I don’t know if you can ever let go of the first band you fell in love with. The music that feels like it’s giving you air when you’re young, confused, and drowning will always have a hold on you, even if you outgrow it. So when I heard Say Anything was playing Cain’s Ballroom the Sunday before Thanksgiving, I knew I had to see them.
Yes, even though they’re touring an album I don’t like that much. Even though their songs have gradually disappeared from my Spotify Wrapped rankings. Even though the lead singer’s reputation has become increasingly murky and dubious in recent years. Sometimes you just owe it to your past self.
Say Anything, after lead singer Max Bemis declared online a few years ago that he’d never tour again, is touring again. They’re on the road to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the album …Is A Real Boy, an impetuous, nose-thumbing record in which a 21-year-old Bemis shrieked about his grimy interactions with girls and generally being angry.
Today, Bemis is a 41-year-old married but recently separated father of five who has muddled through countless mental health struggles and musical meanderings since the release of his sophomore album. It was hard to imagine a punk rocker whose life had led him further from the messages of those early songs. I went to the concert wanting to see how much he’d changed. I knew I had.
***
I entered Cain’s with just my car keys, credit card, and ID so I wouldn’t have to manage a purse on the dance floor. It was risky to undertake this endeavor without the Chapstick and Ibuprofen I’m used to having constant access to, but I was ready to reclaim my youth.
Or rather I was, until I realized I hadn’t brought earplugs. Thankfully, I ran into a fellow over-30 friend and her husband who had earplugs to spare, proving you can be reckless and spontaneous as long as the network of fellow millennials is there to catch you.
My knees ached when this friend told me there would be three opening acts before Say Anything took the stage, but fortunately, the first opener was both brief and engaging.
Runt, a “folk death” band from Tennessee, played sharp little fragments of songs about politics delivered in rasping voices. I alternated between admiring the lead singer’s gorgeous shag haircut and worrying that his long, untrimmed guitar strings would poke someone in the eye. The audience was clearly unfamiliar with their catalog of music but enthusiastic about their vibe, cheering when a band member shouted, “Fuck the IDF!” My personal favorite moment was when the (upright) bass player managed to stand on his instrument and play it at the same time, a skill I’m willing to bet they don’t teach at Juilliard.
After Runt’s energetic 20-minute set ended in a wistful, robust number, the changing of the equipment began. I waited impatiently for the second opener, which by pure late-game coincidence was a band I currently love, Oso Oso.
Oso Oso’s sound reflects my changing tastes in music over the past decade, ever since that moment when I was at the height of my love for Say Anything. The group’s songs feel more melancholic than angry, the kind of music that feels like driving home late at night and feeling caught between what you’re leaving and what you’re going home to. There’s a lot of wondering, a lot of uncertainty, but not the white-hot resentment of the world that typifies the punk music of my younger years.
Oso Oso’s onstage energy was everything I hoped; every member of the band was bouncy and full-throatedly enthusiastic. You can tell when a band is passionate about their own music, and I could feel how jazzed they were to be playing for this crowd on this stage.
Unfortunately, the sound mixing left plenty to be desired. I took an earplug out to test that I wasn’t imagining how sludgy the lead singer’s vocals sounded and felt gratified when I saw a cool-looking guy with huge ear gauges next to me pumping his thumb in an upward motion: the universal sign for “turn up the mic, dude.”
I felt slightly desperate at this development, wanting to hear the crooning and intimate vocals the way I was used to on the band’s recorded tracks. But we don’t come to concerts to hear the songs the way we’re used to, I reasoned. We enter in communion with our favorite musicians to feel something new about the music. The band played many of their best songs—“Basking In The Glow,” “All Of My Love,” “Reindeer Games,” and “gb/ol h/nf”—and I got to experience the radiant pleasure of crooning the line “Ohhhh no, big big wave” along with the singer who wrote it.
After a 32-minute set I would have been happy to see linger, I was delighted to discover that Cain’s stocks Mood Brüs and enjoyed a Cherry Lime Fizz before Motion City Soundtrack took the stage.
I paid little attention to Motion City Soundtrack’s set. Listening to the band, which I’ve never been familiar with, reminded me how deeply personal music both is and isn’t: a band you love can make your nerve endings feel alive with shared understanding, but a band you don’t know just sounds like noise.
From what I observed, much of the crowd was actually at the concert for Motion City. I could understand why: the lead singer was charismatic and commanding, even though he said things like “I’m a sad, sad man” between numbers. Was he? I wondered idly as the crowd thrashed to a song about Veronica Mars. These are the kinds of philosophical questions that often pull me out of live music experiences—questions like whether a musician can sustain the authentic emotion that helps him connect to audiences while being cheered on by adoring fans night after night.
At any rate, I don’t think anyone cared. The energy was lively and heads were nodding along for the entire 70-minute set, which ended with “Everything Is Alright,” the only song of the band’s I recognized. By the end of their act, I felt like the rubber dog head sitting on Oso Oso’s merch table: deflated and a little existentially weary.
