A Decade Half-Spent: AJJ’s Good Luck Everybody

We are deep in the final dregs of 2024, which means, terrifyingly, that in just a few days we will hit the halfway mark of the decade—and, perhaps even more terrifyingly, that the onset of COVID-19 was almost five whole years ago. I’ve never been great at grappling with the passage of time but, for some reason, that fact, even more than most, feels nearly incomprehensible. How can it possibly be almost five years since quarantine? How can it possibly be five years since all of us privileged non-“essential workers” desperately searched for purpose inside batches of sourdough starter, since we all watched Tiger King for some reason and got weirdly into the idea that everything was cake?

How can it possibly be five years since I sat in my childhood home in Tallahassee and brute-forced my way into learning how to do alt-TikTok-style eyeliner for my Zoom prom (I wish I was kidding) while binging Game of Thrones and watching my notifications pile high with men demanding I kill myself (because I inexplicably went mini-viral for a random TikTok video)? How can it possibly be five years since the only semblance of schedule and routine I had in my life was hopping on Instagram at 10:30 PM EST to watch AJJ’s Sean Bonnette live-stream free, half-hour-long concerts every night, since my only semblance of community was rapidly double-tapping my phone screen when Bonnette played the opening chords of a Silver Jews cover song and watching my pixel hearts intermingle with everyone else’s, floating upwards in unison?

There are very few memories I have of quarantine that don’t make me violently cringe, but looking back on Bonnette’s nightly (eventually turned weekly) “Live from Quarantine” streams only elicits genuine fondness and gratitude even now, years down the line. AJJ’s predominance in my life at that time wasn’t just due to those nightly concerts, either—the band’s January 2020 release Good Luck Everybody would likely have served as the soundtrack for my first few months of lockdown regardless. Not only was the record one of the last releases to catch my eye before everything went to shit, but, as days in quarantine turned into weeks and then months, Good Luck Everybody went from a solid record fueled by 2019 anger to an eerily prescient encapsulation of the months, even years, that followed its release.

Because, before the indie albums that came to define the COVID-consumed fever dream that was 2020 (like Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters and Jeff Rosenstock’s No Dream), there was still that first and worst month of quarantine, those four or so weeks that passed by while we moved from miserable and confused to desperate and fearful—into that sunken state of bored complacency with the new dystopian state of reality. But during that time there was also, thankfully, Good Luck Everybody, which somehow perfectly evoked the muted hopelessness, pervasive isolation and gradually normalized despair of life during a global pandemic (a pandemic that, obviously, AJJ’s January album could not have possibly predicted).

In other words, between the album itself and Bonnette’s nightly performances of its tracklist, I found myself clinging to Good Luck Everybody during that first month stuck at home. I know I wasn’t the only one, either; there’s a reason a few hundred of us tuned in every night to watch Bonnette sit on a black stool and sing to the people trapped behind their phone screens. But when Bonnette wrote the lines “Everything’s bullshit now, here in 2019 / And you can bet it’s gonna be a bunch of bullshit, too, out in sweet 2020 / Or whenever this album’s released” on the album’s excellent closer, “A Big Day for Grimley,” it’s a pretty safe bet that the kind of “bullshit” he was referring to had more to do with the winding days of Donald Trump’s first presidential term and police brutality than a global pandemic shutting down the entire world for months on end—but the shoe certainly fits either way. Good Luck Everybody was so jarringly resonant during the quarantine months that the band themselves have commented a few times about the uncanniness of it all. As cellist Mark Glick quipped in 2023: “I do want to go on record that we did not engineer COVID as a marketing stunt for Good Luck Everybody.”

Despite its unexpected resonance with the very near future, the record was undeniably about the (very recent) past. Good Luck Everybody was written, certainly, as a response to 2019, as well as the previous four years in general—and, honestly, the fact that an album about 2019 ended up speaking so much to the experience of living in fear of a virtually unprecedented international pandemic really says something about the awfulness of the years that led up to it. A majority of the tracks on the album revolve around Bonnette’s growing horror toward the state of American politics (especially Trump, who is all but explicitly named in these songs) as well as our ever-increasing desensitization to the constant stream of atrocities that quickly came to define the Trump era.

