journeyproud's Recent Activity

  1. journeyproud liked thebe_st's post in the thread Barely Civil – I’d Say I’m Not Fine.

    Excellent review; glad I checked this out. I've been playing it on repeat all week. Awesome album. Hope others can find it as well, these guys are doing something great.

    Mar 27, 2024 at 3:10 PM
  2. journeyproud liked Craig Manning's post in the thread Album The Dangerous Summer - Coming Home (2022).

    I think I like Mother Nature a little less now than I did when it came out, just for what it did to their songwriting in the long run. If you look at how most of those songs work, there's just way more repetition in AJ's songwriting than there had been before (the choruses to "Blind Ambition" and "Virginia" and "Way Down," the outro of the title track, etc.) and I think they learned the wrong lessons from that on their subsequent releases. Without a producer like Sam Pura to make those songs as dynamic as they ended up sounding, I just don't think they are as good at their core as the songs on the first two albums. Still an amazing album, to be clear. I love it and it means a lot to me. But I think the seeds for what led to their decline are absolutely there, in retrospect.

    Mar 27, 2024 at 3:09 PM
  3. journeyproud liked Craig Manning's post in the thread Album The Dangerous Summer - Coming Home (2022).

    I just miss the way AJ used to write songs. There’s something almost stream-of-consciousness about those first few albums, like he hadn’t learned enough about songwriting yet to get totally locked into rigid forms. And the result is that those songs are so packed with words, and along with it, so much feeling and emotion and memory. The more recent stuff just feels so lyrically thin to me in comparison. It’s most obvious in the lack of those really incredible bridges he used to write, but even the choruses have just lost that special something. Coming Home isn’t bad, but it feels like something a hundred other bands could make. I’ve never felt like there was any other band that could have made Reach for the Sun or War Paint. Even among that era of pop punk/emo bands, there was something about the way AJ wrote songs that was unique from everyone else. I don’t know if that’s something they can ever get back, but I’d love to be wrong.

    Mar 27, 2024 at 3:05 PM
  4. journeyproud replied to the thread Benji Madden and Cameron Diaz Announce Birth.

    What a boss.

    Mar 26, 2024 at 3:54 AM
  5. journeyproud replied to the thread Barely Civil – I’d Say I’m Not Fine.

    I’m with you. Have been following the band and this album is very special.

    Mar 23, 2024 at 12:02 AM
  6. journeyproud liked Mrk_Brdshw's post in the thread Album Hot Mulligan - Why Would I Watch (May 12, 2023).

    New song is so good. The subject matter got me pretty riled up as I listened to it while sitting at my desk at work lol.

    Mar 21, 2024
  7. journeyproud liked youll be fine's post in the thread The Story So Far - I Want To Disappear (June 21, 2024).

    I just feel like there’s a common denominator with all these stories

    Mar 21, 2024