I grabbed another Mood Brü to gird myself for the final performance and slumped in the side room to rest my feet. I spotted a fellow concert-goer wearing a Modern Baseball sweatshirt. They’re another favorite band of mine—but I only learned about them because they opened for Say Anything the first time I saw the group live 10 years ago.
***
I fell for Say Anything the way so many girls get into bands: by falling for a boy first. Ian was cynical and darkly funny and loved Say Anything. I was 23, new to New York City, and everything in the world felt hard, including trying to date him. But the band’s angst twanged in magnetic resonance with mine and played on constant repeat in my windowless cubicle.
Fast forward a few months. Ian moved away. I yearned. There were mix CDs, an unplanned New Year's Eve visit that made my roommates mad, increasingly fraught attempts to run a food blog together. Then there was a Say Anything concert in his hometown. Of course I flew in.
I remember that 2015 Say Anything concert being perfect. I didn’t know how to dress cool enough but it didn’t matter. The band played all the songs off Hebrews that I most wanted to hear. Ian’s hands wrapped around my waist from behind and we swayed like all the couples around us (who probably weren’t trying to figure out the nature of their situationship). Being in the room with the same singer’s voice that lived in my head was a flame in the darkness.
***
Fast forward again to 2025. Max Bemis and his band took the Cain’s stage at 10pm sharp. At the start of that show 10 years ago, his arrival was stomach-droppingly surreal, like seeing a figment of one of your dreams appear in the flesh. This time it felt strange in a more pedestrian way, like running into an old ex at the grocery store years after the split. Bemis hit his vape immediately and launched into a song I didn’t recognize offhand.
I did my best to study up on the album, but …Is A Real Boy was never my favorite part of the band’s discography, so I didn’t even make it through one full listen before the concert. It felt so consistently angry and misanthropic in an immature way that, even when I first started listening to them, I could never stomach the whole album at once, just the odd track on a playlist.
Things picked up when Bemis launched into the balladic intro of “Shiksa (Girlfriend)” and his bandmates began to thrash around him, sending drumbeats rocking through my body. Bemis still displayed much of the swagger and fuck-you energy many associate with his music; his postures onstage were sharp and jerky, as though throwing off a comforting hand at every turn. I was reminded of how he likes to sing with his tongue stuck out, as though to emphasize the mocking irreverence of his subject matter.
“You guys are fucking fantastic,” he said after the track ended. “I’m really happy right now, and sometimes this is so hard because to perform these songs, I have to go to a space of being miserable.”
“Oh yeah, I am, on the inside,” he continued, “so it’s okay.”
It seemed quite easy for Bemis to access the anger that formed the spine of his early albums. But was this part of the performance, to give the fans the energy they connected with originally? Or was he actually still this angry? That’s the thing I guess we can never know about performers. And it’s probably too much to expect vulnerability in front of crowds of thousands night after night, yet I still felt myself wanting it anyway.
Bemis delivered the same kind of performance he probably gave 20 years ago. It was a choice to revisit, but not to revise. I still enjoyed myself, but I was a bit disappointed not to be given some of the hard-won wisdom that a man who has gone through great love and great heartbreak must surely now possess. That said, he sang the line “I don’t really give a fuck about falling in love” with a vitriol that felt too raw to me to be merely performance.
The rest of the set flew by in a flurry of snarling vocals and punchy instrumentals. Bemis worked the crowd in the way an elder statesman of punk can do in his sleep: holding out the mic to the audience to sing the best parts of songs, making self-deprecating comments about the irony of playing a track about a post-hiatus tour, vamping for fan-favorite moments like the telephone ring that introduces “Wow, I Can Get Sexual Too.”
The highlight was the penultimate song, “Ahhh… Men,” the only track I heard at both Say Anything concerts I’ve attended. The band left the stage and Bemis strummed his guitar solo, bringing the energy to a more intimate place as the crowd chanted “I will lie with you in your grave” together like a requiem. I wondered who everyone else was thinking about as they sang.
“And this next one is called ‘Alive With The Glory Of Love,’” Bemis said as he introduced the final song, an intro that gave us little warning that we were hearing the show’s finale. When he finished the song, everyone seemed surprised as the lights snapped on. A few people chanted hopefully for an encore, but none came. It felt distinctly anticlimactic as we all trickled out into the rain.
***
I came home sodden from the concert to an empty house. My ex-boyfriend had moved out that morning. So much about that experience was new: This relationship had been my first time living with someone, trying earnestly to build a life together, and it had failed. You never really plan for that outcome, do you? Relationships have a way of progressing upward—cohabitation leads to marriage leads to lifelong happiness, possibly with a side of kids. But here I was, back at the start again.
Not so different from Max Bemis, I suppose. At the tail end of his years-long marriage, on a tour he vowed he’d never undertake, and returning to the music that launched his career, he had been confronted with the surprising ways life circles back on itself, even when we like to think it moves ever-forward.
And although his early music didn’t resonate with me at Cain’s, I still took comfort in the fact that we were leading parallel lives, picking up similar-shaped pieces of what got broken. The next day, I put on Hebrews and listened to the songs I fell for in the first place. I still love them.
