Out of the WTR

by Stella Rose Tarlin

Content Warning: Discussion of sexual assault and coercion.

8–18–2020, Iowa City, Iowa: I delete every SWMRS song from my playlists and remove two SWMRS t-shirts from my closet. It feels like mourning. 

8–2–2020 through 8–17–2020, Iowa City, Iowa: I do not listen to SWMRS. I cannot bring myself to purge them from my library. 

I have always been a music person. Not always a musician, but a sing-in-the-shower, dance-while-cleaning, skip-my-bike-helmet-for-headphones kind of music person. I listen to it constantly, in any situation that it’s possible to do so, and that kind of listening cannot persist without some side effects. When you listen to music like that, it changes you; it leaks into your bones and rearranges your ears until it defines you, until the periods of your life are best labeled by the albums that you played while they passed by.

8–1–2020, Interstate 80, Iowa: I find out what Joey Armstrong did to Lydia Night.

When I was 18, I passed my driver’s test on the first try and drove home with Fall Out Boy’s M A N I A blaring through my speakers. When I was 17, I broke up with my boyfriend of two years and spent the night listening to Hot Mulligan’s Opportunities on repeat. Before either of those moments, I drove to Oberlin, Ohio with my dad and played SWMRS’s Drive North on both the trip and the return. 

That trip was not, in the end, important. I’ve forgotten most of the details of that little college town, but I remember the thrill of hearing “D’You Have A Car” at highway speeds for the first time. I remember the way the chorus of “Hannah” echoed around namelessly in my brain until a search of what few lyrics I knew told me that this, too, was SWMRS. 

Oberlin was unimportant, but its soundtrack has stayed with me. 

8–1–2020, Interstate 80, Illinois: I drive from Evergreen Park to Iowa City with my dad. On the way, he tells me he saw a headline about SWMRS recently, and that it didn’t sound good.

More than any other band, my adult life has been defined by SWMRS. The August I moved out was the August they took over, dethroning my former favorite band and album to reign supreme at the top of all my playlists. They only had one album at the time, Drive North, but I played it on repeat until I knew every word, until even the songs I hadn’t loved at first were engraved word for word and note by note into the deepest layers of my skin.

7–21–2020, Instagram: The official SWMRS account posts Joey Armstrong’s apology letter regarding Lydia Night. In it, he admits that, although he “[doesn’t] agree with some of the things she said,” he “failed her as a partner.” He does not acknowledge any specific allegations. He is currently 25 years old, and was 22 during their relationship. 

SWMRS were more to me than just one band. They were a symbol. They were an entry point to the world of modern California punk, a gateway drug for beach-themed band names and wailing guitars that made me feel like I was speeding down a summer highway. I devoured everything that Spotify’s artist radio had to offer, made a surf punk playlist to repeat whenever I craved energy and joy. I named it Gone SWMN, in honor of the band that introduced me to this world. 

I became obsessed not only with SWMRS, but also everyone in their orbit. I came to love The Frights, FIDLAR, and Charly Bliss because of them. I came to love, almost as much as SWMRS themselves, the Regrettes, a group of teenage girls from Cali with a lead singer on whom I developed an immediate crush.

7–20–2020, Instagram: Lydia Night, lead singer of the Regrettes, posts a five-page letter regarding the manipulation and sexual coercion that she suffered during her year-long relationship with Joey Armstrong. She is currently 19 years old, and was 16 during their relationship.

Not counting shock, the first thing I felt toward Joey Armstrong was rage. 

I would be less ashamed of this fact if I did not believe that SWMRS had a large hand in teaching me how to feel angry. 

7–17–2020, Twitter: Cole Becker, lead singer of SWMRS, responds to an accusation of sexual assault against the lead singer of The Frights. The final line of his post reads: “this is a time where it’s crucial to fearlessly examine ways we embody patriarchy and rape culture and do the work to unlearn and amend.”

I’m still close to my ex-boyfriend’s former best friend; he’s the one person I regularly trade music recommendations with. He has better taste in songs than he does in people, and lately I’ve been searching for a way to tell him why I hate how he’s rebuilding his old friendship with my ex. How do I convince somebody that I need him to be angry for me? How do I convince somebody that the friend who defined his teenage years has a secret superpower: the bizarre ability to beg and beg until someone else begins to feel disgusting?

How do I apologize for sending him my SWMRS-covered playlists, for forcing his ears to join mine in their guilt?

4–20–2019, Milwaukee, Wisconsin: After spending six hours and over 100 dollars on bus travel, I see SWMRS perform live for the first and only time, with opening acts Beach Goons and Destroy Boys. It is one of the best nights of my life. 

I dyed my hair for the first time this summer, and as much as I hate to admit it, I felt a secret thrill each time I remembered that my chosen cut and color were not dissimilar to those of Cole Becker, my favorite SWMRS member.

