When All You've Got to Keep is Strong
Rediscovering a high school anthem two decades later
Ever wonder what song would play over the opening credits of your life?
In high school, I spent hours scrolling through my iPod, trying to find out.
My teenage years were lived in moody lyrics in AIM away messages.
In adolescence, emotions swell and crash like the waves at Mavericks—epic, dangerous, and all-consuming.
Big feelings demand big songs.
Finding the perfect song became my quest and coping mechanism.
I cycled through anthems, hoping to land on one—like I hoped to find a friend group, a set of interests, and a sense of self.
Like so many parts of high school, this was an unfinished project.
I never found the perfect song then, but now, thanks to Spotify’s time capsule playlist, I finally understand which song I should have chosen.
The first thing that hits you in “Move Along” by The All American Rejects is the drums—intense, precise, impossible to ignore.
Drummer Chris Gaylor tumbles across the toms and snares with unpredictable syncopation, a pounding heartbeat that catapults you into the song's delicate balance between hope and hopelessness.
Gaylor plays with finesse, knowing when to pull back and when to unleash catharsis.
The drums are what build and release tension, carrying the song from verse to chorus.
When the chorus arrives, Gaylor unleashes an avalanche of urgency, his drumsticks skittering relentlessly across the hi-hat.
It’s the drums as much as the lyrics that convey the importance of movement as a survival mechanism.
This is what happens when a pop-punk drummer refuses to cut corners.
It’s the same reason Blink 182’s discography punches above its weight class—Travis Barker has never half assed anything on the drum kit.
I hope to one day work as hard at anything as Chris Gaylor did on this song’s drumline.
When I was in high school I briefly wanted to play the drums, begging my parents to buy me a drum kit, only to play it for a few months and promptly lose interest.
I blame songs like this for that adolescent eddy.
While I never found the discipline necessary to play the drum part I so admired, I still deeply appreciated the instrument.
Drums deliver an intense emotional release that perfectly matched my thuddingly intense feelings as a teenager.
I first heard Move Along on a second date as it played over the end credits of She’s the Man, Amanda Bynes’ comedy based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
I was a sophomore in high school.
Carly was a freshman who I’d met on the crew team.
Our first date was Failure to Launch, a romcom starring Matthew McConaughey, Sarah Jessica Parker, and, for some inexplicable reason, Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw.
Too timid to kiss her after Failure to Launch, I hugged her goodnight while our parents idled at the other end of the parking lot.
After She’s the Man, Carly leaned in and kissed me—a moment I’d replay in my head for weeks.
On the ride home from that date, I remember giddily eating a protein bar that my dad had stashed in the glove box of his Audi.
Why this was my chosen way of celebrating my first kiss is beyond me.
What I do remember is burning Carly a CD with “Move Along” on it, complete with a cringey track note of the lyric: “Your hands are mine to hold.”
Carly broke up with me over the phone a few months later.
She said she'd be traveling a lot that summer, so we should just be friends.
Those three words hit like a sledgehammer.
Her hands were not, in fact, mine to hold.
After the call, the power went out.
I lay on my bedroom floor, finishing my Algebra II homework by headlamp.
The assignment was to create a drawing using the formulas we’d just learned.
I’d tried to sandbag myself with a crude car, only to end up cursing on my green IKEA rug.
I didn’t want to learn the algebra formulas necessary to finish drawing this stupid car on graph paper— I wanted to cry over this girl who had just dumped me.
For months after our breakup, anytime I had to do Algebra II homework I felt sad and forgotten.
Carly’s family was from an exurb of Philadelphia.
For months after our breakup, every time I saw “Philadelphia” on the departures board at SFO, I felt sad and forgotten.
Carly and I briefly dated during the heyday of Myspace, when people had songs on their profiles that would automatically play when you visited.
After we broke up, Carly changed hers to “Ooh Ahh (My Life Be Like)” by Grits.
For months after our breakup, I kept visiting her Myspace page, and every time I heard the intro to that song, and I felt sad and forgotten.
Carly went on to date and marry a football player from Terra Linda High School.
I stopped feeling sad and forgotten about eventually, not because I really processed what had happened or why, but because of the relentless movement and change of high school replaced my sadness and confusion with different sadness and confusion.
The only thing to do was move along.
The “Move Along” music video is iconic.
Why is it so satisfying to watch frontman Tyson Ritter changing outfits and identities to the beat of those drums dancing across the high hat?
I believe it’s because the experience of watching the chorus of this music video is a crude approximation of re-living what high school felt like— rapidly flitting between different identities while yelling about your hope being gone, when in reality you haven’t even decided who you are and what exactly it is you are hoping for in the first place.
The final chorus is as satisfying to watch as it is to hear.
Tyson Ritter, wide-eyed and pleading with the camera, looks like an emo Cillian Murphy.
No music video mouth has ever looked so emotional, no stare so desperate—until Gotye’s Somebody That I Used to Know briefly changed music in 2011.
Witness the knowing looks between bandmembers, uniting around the hope offered by the lyrics like the Avengers circling up to save New York City.
Just look at these hairstyles— all four members of this band could have played Shaggy in a live action Scooby Doo, but when I saw this video on TRL my sophomore year I thought they were gods.
