I miss Modern Baseball. No, not the pitch clock, shift, sticky stuff, launch angles or whatever other changes have come about in Major League Baseball recently. I’m talking about Modern Baseball, the emo revival band from Philadelphia known for their catchy riffs, relatable but albeit occasionally cringey lyrics and unique vocals.
Now, if you’re a nerd like me and happen to be one of their 1.3 million monthly listeners, you’ve likely seen that lamenting statement — “I miss Modern Baseball” — somewhere online and maybe even sympathized with it. Songs like “Tears over Beers,” “Your Graduation” and, my personal favorite, “Re-Do,” capture an angsty, nervous and awkward feeling that I’ve never heard another band replicate. Many have come close, but there’s just some facet of their music that makes Modern Baseball stand out.
Their music is not for when things are going well. Instead, it’s in the same vein as Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski, Frank Ocean or Jeff Buckley. They’re not quite the slow, sad ballads of those artists but they still have you reminiscing about everything that has gone wrong in your life. Modern Baseball strikes an emotional chord (no pun intended) that seems to fit perfectly in moments of anxiety and sadness. While it may not feel quite the same when you’re at a good point in your life, it’s still great music played by talented musicians.
I first listened to Modern Baseball my senior year of high school. Bleary eyed and exhausted, I was driving to school at 7 a.m. and going through my usual routine of drinking a cup of too hot coffee and spilling a bit on myself when Apple Music decided to play “Tears over Beers.” As an angsty and awkward teenager terrified about going to college and wondering if my high school relationship would last through a semi-long distance, I felt seen. I was worried about making new friends, losing old ones, trying to pass classes and everything else that comes with the few months before leaving your hometown for college. Since then, I’ve listened to their entire discography, bought a t-shirt and placed tons of their songs into my sad music rotation. Some of my fears came true (most didn’t) but Modern Baseball was there whenever I wanted to feel like I wasn’t the only person in the world feeling shitty and thinking about every mistake I’ve ever made.
Just a couple weeks ago they released new music for the first time in seven years and, while they were just demos, it reminded me of what I loved about the band — they make you feel like you’re not alone. They will always hold a special place in my heart. Others feel the same, and that’s why there are so many who make that same lamenting pronouncement about this indie emo band out of Philly: I miss Modern Baseball.
Modern Baseball went on an indefinite hiatus in 2017 due to mental health struggles, and there has been no indication whatsoever of them getting back together. In the six years of music making for Modern Baseball, they released four EPs and three studio albums, all of which incorporate similar themes of the struggles of young adulthood, awkwardness and angst. Since then, two of the band’s members have formed a successful group called Slaughter Beach, Dog, releasing several albums and touring across the country.
It is theorized that our music taste mostly stops expanding when we are around 30 — that some of our most formative years of music are literally in our most formative years of life: adolescence. People love the music they listened to in those years of change and development. It inextricably affects their auditory future and makes them want to return to the music they used to love. That’s why my dad still listens to Led Zeppelin, even though they haven’t been consistently active since the ’80s and that’s why I keep listening to Modern Baseball despite not being a senior in high school worried about just about everything the future held. There’s comfort in familiarity especially when it’s deeply rooted in emotional experiences, causing many of us to revert back to the music that was there for us in those emotional experiences. People want what they know, but they can get bored if it’s the same thing over and over again so they want more.
There’s a desire to consume more and more and more of the familiar because it’s comforting to be with something you know. There’s also a desire to recreate that feeling of first experiencing music — of wanting to relive the emotions you felt the first time you listened to a particular song. Music can capture a direct emotional connection differently than any other type of art. It taps directly into the emotional core of memories, bringing back not just the basic information but the totality of experience from the past. There’s an intrinsic beauty in experiencing something for the first time; it’s like taking the first steps outside after a snowstorm, going from an unsullied winter wonderland to footprints marking the path of a wanderer. And it’s the dream to find a separate song that causes the exact same feeling as a particular song you once listened to.
