sculpt their sound or tell them what to do, but just to make it happen. It couldn’t be super tight and edited and aligned for that razor-sharp precision. This has to just be real. We have to get them playing together, get them in a room that’s all wooden and with good 1970s technology everywhere.

Rob Pope: What we knew about him was that he had worked with Face To Face, and that was his connection to Rich Egan. We knew he had spiky blond hair and dressed like an extra in a Nine Inch Nails video. He’d worked with Guns N’ Roses as an engineer, and he had worked on a Snoop Dogg record. That was all we knew about him. We were like, “Great, let’s make this record.”

Chad Blinman: It wasn’t going to be a glossy-sounding record with big, layered, super cool synths. It needed to be shitty synthesizers, really simple, pure. Very analog, very simple, clean, basic sounds. They have a humbleness about them. That artificially perfected sound would have taken away all of the charm and sweetness. 

Jim Suptic: We got to try things. In the middle of making this record, we got on the guest list for Ben Folds Five, and Sarah Michelle Gellar was there. I almost lost my mind. But the more important part was Ben Folds did this song where the bass player, instead of playing bass, played a moog keyboard as the bass. On the song “Out Of Reach,” Rob does not play bass. He plays a moog keyboard for the bass lines because we saw Ben Folds Five and thought, “That’s cool.”

Ryan Pope: Chad taught the band don’t settle on a sound. Many times he plugged in six different guitar amps for one bridge just to try to find the right sonic tone. We got to actually spend time on guitar drum sounds, on bass tones, using different amplifiers. Matt was like, “Holy shit, I get to actually take more than two vocal takes.”

Matt Pryor: I cut my chops doing vocals with [producer] Ed Rose, which was a lot of “That was perfect. Do it again.” Blinman worked in the same way. I learned, just out of necessity dealing with either Ed or Chad, how to do vocals fairly quickly because they were, as am I, impatient.

Chad Blinman: James and Matt worked out the vocal parts together really closely. It was super cool the way they worked. They would trade off vocal parts based on where they would fit. They would sometimes invert roles where Matt’s lead vocal part would become the harmony note with James singing the part below that. That was a little bit haphazard. It wasn’t necessarily the way that a typical professional vocal arrangement would be.

Jim Suptic: I’m still learning how to sing.

Rob Pope: A lot of that record was all track to tape. The whole band playing on the floor together.

Chad Blinman: The terror on their faces when I was grabbing the razorblade and doing edits, which we didn’t do a ton of. We would cut the beginning of one take to the end of another take, or slice out a tiny little sliver of tape to tighten up a moment. The apprehension, it’s a classic thing from the era of working with younger bands. That’s part of developing trust together.

Matt Pryor: I don’t remember anything being incredibly difficult. The time that James [Dewees] walked into a door and almost passed out and then played the piano line to “I’ll Catch You” when he was concussed. It was maybe a bit of a hiccup. But other than that, not really.

With the album wrapping up, the band looked close to home for the final pieces. 

Matt Pryor: The title came from Jim talking to his mom on the studio phone.

Jim Suptic: I was telling her about the record, all the shows we were going to and all the fun we were having. She said, “Well, you definitely have something to write home about.” The light bulb went off. All the lyrics are really about leaving home, seeing the world, being a bunch of kids who dropped out of school to go be in a rock band. That’s the core of that album.

Matt Pryor: The artwork was another very last-minute, rushed, desperate thing. Rob, Ryan, and Jim had gone to school with Travis Millard and hired him sight unseen.

Rob Pope: We talked a little bit. I remember giving him a cassette of the record because we were done with it, but we needed artwork pretty quickly.

Travis Millard: They’re like, “It’s going to be a three-fold, gatefold record. We want one painting that’s going to go across the entire front cover. On the inside, it’s another painting. So two really long paintings. It needs to be in Santa Monica next Friday.”

Ryan Pope: We told him to go for it, have fun. 

Travis Millard: I felt sick to my stomach. I was like, I have to go home. I didn’t even finish my beer.

Rob Pope: He invited me to his studio in this weird little barn and showed me drawings of these punk dudes playing guitars and their faces are all fucked up, and they have horns. 

Travis Millard: There’s bearded ladies having a beer. There was this big lady and her little buddy. It’s sideshow stuff. These hairy-face guys having a beer at a table.

Rob Pope: I’m like, “Have we listened to the record?” It’s not this aggressive. I just don’t feel like they match.

Ryan Pope: We were like, maybe something a little softer.