Some of it does fall a little flat, the lyrics feeling a tad too-on-the-nose, especially in hindsight (while they’re still decent songs, the balladic “No Justice, No Peace, No Hope” and the furious “Psychic Warfare” do come to mind). But some of the album still works incredibly well, as evidenced in tracks like “Loudmouth” and “Normalization Blues,” both of which are pitch-perfect encapsulations of (and self-aware critiques from within) the political zeitgeist of the time. And I can’t forget the Twitter-inspired, Kimya Dawson-featuring, oddball pseudo-campaign anthem of “Mega Guillotine 2020” and its children’s show sing-along style music video (which features the severed, bloodied heads of prominent politicians floating through a Teletubbies-esque world), a combination so ridiculous and ballsy that it’s been my go-to election song ever since.

One of Bonnette’s greatest strengths as a songwriter has always been his ability to spin his own experiences and internal monologues into deeply personal yet universally resonant narratives—to turn his own self-flagellating self-consciousness into far-reaching diagnoses of a struggling culture, without veering into didactic or prescriptive territory—and this skill is on full display in both “Loudmouth” and “Normalization.” Rather than attacking our political moment itself (as he does in “No Justice” and “Psychic Warfare,” which are very much direct addresses to our leaders and their monstrous actions and policies), these tracks embody the experience of living within it, the ways the daily horrors bleed into us and make us complacent, make us callous. They combine Bonnette’s signature self-awareness with trenchant political critique, and are undoubtedly stronger for it.

There are few songs that encapsulate the state of online discourse as well as the spirited, rollicking “Loudmouth,” which just about sums up every Twitter argument with its immortal opening lines: “You’re a loudmouth and a tool / And I don’t disagree with you / But you don’t need to be a dick about it.” But the song ends up being far less about the “you” than the speaker themself; it even ends with a slightly-altered reprisal of the opening, in which the speaker admits that while the subject is “a loudmouth and a tool,” “It turns out I am, too.” Bonnette implies that much of “the discourse” serves as a convenient substitute for actual action or change; we need to direct all our pent-up anger and fear and disgust somewhere, and semi-anonymous idiots are far more accessible targets than the masters of war and captains of industry. “Timid, meek, and cruel, this is the best that I can do,” Bonnette sings. “I need to speak my truth, yet here I’m broken wide, wide open.” He drives the point home in the bridge: “My resentment, big and strong / And all the things that I can’t change / They’ll buckle me beneath the weight / I will drive myself insane / With all the things that I can’t change.”

Bonnette knows that it feels easier to fight amongst ourselves, because we are actually here to fight against, than to direct our rage uselessly towards the untouchable-seeming powers that be. But, as he sings earlier in the record, on “Normalization Blues,” this is just proof that said powers not only “try to divide us” but are “largely…succeeding / ‘Cause they’ve undermined our confidence in the news that we are reading / And they make us fight each other with our faces buried deep inside our phones.” It’s the fault of those in charge, of course, but we also play right into their hands, and we spend so much time running our loud mouths at each other that we can’t even bring ourselves to see that, let alone take communal action—communal action such as, for instance, refusing to give celebrities our money, attention, and all our love, as Bonnette (and Jeff Rosenstock, who provides guest vocals) points to in the opening track, “A Poem”: “If you don’t give it to them they’ll starve to death / And that’s alright.”