2–15–2019, Spotify: SWMRS releases Berkeley’s on Fire, their second studio album. It has ten songs, three of which were previously released as singles. 

Berkeley’s on Fire was my defining album.

It was different from my usual, more punk than pop-punk in both sound and theme, and it took its time to grow on me. It did, though, and more importantly, I grew with it. I stepped out from the other side of that album, the other side of that era, changed — and I no longer know what to do with that. I have never been good at being angry, let alone out loud, but SWMRS taught me a way. Cole Becker and his band showed me how to laugh and sing and be filled with righteous anger at injustice, and I have since become almost comfortable in that feeling. 

Can I turn that same anger toward the person that gifted it to me in the first place? Can I laugh at his awful hypocrisy knowing that, if any man but his bandmate had been outed as Lydia Night’s abuser, Cole would be laughing right along with me?

October 2018, New York, New York: Lydia Night ends her relationship with Joey Armstrong. All of SWMRS were aware of their romantic involvement, as was the Armstrong family (including Joey's father, lead singer of Green Day).

I look in the mirror now — look at my dyed hair, patterned shirts, heavy lace-up boots, and I am proud. The self I was before Berkeley burned would have thought herself far too uncool for any of those affectations, but that has changed. I am glad that I have changed. 

Still, at the edges of my reflection, I cannot help but wonder. Is it possible to separate cause and effect, to know whether I changed with the album or vice versa? I listened to it constantly before I even knew I liked it. I listened enough to send its chords and lyrics past my bones and into the nerves and mind that build my personality, and I fear it might have worked an alteration there.

I like the self I’ve built post-Berkeley, but I am bitter and ashamed every time I stop to think about its building blocks. 

12–28–2017, Evergreen Park, Illinois: I break up with my high school boyfriend. He does not seem to understand why, and I cannot articulate how I have come to hate him. 

When I say that I am bad with anger, I mean a thousand things. I avoid conflict like the plague, I am terrified of hurting others’ feelings, and I am far too easily taken in by love. I stayed with somebody I hated for months because I didn’t want to hurt him, and even now, in all my rage, I have not yet purged the love for SWMRS from my body. 

I do not want to show respect for any facet of that band, but want alone can’t stop my hand from acting otherwise. I never knew before that adoration is involuntary, but I am still incapable of writing SWMRS’s name without breaking the cursive script that fills my notebooks to give them their proper printed capitals.

September 2017, Europe: After inviting her band to open for SWMRS on an international tour, Joey Armstrong begins to make romantic and sexual advances toward Lydia Night. At his request, she will keep this relationship secret from her friends, family, and therapist. 

I worry about discussing SWMRS through the lens of the personal. I worry I’m inserting myself where I don’t belong, that I’ll appear as though I want to take Lydia Night’s trauma and pretend that it is mine. That is not my intention. As a fan of hers built by the deeds of her abuser, I fear I already owe Lydia Night one apology. I do not want to owe her another. 

I would not have written this if I didn’t have to, but I cannot see another way out of the deep end. 

July 2017, Sister Lakes, Michigan: I spend a weekend with several friends at a lake house owned by one of their families. My boyfriend tries constantly to touch me when the others aren’t looking. He cannot seem to understand that “no” could have a reason besides fear of being seen. 

At its basest level, my anger toward SWMRS is personal.

I was terrified to come out to my high school boyfriend as asexual, but when the moment came, I thought my fears had been unfounded. He told me that he loved me, that he was perfectly OK with stopping where I asked. It took far too many repetitions of his pleading, denying, and questioning before I finally realized that no, he wasn’t.

I hate Joey Armstrong because I was a fan, but more than that, because he is familiar. I know the kind of shame, revulsion, and confusion that he deals in. I know how it feels to be pressured past one’s limits.

July 2017, Sister Lakes, Michigan: A friend compliments the SWMRS song that I put on our communal playlist, and though I’ve barely even begun to learn the words, I feel like it’s me he’s approving of. 

On the corner of my dresser, quarantined from all my other clothes, two SWMRS t-shirts sit in a folded pile. I know that I want to get rid of them, but I have not yet figured out how. The wastebasket feels like an awful anticlimax, but burning them, my first idea, would take far more effort than they’re worth.

I thought that my high school breakup had earned me freedom from revulsion, but now it won’t stop creeping back to find me every time a chord or lyric reminds me of what used to be my favorite. I can no longer listen to the songs I used to love without dwelling on how, in the spaces between notes, the drumbeat is tearing down somebody not unlike me. The drumbeat is making me bolder, making me angry. 

It is all I can do to hope that, even if the opening notes of Drive North had never graced my ears, I would still have discovered this anger.

April 29, 2017, Evergreen Park, Illinois: Spotify recommends me a SWMRS song for the first time. Enamored, I save and listen to every song they’ve ever written.