Travis Millard: I was like, “Oh, I’m fucked. I’m totally fucked.” I was sitting around my room, wondering what I was going to do. I had this toy that my dad had that was his from the ’50s on a shelf of knick-knacks. It’s like a wind-up toy. I started to draw that robot, and then I thought of robots caring for each other. I liked that. The dichotomy of these robotic things that have feelings for each other, and they’re sharing this tender moment on the couch. 

Rob Pope: Pretty quickly, he called me back to his studio and he had come up with this concept of these robots listening to a record in love on a date or whatever it was. That felt much more appropriate than horned punk weirdos.

Matt Pryor: I still didn’t get it. I didn’t see the horned punk weirdos, but I wouldn’t have liked that anyway. Travis came in with these pictures of these robots. I was like, “I don’t understand what the fuck this has to do with anything.” But it was just like there just wasn’t time.

Travis Millard: It was down [to] the last 15 minutes before FedEx closed. In my mind, the paintings were still wet. Then I had to Frankenstein some package together because they were just these long, odd flat paintings. I got it out in time. Then I got a call from one of the guys at Vagrant the next day, and they were like, “Hey, man, we got these paintings. They suck, dude.” What? And he was like, “No, I’m just kidding, man. They’re awesome.”

Matt Pryor: He’s like, retconned it, too, now with these little animation things that we did for the tour announcement of just the robots. He named them. They have a backstory of falling in love at a factory. It all makes a little more sense now. At the time, for me, I was just like, “It’s fine. Just go. Do it.”

Something To Write Home About was released on September 28, 1999, two months after the band finished recording. The band attracted an even wider audience and later toured with Green Day and Weezer. The album even hit no. 31 on Billboard’s Heatseekers—not that the band noticed. The band was more concerned with the ever-important College Music Journal (CMJ) showcases that would regularly help break new indie bands. 

Rob Pope: Spin magazine said something about it sounding a lot like Superchunk, and we were like, “Yeah, great. They’re good.” We didn’t give a fuck, to be honest. We knew that we’d made the record that we had wanted to make. We were worried about getting to the next show.

Matt Pryor: The first or second show of the tour was at CMJ Showcase. We wanted to make sure that we had the record in time for that. We were just off to the races at that point.

Ryan Pope: We went on a tour for 120 days after that. 

Jim Suptic: Right when it came out, there was a big hype. We got on 120 Minutes and got interviewed. I think they played that video four weeks in a row. So that was crazy. And that’s when I really think it started going off.

Something To Write Home About’s legacy grows every year. If not for the Get Up Kids, would there ever be a Fall Out Boy or Title Fight? Would there ever be an Olivia Rodrigo? One shudders to think. Emo, as a genre, and its many satellite subgenres wouldn’t exist without the album—for better or worse. Without Something To Write Home About, there is no Vagrant Records, which established itself as the home for bands like Saves The Day, Alkaline Trio, and Dashboard Confessional. But the album speaks for itself. Pryor’s lyrics are confidently contradictory, cynical and sentimental, angry and loving, like a teen who doesn’t know how to process growing up, because who does? There’s a delicacy to his diary-entry lyrics that capture adolescent angst from a first-person perspective. As long as there are teenagers boxed in by their small town or the pain of a friend’s betrayal, the album will connect with listeners. 

Chad Blinman: It’s very much their vision. If something got outside of what fit the band well, it was easily and simply rejected. I don’t remember anybody ever having any arguments or fights about any of the creative things on the record. It felt like a really cool, collaborative, democratic process from start to finish.

Rich Egan: I love every single thing about that record. There isn’t a missed note. There isn’t a misdrawn thing. It’s one of the top three, if not the best record that I think we ever put out. They changed everything. They changed everybody’s lives with that record.

Matt Pryor: It sounded like what we heard in our heads. I remember sitting in that shitty car with a cassette and our booking agent, Andrew Ellis, who’s a famous curmudgeon. He was like, “This is pretty good.” That’s the nicest thing he’s ever said to me.

It had been on the heels of having two years of people not believing in us or people believing in us until it got to a certain point with the major label thing and then having them not be willing to take a chance on us.

Jim Suptic: Obviously, it’s our biggest and most probably well-known album. Every band has their moment. I’m glad that we’ve had different parts of our career. But the fact that we put out anything that 25 years later still means so much to people—it’s awesome.

Ryan Pope: I’m glad that we still have fun playing these songs, which is cool. It doesn’t feel like a drag. It can still be exciting.

Rob Pope: We talk about sonic nostalgia a lot. We do realize that it’s important for us to tug on those heartstrings the same way that the record does. We were just in Brazil, and they were screaming Matt’s words back louder than the entire band, which is pretty amazing for a record that’s that old and for a record that we made when I was just old enough to buy alcohol.