In times like these, community (and, thus, communal action) really is all we have. Therein, however, lies the problem: As Bonnette spits on “Normalization,” “Connection’s more important now than it ever was, but I’d rather be alone.” This thematic throughline crops up across the album, and Bonnette’s way of linking our (often self-inflicted) loneliness with contemporary politics rings devastatingly true. “Normalization”—which has perhaps the most classically AJJ musical arrangement on the record, all frantic, folk-y finger-plucking and brilliant acoustic goodness—tackles this discomforting realization head-on, with Bonnette himself featured as patient zero. “I can feel my brain a-changin’, acclimating to the madness / I can feel my outrage shift into a dull, despondent sadness,” he sings, over a rapid-fire finger-picked melody. “I can feel a crust growing over my eyes like a falcon hood / I’ve got the normalization blues, this isn’t normal, this isn’t good.” The song’s critique transcends Trump himself, at once aiming bigger, at “the evil men who really run the show” (of whom Trump is both “a symptom and a weapon”) and smaller, at Bonnette himself and all of us who, like him, live “detached and…distracted, all keyed up but unproductive / Vacillating between being all excited and disgusted / And then dozing lackadaisically in this bubble where [we’ve] made [our] mental home[s].”

Perhaps I’m just speaking as someone from the future who already knows the dark timeline we would all find ourselves living in five years down the line, but Good Luck Everybody feels at its strongest when it lives in this space of disgusted resignation and resigned disgust—this constant but always-losing fight against the all-consuming “normalization blues.” While some of the other tracks run the risk of being distilled into “orange man evil” diatribes (which, while undeniably true, feel less interesting, less evergreen), Good Luck Everybody’s strongest moments manage to not only criticize the establishment from its standpoint amongst the masses, but to also embody and critique the masses themselves—ourselves. The album stands a testament to the detrimental impact all the constant awfulness around us is having on our ability to connect to each other and to ourselves, simultaneously commenting on the horrors produced by those in power and “observing [the] drastic changes in the way we’re all behaving,” as Bonnette sings in “Normalization.” The weather is changing, the soul is decaying and this is probably the last golden age of anything. Good luck, everybody.

In an interview shortly after the album’s release, Bonnette said that he hoped he wouldn’t have cause to play “Normalization Blues” much longer. “That would suck,” he grins, laughing slightly. But, unfortunately for us all, “Normalization Blues” has matured like overly expensive scotch—it’s only gotten stronger with age. Even just a month or so following the filming of that interview, the song began to take on new, COVID-infused meaning: “Connection’s more important now than it ever was,” Bonnette croons, the sentiment truer during the months of quarantine isolation than possibly ever before. “Buddy, what are you gonna do?”

Peering at the album through the fogged-up lens of COVID lockdown, nearly everything feels eerily relevant. There’s Bonnette apologizing “that you have to have a body / Filled with infection,” a body “that will hurt you, and be the subject of so much of your fear” and “will betray you, be used against you, then it’ll fail on you, my dear” in the latent TikTok hit “Body Terror Song” (which also, apart from COVID, became something of a trans anthem, a too-close-to-home account of the misery of dysphoria). There’s the robotic, going-through-the-motions energy of “Feedbag,” which sees the speaker doing little more than keeping themselves alive, just “fill[ing] my feedbag full of food,” unable to connect with anyone or anything as they “walk along this ugly lake,” make “eye contact with someone and then look away,” and force themselves to remember that “people are real.” There’s even the line, “Oh, to be awake for such a shitty dream,” which captures both the haze and horror of those surreal early days of quarantine.

There’s “Maggie,” written about Bonnette’s dog of the same name, which is the only song that really seems to be about genuine, meaningful interaction with another living creature—and it’s tellingly about one’s relationship with a pet rather than another human being. There’s “Your Voice, As I Remember It,” a heartrendingly blunt track about grief and loss (“I long to hear your voice as I remember it / But now I have no choice but to remember it”) that also doubled, in the height of isolation, as an embodiment of the forced solitude and the unimpeachable distance placed between you and your loved ones. Of course, all of these songs have immense meaning outside of these accidental COVID connections, but the unintentional twofold resonance of Good Luck Everybody during those early months of quarantine is precisely what made the album such a lifeline then and now.

