An Open Letter to Fall Out Boy From The Mother of a Teenage Fan

I suppose that this could have been addressed to any band out there, but it isn’t.  It isn’t because she chose you. 

I’m not sure when it happens, but I suppose it happens to all teenagers and their mothers. The slow transition of introspective self isolation, when they start spending more time alone in their room, beginning the segregation of themselves from the crowd with the insertion of ear buds, the creeping feeling that the people who have nurtured them for their whole lives no longer understand them. So then we begin the awkward dance of what feels like interrogations over dinner and evasive answers because she is sure that I could never understand her. The worry on my part and the frustration on hers builds.

But I do understand her. I understand her because I remember myself what it felt like and what music meant to me when I was her age. When the pressures of growing up are drowning you and music feels like air in your lungs.  How when no one else understands and you can’t form the words to help them understand, that somehow that song, those lyrics GET it. She has connected with you, with your music, on a level that is personal and meaningful. When she isolates herself away and I look at her closed bedroom door, I can take solace in fact that you are there for her when she feels like no one else is.

You need to know that she is amazing. Beyond amazing. She is cuttingly witty and intelligent.  She is a marvelously talented classically instructed double bassist. When she is finished with her requisite scales, and measure after measure of complicated pieces, she decompresses by playing your music. She writes the notes down in a bound journal of lines that is tucked away in her case like a treasure.  She’s the kid in the orchestra pit with purple in her hair and black on black Vans.

I bought her tickets to your concert tour this summer. She didn’t ask for them because she was unsure if we would allow her to go.  It will be her first concert experience.  I bought them because I want her to know how it feels to stand in an arena with thousands of other people that feel just like her. To feel the bass in her feet, the drums thump in her chest, the sound of thousands of kids singing back the lines that she has connected with.  It is an experience that YouTube just cannot provide and it is the least I can do for her.

She is amazing. She is mighty. She is mine.

But she is also yours. You are the anthem of her youth, so Thank You.