The Songs That Bind: Dan Campbell of The Wonder Years
A series where songwriters talk about two songs that changed their lives: one of their own and someone else's.
Graphic by Matt Mitchell & press photo by Michelle Baumval Music Features The Songs That Bind
In my time as a music writer, I’ve had the chance to share communities and spaces with some of the greatest artists in the world. It’s a privilege I hold close and will never take for granted. Very often, I take on gigs interviewing singers and bands that have, in some form or another, changed my life. That’s why we do this, right? Being someone who has spent so many days devoted to the forever-expanding landscape of music, I don’t shy away from telling someone that a song they wrote changed my life. We deserve to tell our heroes that they’ve made tumbling through this world even the slightest bit easier.
But I wanted to flip the script and call up some of my good friends and favorite songwriters to get the scoop on the songs they hold closest to their hearts. In the series’ first installment, I spent some time with Dan Campbell, the frontman of beloved bands like The Wonder Years and Aaron West & The Roaring Twenties.
I met Dan for the first time in 2015 at Van’s Warped Tour, when he was signing autographs alone at a random sponsored booth in the unmoored heat of a Cleveland July. On that run of dates, he was pulling double duty—performing an early set as Aaron West before playing a Wonder Years set later in the afternoon. A year later, the first major essay I wrote in an undergrad nonfiction course was about a Wonder Years show.
Now, nearly a decade on, I’m lucky to call Dan a friend who not only continues to make music that definitively captures the ageless human capacity for empathy and reflection, but is somebody who continues to drape a generous, graceful and selfless light across how he interacts with the world around him. Few storytellers have ever made their own experiences so accessible, and I look to Dan’s blueprint in my own writing always. When I was formulating the basis for this series, I knew he would be my first guest before I even opened my phone to text him and ask if he’d join me. From “Dismantling Summer” in 2013 to “Cardinals” in 2015 to “Laura & the Beehive” just last year, he’s written songs that I—and so many others—am always finding parts of myself in.
For chapter one of The Songs That Bind, Dan talks about Christian Lee Hutson’s “Lose This Number,” from his 2020 album Beginners, and his own song, “You’re the Reason I Don’t Want the World to End,” from the 2022 Wonder Years album The Hum Goes on Forever.
Christian Lee Hutson: “Lose This Number”
I went all over the map when I was thinking about it. I was like, “Man, what’s a perfect song?” And there’s a lot of ways to look at that. It’s like, “Okay, what’s my favorite song? What are my favorite songs of all time?” Nothing has boiled down vitriol the way that “No Children” by the Mountain Goats has. Or, is a perfect song a perfectly encapsulated little pop song like “Call Me Maybe”? When you said “perfect song,” the first song that smacked me in the face, before we really even had our text conversation, was “Lose This Number.” So I decided that was my instinct and that I should stick with it.
[Beginners] is, really, a front-to-back amazing record. This is what’s unfair about making art. You could make a record and then your follow-up is better, and I think that most artists probably feel that way about their follow-ups. But the when and where of how someone hears your record for the first time is going to just color their opinion of it forever. There was something about hearing Beginners in the pandemic as a new father. No matter how good the follow-up was going to be, it was never going to strike me quite the same way.
It was probably May or June, early pandemic in 2020, and we had come home from a tour. My son had just turned one three weeks into the pandemic, and I come home from this tour with this full tumult. I thought that I was going to provide for my family and that he was going to feel safe and comfortable, the way that you want to guard your children against things. I grew up with some financial tumult in the family, sometimes you’re worried about paying the bills. And I was like, “I hope he never has to experience that,” because it’s so stressful on a kid when you see your parents are stressed about it. And it bleeds into everything else they do in life and how they parent and when they can parent and how much overtime they’re working to try and get everything paid for. It’s the unfortunate and horrifying prevail of capitalism pressing down on you at all times. You have to be worried about this as a parent.
So, I was like, “Oh, my God, I basically just lost my job.” My wife was working from home, so it was just me and Wyatt all day. We wake up, and it would just be me and him hanging out all day. I’m trying so hard to be present and apparent, but I’m also losing it a little and spiraling into a deep sadness about both parenthood and finances. But, also, I’m mourning at this point. I’m thinking, “Well, music can never come back,” or, by the time it can come back, I will have to have moved on in order to keep my mortgage paid and have to find a different path in life.
I was almost mourning the loss of my career which, luckily, we didn’t lose. But, I was like, “It’s over, at least for me.” That had been my driving purpose for so long, so I was just spiraling. We would eat dinner and, after dinner, [Alison] would take Wyatt for a little bit and I would take our dog for these really long walks, just to be out of the house. And it was on this really long walk that I put on Beginners for the first time. When it got to “Lose This Number,” I was watching these kids run around this field near a valley with a creek in it at sunset. I started weeping, crying at, like, 6:30 PM by myself, walking.