This desire to recreate the comforting feeling of the familiar with art is especially present nowadays, pressuring artists to continue producing more works even when it’s apparent they’ve lost all passion for it. Even artists like Johnny Cash, Elliott Smith, Jimi Hendrix and Amy Winehouse had music released long after their deaths to try and satiate fans’ desires for more music and record companies’ desires for more profits, with or without the artist’s permission. For living artists, it places a nearly insurmountable pressure to live up to the expectations of their fanbases, despite their inability to recreate the experiences fans loved. As a Metallica fan, I’ve seen it firsthand and have tried and tried again to listen to any of their albums after Reload but there just doesn’t seem to be any passion for the music anymore — it just feels like a cash grab. If they still want to create more art, then they should feel free to do so, but it is when the music’s creation is forced when issues begin to arise. It seems that the desire for more to consume is creating a Frankenstein’s monster of half-finished art that just leaves everyone disappointed and worse off than if there was nothing new.
I understand the yearning though. When something you love ends, it hurts, and you can’t help but want to go back to the time when it was in your life. People wanting to consume more of what they love isn’t malicious; instead, it may be a symptom of the capitalist system we find ourselves trapped in. Our desire to be with what we love is preyed upon to extort the most amount of money possible from artists and consumers. It’s been ingrained in our minds that more is better and that we always need to strive for endless expansion, not seeing that we’ve ended up in ouroboros of consumption because we don’t think we can let anything stop. We grieve for what we love and want back. Art can inspire those same feelings of attachment — when art ceases to be produced, it can feel devastating. When an artist stops creating art for whatever reason, that is a loss. Art offers so much: connection, purpose and just the entire spectrum of the human experience. Losing that hurts.
I think that’s why people miss Modern Baseball so much. They are a piece of the musical past that people continue to connect with. No one wants it to be permanently over — it’s like life or a relationship. Their indefinite hiatus gives fans hope that one day Modern Baseball may return and recreate for them that feeling of listening to their debut album Sports for the first time. There’s a want for more songs that you can blast scream-singing with the windows down after a breakup.
Recently, the embers of hope of a Modern Baseball reunion were fanned. On June 24, the band shocked just about everyone by releasing two demos of their songs “Rock Bottom” and “Pothole” as part of the 10 year anniversary of their album “You’re Gonna Miss it All.” Does this mean they are making a comeback? Probably not. No one, including myself, wants Modern Baseball to be done forever, but there’s no use in constantly monitoring their social media for a new post or changed profile picture. There can always be hope, but it’s necessary to know the reality of the situation. Their time on this earth was temporary. Everyone and everything ends at some point. Nothing we do will bring them back; only Brendan Lukens, Jake Ewald, Ian Farmer and Sean Huber can decide on that. I am sad that they aren’t making music anymore but I only want them to come back on their own terms and not because of a pressure to create more just to appease a record label.
But that’s the thing. Modern Baseball doesn’t need to come back. What they’ve created, and the emotions they’ve stirred in countless individuals, has already happened. For many, including myself, Modern Baseball has been there through times of struggle and anxiety. And that will continue to happen as more and more people listen to them.
Art doesn’t stop existing after it has been made. It exists in perpetuity, like death or taxes. Modern Baseball will continue to exist, whether it be in memory, on streaming platforms, YouTube, CDs, vinyl, cassettes or someone’s hard drive after illegally pirating a song. And if they don’t produce any new songs or albums, that’s perfectly fine because there will always be something to go back to. The creation of art is temporary, whether that is the run time of an album, the slow degradation of a statue or a band breaking up. Someone has to take a step in the snow at some point. It will end — at some point it will be impossible to continue making it.
But the experiencing of art is eternal. The moments of experiencing it can’t be recreated; no second is ever the same as the last and no song will ever feel the same twice. A song may remain the same, but you don’t. You might listen to a song years later and feel entirely different about it and the emotions you experience. I relate to “Tears over Beers” differently nowadays than I did as a naive high schooler spilling hot coffee on himself. It’s ok to miss the past and how things used to make you feel, but it’s better to appreciate the moments you had with those works of art than to try to recreate them because you will never be able to. But that’s the point, right? That’s the thing about a moment’s beauty. It can only exist once. There is always a void left behind with change and loss, it just means that what you’ve lost was important to you. But there’s no need to fill it with zombified recreations of the past. Live with it, embrace it and know it will always be there.
That being said, I still miss Modern Baseball.
Statement Contributor Miles Anderson can be reached at milesand@umich.edu.
The post I miss Modern Baseball, but I probably shouldn’t appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
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