There are the Unseen Moments, Too: A Guest Post from Amy Fleisher Madden, author of Negatives
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Negatives brings to life a decade of emo music that surpassed just being music and became an entire way of life. With gorgeous photography that will take you back to the scenes and contributions from the musicians that made this era unforgettable, you’ll be right there with your favorites, reliving it like the day it happened.
Negatives brings to life a decade of emo music that surpassed just being music and became an entire way of life. With gorgeous photography that will take you back to the scenes and contributions from the musicians that made this era unforgettable, you’ll be right there with your favorites, reliving it like the day it happened.
My career in emo has, at this point, passed the two-decade mark, and if I’ve learned anything thus far, it’s that it’s hard to pick favorite memories. There are the memories that there are photos of—live shows, albums, and those memorable highlights—but then there are the unseen moments, too. Late-night conversations, 24-hour drives, and the times spent fighting your surroundings that continually force you to grow up and evolve, where you experience your own personal metamorphosis. Oddly enough, those are my favorite memories. That’s why when I sat down with my editor at Chronicle, Olivia Roberts, I stressed that we had to include moments of “the in-between.” There’s a whole section in the book that I’ve called “Everything and Everyone,” and I did my best to illustrate these sorts of moments. Several of the images in this section of the book were provided by myself and my closest friends, and I think that’s because I can verify with certainty that those moments mattered. They aren’t fleeting snapshots—they were monumental moments in all our young lives. We were who we were at that very moment, and six months later, we were completely different people. Bands got bigger, or smaller, or changed members, or changed directions. Some friends changed careers or locations for the long term, or became public about sexual preferences, or altered their relationship with sobriety.
I am still learning about this intangible and ever-changing thing that is emo, something that was deep underground for so long but then entered the mainstream. We see it even as recently as yesterday when Miami Heat player Jimmy Butler arrived at a press conference with straightened hair and facial piercings and outright said, “I’m emo.” Chris Carrabba and I sat at a dinner table that night with our families, and our kids showed us memes on their phones ranging from the on-point “Backboard Confessional” and even funnier “Ball Out Boy.” It was a moment of pure laughter and joy—and thinking we had that evening with our families after such long and tumultuous, albeit wonderful, runs feels like such an accomplishment. And I think as long as the reference to the culture stays good-natured and honest, then I’m for it.
The very Kurt Vonnegut-esque feelings that I am having in my head regularly make me feel like I’ve become unstuck in time. If you cut to a moment twenty years prior to now, the scene would have been me and Chris sitting alone at a table in Dunkin’ Donuts in South Florida, writing down potential album names for his debut LP as Dashboard Confessional and wondering if anyone would ever love his music as much as we did.
After a decade-long run in the music industry that started when I was sixteen, I took a much-needed and never-offered break. When I look back at that time, I view it as a moment to heal and to catch my proverbial breath. I started working at such a high-stakes level so young and almost accidentally that by the time I was twenty-six, I was incredibly burnt out and had made so many mistakes that I needed to process and learn from. I just needed to regroup mentally and find my footing for what I thought would be the Second Act of my life. Social media didn’t exist then as it does now, so there wasn’t this chatter out there urging self-care, mental health
breaks, and things like that—so I didn’t even know why I felt like roadkill at that point. I just knew I was empty, and I needed to take some time for myself to just live. Looking back, I probably should have backpacked through Thailand or something wonderful and cliché like that—but instead, I did a very normal thing and decided to go back to college.
What I learned from that break is that emo is like the circus … or the army … or something of that metaphorical nature that is never-ending. Just because I got off the carousel, that doesn’t mean that it stopped. It kept going in my absence, and when I hopped back on, I was delighted to see that it was still going. I think that musical movements evolve over time, and sure, there will be peaks and valleys, but it’s very important to recognize that no one person is the center of the emo universe—it’s always been a collective consciousness that keeps things going.
When I try to reference my favorite memories, you should know that I recently bought some vinyl record frames. I thought I’d decorate my office with albums that I worked on throughout the years, albums that changed my life. But once I slipped the album jackets into the frames, I just froze. The imagery is too powerful, even still, for me to look at daily. Of course, these records bring me joy, and I do have a sense of pride for them, but they also bring with them every other memory of what happened throughout the record’s life, which is, for better or for worse, pain. I suppose I’m not yet ready to write down my moments of growing pains here, where they are on display for casual viewing. I think I can only absorb and digest those memories when it’s planned and on purpose—as evidenced by the entire book I wrote about it—because they take me to too many places that might not be so lighthearted to visit—and if that isn’t emo, I don’t know what is.