And then there’s the closing track, “A Big Day for Grimley,” which is perhaps the record’s strongest (or, at least, my personal favorite) chapter. It’s one of those songs that takes up residence in your gut, builds a home there—and while this would be the case even if not for the pandemic, hearing it during the midst of lockdown felt like being run over by a train. I was at a school across the country when COVID hit, when I was instructed to go and stay home for an indefinite period of time as quarantine became enforced nationwide. I returned home to a ghost-town, everything off and quiet and surreal, and proceeded to not leave the house I grew up in for the next six or so months—hardly speaking to any living beings besides my immediate family and, altogether, becoming a husk of a person. Again, there’s no way “Grimley” was written with this pandemic experience in mind, but living inside that moment, it certainly felt like it could have been. Bonnette chronicles a return home to Phoenix and the city’s odd stillness—the “deafening quietness” that came with it: “I went back to the desert, little Midwest in me / And now I am colder than I used to be / I live in a fortress the shape of my body / And now there’s a coldness, and it’s shaped like me.”

It’s also, simply, a gorgeous song, both lyrically and sonically. Now, I have nothing against the increased production quality and more complex instrumentation of AJJ’s recent albums—it’s a natural transition as the band grows more accomplished and has access to greater resources—but I will always have a soft spot for songs that center Bonnette and his guitar, acoustic and stripped down, and the first few verses of “A Big Day for Grimley” scratch that itch more than perhaps any other song on the album. And when it grows grander, introducing a call-and-response chorus, a whistled solo and some added folky twang, it feels entirely earned. The last verse of the track—and of the album—is a utopian imagining of a world in which everyone gets what they want and what they need, with each line repeated back by a group chorus: “Solitude for the stoic / Mirth for the merry / A quiet room for the overwhelmed / Arcades for the ADHD / Health for the sickly” and so on. It’s bittersweet, not enthusiastic, as if even the moment the lines leave Bonnette’s mouth, he already knows the fantasy is just that: a fantasy. “Grimley” is, simultaneously, the only real glimmer of hope amidst the bleak landscape of Good Luck Everybody, and the acknowledgment of its naivete, its impossibility. The song hits on just the right combination of warmth and devastation, a perfect way to end an album all about swallowing one’s own resigned horror at the state of the world.

While Good Luck Everybody might not be AJJ’s “best” album (or maybe even their “best” of the decade thus far, given their excellent 2023 release, Disposable Everything), it really does feel like opening a time capsule into what 2020 was for so many of us. When I think back to those weird, dark days of quarantine—or, at least, to the few moments of quarantine I can remember without wanting to slam my head into a wall—this will always come to mind: my legs tucked under me on the couch and my phone held close to my face, Sean Bonnette crooning “good luck, everybody” to an audience of a hundred or so strangers connected only by love for his music and desperation for connection itself, that momentary spark of long-dormant hope (maybe soon this will be over and things will get better) making something clench in my chest.

But we’re almost five years away from that now, and while the pandemic’s peak has long passed, I feel like I’m still waiting for things to get better. Even though the COVID era feels like something of a separate bubble reality by now, we’re all still reeling from its impacts—economically, politically, socially. Something indefinable shifted with the pandemic, something that has made us all lonelier and crueler and more distant. Brain-rotted elementary schoolers are speaking in incel parlance, we elected a convicted felon to high office (again), our government is ignoring (and, really, enabling) the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths happening in Gaza literally as I write this, and we seem less interested in forging connections and making meaning than ever before—and there is still another half of this decade to go, five more years that will inevitably be dominated by the dystopian shadow of Trump once again. Everything’s bullshit now, here in 2024, and you can bet it’s gonna be a bunch of bullshit, too, out in sweet 2025. So, good luck, everybody. God knows we’ll need it.

Casey Epstein-Gross is an Assistant Music Editor at Paste. Her work can be read in Observer, Jezebel, and elsewhere. She is based in New York and can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television and film, music, politics, and any number of opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].