I think that [“Lose This Number”] is multifaceted. I think that, first of all, one of the things that [Christian Lee Hutson] does really masterfully across Beginners—and one of the things that I think is one of the most important things about songwriting—is, in the first line of the song, it should be like you walked in on the middle of a conversation and your interest is so piqued and you’re trying so desperately to catch up, because you want to know what’s going on. You desperately want to be a part of it. Opening the song on “Bobby helped me track you down, ‘cause I just saw your name in the paper” does that. Immediately, I needed to know where the song was going.
That was the first hook for me into that song, and then I love his ability—and he does it brilliantly on “Atheist” and “Northsiders”—to balance a little bit of levity. Another thing that I think is a marker of a good song is the ability to show the expanse of the human condition in a song that is, in some ways, sad and, in some ways, angry; that there can always be this little raw joke in there—like “Bobby helped me track you down, ‘cause I just saw your name in the paper. You said, ‘Of course that reminded you of me, don’t you know that’s how a name works?’” I think, “Man, that’s a really smart lyric.” And, instantly, I love a hook and it’s something that I’m always searching for and that I’m bad at. It’s one of my shortcomings, and the fact that the whole hook of the song is just “Lose this number,” I think it’s so wonderful.
It’s one of those phrases where, in three words, you have said paragraphs. I have a tendency to overcomplicate hooks and oversell or overshare them. And that’s not really the point of a chorus. You can do that in a verse of a song, where you can be as verbose and dense as you want, but the chorus is supposed to breathe. And the fact that he made a chorus out of just “lose this number” is really, really good. I also was in love with the stop later in the song, where there’s a “lose this number” and then “listen” and then there’s this pause. They don’t have to add a beat, right? It’s not a measure of five. He stops on a floor tom hit and he just says “listen,” as though you’re not getting it. Stop whatever you’re saying, I’m trying to tell you we’re done. Lose the number. And I think that’s really well done.
I love when songs can be conversational in that way. That’s part of the magic of “Anti-Hero” by Taylor Swift and why it’s such a big song, because of the way that she works in conversational pieces into her melodies. I think Christian does that super, super well there. And then the lines that had me actually crying in the street was “I want to crawl into this daydream I’m having. We’ll live here forever, confetti blowing into the ocean, the three of us finally together—where the whole time I’ve just been asleep here, 20 years younger, smell of sugar and seaweed, Indian summer.” It’s so visceral to me. I think, when I was a kid, I remember the one week a year where we got to go to the beach. I looked forward to it all year, it felt so special and so important.
I remember the smell of the seaweed and the smell of the sugar from all of the little shops. I remember, as a really anxious kid, that being the one week of the year where my brain stopped feeling so bad. I sing about it in “Summer Clothes,” it’s something about going to that beach town that pulls out something in me where I felt the safest and most loved in that place. So, those lyrics, Christian does such a perfect job of being so visceral with it and wanting to go back to that place—but, knowing it’s impossible, because it immediately returns back to “lose this number.”
At the time, when I was listening to it I was thinking about who I wanted to be for my kid and the experiences I wanted to give him, the way I wanted him to feel all the time. And then having that juxtaposed against being in this pandemic and knowing we’re not going to be able to take him to the shore this year. It sounds so stupid, but it was so important to me that he get to go to this place that I went to, and that was a line where I was just standing there and thinking, “Oh, my God. I’m just crying on the street.”
The ocean on different days can be different things, too. It can be dangerous but, most of the time, I find it to be healing to me. Especially in “The Ocean Grew Hands to Hold Me,” when I was writing that song we had done this tour of Japan and Australia and ended in Hawaii. I was getting to the airport to leave for the tour and my grandfather died. And I remember just feeling really beat up on that one, it was a really tough tour—not just emotionally, but also physically difficult. There’s not a lot of sleep and you, basically, fly to Japan and you have to flip your schedule upside down and you’re back to playing shows in DIY spaces and really small venues. You had four bands crammed into one, short school bus or an airline transport bus. But it’s not like a tour bus, where there’s bunks and everyone sits in a seat. They were really, really tight quarters.
That tour was really beating the hell out of me and then, getting to Hawaii and just being like, “I’m just gonna float here for a minute and feel calm,” there’s something about that. It’s gotta draw back to being a kid and going to that place and feeling the most safe that I had ever felt, the most serene. I’m always drawn to it. Early touring, you were never really sure where the cities you were going to were, and sometimes we’d show up to one and I’d smell the air and be like, “We’re close to the ocean. I’m going to go find it.” And I would just go walking to figure out where I was in relation to the ocean. I was literally being pulled there.
The Wonder Years: “You’re the Reason I Don’t Want the World to End”
If we’re not touring, we aren’t making any money and I can’t pay the bills. So I was freaking out about how to survive through not being able to go on tour, and I saw some friends that were artists being like, “Hey, I need some work, does anyone want to commission me? I’ll paint a portrait of your family or I’ll come shoot photos.” And I was like, “Well, I make art, too. Maybe I could do a version of that.” So I opened it up and said, “I’d like to write songs for you, commission songs.” What I would do is spend a couple hours talking to somebody and getting their story and collecting all of these important details. Then, I would work on the song, I would shape it into what I felt like they wanted—whether it was a family portrait in song form for their wedding, or a song as a memorial. And then Ace Enders would record it, John-Allison Weiss would do the artwork, I would hand write-out the lyrics and then they would get it on a one-of-a-kind seven-inch vinyl.
