But there is room for the anthemic in small moments, too - when you're alone in your room and a song is the only thing that's there for you. Most of the songs covered in this NPR series are huge: war songs, protest songs, songs that grace Super Bowl stages and national rallies. You don't need subtlety to write an anthem even the ones that are subversively tongue-in-cheek are pretty obvious about it. "I think of it more, now, as almost a celebration," Hoppus says, "of hardships gone through and friends lost." It's a celebration that means a lot to a lot of people: Not an anthem in the usual sense of the word, more of a reminder. Now, though, after nearly a decade, the band is playing it again. A musician friend of theirs, Adam Goldstein - better known as DJ AM - had died from an overdose in early 2009, and Hoppus says he couldn't bring himself to sing it. There was a period of time when Blink-182 didn't play "Adam's Song" in concert. "We all are dealing with our stuff, and we don't look, and don't see, and so then we don't notice." "We never know what's going on in other people's lives - people who we have relationships with, but also the people you sit next to at a concert or pass on the street, these humans you brush up against," she says. She'd come into the job aware of the band's gross-and-goofy reputation ( Dude Ranch, for example, had closed with a skit about a dog drinking urine from a toilet), and though she knew this song was different, she also knew she couldn't really expect this band to "act." Instead, her vision was to focus not only on the musicians but the people around them: the couple having a fight backstage, the person on the payphone by the gas station - and what they might be going through. Liz Friedlander, the director of the "Adam's Song" music video - which became an MTV hit, with regular play on Total Request Live - says everyone relates to the song in their own way. Then you feel bad for some of those emotions, because some of them are just really, really ugly. "You feel so many different emotions all at once. "It connected me with with Adam, and it also helped me feel everything," she says, explaining that surviving when Adam had not had been one of the hardest things to process. One day she was scrolling through her phone to find music for a run, and rediscovered "'Adam's Song." "It felt like I had too much good fortune to complain about anything."īerlin says she'd learned in therapy that physical exertion could help calm her down. "It feels ridiculous saying, 'Our band's doing really good, but personally, I'm not feeling like I'm connecting,' " Hoppus says. So he felt weird talking about how he depressed and isolated he felt. The next record was poised to be an even bigger hit. Blink-182 bassist and singer Mark Hoppus says he was at a professional high when "Adam's Song" was born: Dude Ranch, the album before Enema, had gotten major-label distribution and sold better than expected. Talking about these things isn't easy - even for the guy who wrote the song. I just wanted to make sure he had a piece of that, even if I wasn't around." Kennedy says his emotional life has changed for the better since then: "I was able to work with it rather than against it, and just try and learn about myself and keep it at bay, even if it's still here." He still hasn't told his friend about that note. "Because that's how I looked at our friendship: It was a great and beautiful thing. "I just wanted him to have the things that meant the most in the world to me, which were my instruments," he says. He says he had a particular friend in mind.
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