John K. Samson

I kind of felt like she was the anti-me.

Like, I just felt kind of nerdy and a little bit too shy with people, and so I actually had plans to room with somebody else, but I liked B so much that at the last minute, I changed my mind so B and I could room together junior year.

I'm from Canada, and I don't...

So there's freshman year?

Freshman, sophomore, junior, senior.

You stay three years in school, and then you're still a junior.

Yeah, your third year is a junior.

And then all of a sudden you make the leap to senior.

Special thanks to Alexandra Garrityn, Ben Nadav-Hafri, Alex Bloomberg, and Jackie Cohen.

Emma Munger mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Samson, Emma Munger, and Bobby Lord.

Additional scoring by Blue Dot Sessions, Luke Genella, Sun Shapes, and Hue Time.

Our theme song is by The Weakerthans, courtesy of Epitaph Records.

A mix of new and old.

So you're gonna hear some J Church, you're gonna hear some Year of Glad, you're gonna hear some John K. Samson.

But let's start things off with Starflyer 59's I'm Disappointed off of their brand-new three-song EP, Disappointed.

[rock music]

All right, that song was Walk Away by the band Dud.

This band is a little bit of a lost project.

So this was John K. Samson's band between his stint in Propagandhi and The Weakerthans, and it was such a fascinating little piece of music.

My buddy Grant who runs Bitter Melody Records sent it to me one day.

So there's just a lot of these, like, the minutiae of life comes out in this song.

But, uh, there's this refrain that comes at the very end of the song, and it's this rising, rising moment in the song that always brings me joy, and it's when John Samson, lead singer, says, "We'll hold on to the corners of the day and fold them up to save until it's needed." And for me, that is, like, the pinnacle of emo songwriting.

[laughs]

And it's, it's a lyric that I, I hold onto because I, I really think that there are those days where you have to kind of hold on to, you know, certain memories, certain good feelings, like your connection with a person at a, at a level where you guys were, um, like, so enmeshed with each other and, and, like, finding joy in whatever the small thing was that it just, that it's just, it's always there for you.