I did a bunch of these songs, and one of them I wrote for this person—Tyler—who lost his wife. The story was so moving to me and I connected with it so much, the melody for the verses of [“You’re the Reason I Don’t Want the World to End”] came out in that. Immediately I thought, “I’ve never written a melody I liked more than this one. This is maybe the best melody that I will ever write.” Once I gave the song to Tyler I said, “Hey, I really, truly, am in love with this melody. Do you think that I could also use it for the song I want to write about my children?” And he was like, “Absolutely.”
So, I took to repurposing the melody and finding a way to weave it into a larger Wonder Years song and brought it to the band really early in the writing of The Hum Goes on Forever. We played around with it and I hated everything we did to it. It was so precious to me that anything that wasn’t perfect made me want to take it back away and take it off the table. “We’re not touching that song.” There was only one thing that we did to it that I really liked, and I was, “Well, that song’s done. We’ll do something else, I don’t want to work on that one anymore.” It was totally pulled off the table.
Then, I just continued to spiral downward throughout the pandemic and throughout everything else that was happening in the world. I was just watching these mass shootings and these acts of police violence and all of the reaping from all of the sowing of our obsession with fossil fuels and fire as energy—just watching climate catastrophe after climate catastrophe. And then we found out we were having another kid, Jack, and I just shut off. I couldn’t do anything, because there wasn’t a widely available vaccine yet and I was looking at the life that Wyatt was living and seeing that he wasn’t getting to experience anything. We weren’t getting to do anything and I didn’t know when he would be able to. To bring another child into that, I was about as distraught as I’d ever been.
After months of therapy that wasn’t really yielding the results I needed it to, we started on an SSRI for me—because, what it came down to was “I’m useless to my kids if I’m catatonic every day. I’m not the parent they need me to be and that’s a self-perpetuating problem. If the world is going to be as difficult as it is right now, at the very least they should feel safe at home with me and they should feel good and happy and loved.”
There’s a town near us called Cherry Hill, and I didn’t know why. Then, one day, I was driving through it and there’s one street that is, like, two miles of non-stop cherry trees. You just see big pink blossoms. One day, we took Wyatt there, probably about a month to six weeks after I started the SSRI, and we let him run around at sunset. He wasn’t saying a lot of words because we weren’t seeing a lot of people. His speech was behind, but he could say “moon.” We laid on this swing that he had and he just kept pointing up at the moon and yelling at it and waving to it. It dawned on me that I was entirely in that moment. I wasn’t separated from it by something else I was anxious about or some sense of dread that I had. For the first time in as long as I could physically remember, I felt all good, all in the moment with my kid. And that song struck me again, and I was like, “Oh, this is what that melody was meant for.”
How [“You’re the Reason I Don’t Want the World to End”] breaks down is it’s second verse, third verse. In the second verse, I wanted to focus on the internal struggles [of generational trauma]. The reference to “The Devil in My Bloodstream” is in that one. The reference [in the song] to “Passing Through a Screendoor, when I said “I don’t want my children growing up be anything like me” [10 years ago], what I was saying is I don’t want them to be as haunted by their anxiety, their depression, these deep periods of non-stop malaise that I’ve dealt with. What you realize is, there is no way to stop those afflictions if they’re happening. But the thing that we can do, as parents, is give them a loving and supportive and safe environment to feel those things in. So that was verse was me thinking, “If we can just break these cycles of generational trauma, could it stop with us? Would it stop with me, with my wife, with my cousins? Could we offer our children these welcoming, safe places to feel how they need to feel and give them the tools to work through what they to work through?”
We can’t prevent them from feeling depressed but, maybe, we can give them the tools they need to work through it in a constructive way. Then, moving to the third verse, it’s the idea of “Man, everything feels so dark.” Even right now, I’ve become obsessed with the wet bulb temperatures in the American South and the Fort McMurray fire from a couple of years ago and the ways that climate change or the increased heat and lower humidity makes these forest tinder bombs.
You kind of feel like you’re setting your children up to live in a rapidly ending world, which is a difficult thing to square inside of your brain. That’s where we talk in the chorus of the song about being brave for them. You watch them be brave on a day-to-day basis. I have to be that for my kid, I have to make sure that I’m not just falling into a state of disrepair and at least actively attempting to make the world more livable for them.
Then, understanding that most of the things that we can do will be small, it’s okay to start small. The line “Put the work, build a garden, try to stay afloat,” you can’t just give up on the jump and be like, “Well, this is hopeless and we’re screwed.” We have to at least try to do some things. And I know that’s a really difficult thing, because 70% of global emissions are caused by, like, 100 companies. I don’t know—how do you stack up against the Koch Brothers? Just wallowing in self-pity over it doesn’t do anything. It makes your kid’s life harder. At least, you got to try.
Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from his home in Columbus, Ohio.