When they played this live at the 2006 VMAs, Paris Hilton introduced the band and noted that the song had an inspiring message of hope.
Hilton did her homework— Guitarist and backup vocalist Nick Wheeler wrote “Move Along” as an explicit anti-suicide message.
Yet the song is also about the making of the album it appears on.
The band was under tremendous pressure to write and record their second album.
So they wrote about their mantra when faced with the pressure of creating commercially viable music on a time crunch: just keep going—move along.
Are the The All-American Rejects the best thing to come out of Oklahoma?
Probably not, but I had to pose the question before Rob Harvilla beats me to it.
Like many of you, I’ve taken a great deal of joy in listening to 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, and greater joy still in its sequel: 60 Songs That Explain the 90s: The 2000s.
As I wondered which 2000s anthems he’ll cover via his signature slalom course of absurd digressions and self-deprecating asides next, I realized if I wanted to write about “Move Along,” I’d better move along and do it soon.
What makes a song great when you’re in high school is that there’s no subtext—just text, usually screamed into the mic over needy, attention-grabbing instrumentation.
It’s a flare gun for your nervous system.
But a high school anthem is also a time capsule—a snapshot of who you once were.
When I look back on the songs that I played into the ground on my lime green iPod mini, they tended to cluster around certain themes.
There were plenty of songs about being misunderstood—like “The First Single (You Know Me)” by The Format, Nate Ruess’s first band before Fun.
Like “Move Along,” this one has big, moody drums.
These drums were what automatically played when you visited my Myspace page until multiple guys from the crew team told me to take it down because it sounded gay.
There were also the “I’m sad, angry, and overwhelmed, and I won’t rest until everyone within a 50-mile radius knows” songs, like “Give Me Novacaine” by Green Day, “Down” by “Blink 182” (both of which have epic drum parts), and “Dark Center of the Universe” by Modest Mouse.
And then there was the oddly specific “My parents are getting divorced and I’ve got a lot of feelings about it” anthem: “Stay Together for the Kids” by Blink 182.
I was so devoted to this song that I even bought the music video on iTunes—back when paying for music videos was something teenagers did.
It wasn’t all angst, though.
There were the hopeful anthems—the ones that whispered, “This world seems pretty crazy, but maybe we’ll be okay.”
For a while, that song was “Float On” by Modest Mouse, whose frontman shares my last name, but tragically is no relation.
Then it was “Mexican Wine” an underrated masterpiece by Fountains of Wayne.
Like “Move Along,” “Mexican Wine” has a message about how you can persist even after terrible setbacks.
The late, great pop songwriter Adam Schlesinger had more of a sense of humor than Tyson Ritter, though:
I used to fly for United Airlines
Then I got fired for reading High Times
My license expired in almost no time
Now I'm retired and I think that's fine
While “Move Along” isn’t The All American Rejects’ most streamed song of all time, that honor belongs to “Gives You Hell,” I believe it may be their most important song.
After Carly broke up with me, I might have preferred to listen to something as petty and shouty as “Gives You Hell” over the corny optimism of “Move Along,” but that song was still three years away.
“Gives You Hell” is undeniably satisfying to listen to, but does the world need any more vindictive anthems telling your ex to shove it?
Since “Move Along” came out in 2006, I’ve come to believe that we need all of the hopeful rallying cries we can get.
As a teen I would listen to “Move Along” while walking to the bus stop, on the bus to Marin Academy, or while waiting for my dad to pick me up from crew practice.
Back then, I thought I just needed to survive high school.
One day, I’d make it through whatever this was.
My parents would sort out their issues, I’d quit the crew team, find a girlfriend who saw what Carly missed, and never have to take Algebra II again.
As I played this song over and over, I would close my eyes and hope that one day, when I was older, things would get better.
This was right but missing the point.
If I could talk to high school me, I’d tell him: Things do get better—but they also get worse.
Sometimes, life gets better and worse at the same time.
You don’t outgrow your problems—you graduate to different ones.
There’s not really a rhyme or reason to how health, finances, and world events hit you, your friends, and your family.
Who gets what isn’t fair at all.
If you make it out of high school you start getting surreal notifications amidst the ongoing petty melodrama of your life:
An email that the little sister of a close friend from middle school had a grand mal seizure and died suddenly during her freshman year at college.
Texts about the student two grades below me at Kenyon who was stabbed to death in Egypt during the Arab Spring.
A Facebook post that a guy I went to high school and college with died in a helicopter crash.
Not everyone is so lucky to have the time to figure their shit out.
If you successfully paddle out past the breakers and emerge as a 30 something with friends, a fiance, and a stable living and employment situation, you face the somber realization that this is a privilege not a right.
By the time you’re celebrating real successes you’re already mourning losses and setbacks.
Things grow as they decay.
Adulthood is learning to carry, not avoid the mess — to hold on keep moving.
We move along, for those of us who made it out of those angsty spirals—and for those who never got the chance.
There’s no single way to make sense of chaos, but one thing I’m certain of now is that life isn’t one anthem that captures who you are — it’s a mixtape.
And if you’re lucky, you get to keep adding songs to it.
Fantastic! Your instincts are spot on. Audio is your native environment. The new medium fits like a glove and your reflections are beautifully drawn. Bravo. More please.