Yellowcard – Lift a Sail

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In the Yellowcard discography, Lift a Sail is the oddity. It’s not a pop-punk album, for one thing – not really even close. There are arena rock songs on this record, and songs inspired by ‘90s alt-rock, and songs with a whole lot of electronic flourishes, and songs that are experimental and minimalist. There are arguably zero songs that sound like the Yellowcard of old: the band with big, bright choruses, and lyrics about summertime, and triumphant electric violin solos, and rapidfire, double-time drums. And speaking of those drums, this record marks Yellowcard’s first without drummer Longineu “LP” Parsons III, whose technical acumen behind the kit was always a strong selling point for many listeners.

For all these reasons and more, Lift a Sail was a tough pill to swallow for a lot of Yellowcard fans when it arrived 10 years ago. I remember the AbsolutePunk.net forums in the days after the album came out, and the divide in the Yellowcard threads about whether it lived up to their legacy. Plenty of fans loved it, and found the departures the band made from their signature sound to be refreshing and invigorating. But another segment of listeners – if we’re being honest, a larger segment – was baffled by what they were hearing. The phrase “sell out” was definitely bandied about, as if no pop-punk band worth its salt could try on electropop flourishes without going artistically bankrupt. A lot of fans missed the pop-punk, missed the summertime vibes, missed the big choruses and the bigger drums. I definitely remember a few users saying that, if LP wasn’t going to be a part of the band’s universe anymore, then they didn’t want to be, either.

I remember all of that, but what I remember more is listening to Lift a Sail over and over and over again that week, looking for solace in its melancholy songs. The album dropped, officially, on October 7. I probably heard it for the first time two or three weeks before that, courtesy of a label advance. Between those two dates, on October 2, my grandpa died, at the age of 88. All the albums I was listening to that fall are refracted through the prism of that loss, even to this day. I doubt I’ll ever hear Andrew McMahon’s debut Wilderness album, or U2’s Songs of Innocence, or Field Report’s Marigolden, or Damien Rice’s My Favourite Faded Fantasy without thinking of my grandfather and the cloud his death cast on that autumn. But of all those albums, Lift a Sail was the one that released closest the day my grandpa died, and as a result, it is the album I most associate with the grief of those weeks.

If you’d have told me leading into that fall that a Yellowcard album would provide the comforting soundtrack to my life’s first real encounter with death and loss, I’m not sure I would have believed you. That’s not to say this band hadn’t already proven themselves, many times over, to be capable of making music that was profoundly meaningful to me. In my life soundtrack, though, Yellowcard were adolescent longing and teenage summer crushes; they were last-night-of-summer melancholy and, eventually, end-of-college reflection. Their music was all about growing up and coming-of-age. It didn’t seem dark enough or stark enough to speak to something as harrowing as death.

But as I’ve already mentioned, Lift a Sail wasn’t just another Yellowcard album. Frontman Ryan Key wrote the songs about his relationship with (now ex-wife) Alyona Alekhina, a former professional snowboarder who was left paralyzed from the waist down in a 2013 snowboarding accident. “One Bedroom,” the album’s first single, bears the scars of that incident and sounds distinctly unlike any other Yellowcard single as a result. Most Yellowcard albums are introduced with big, bold, catchy rock songs: “Way Away” as the first taste of Ocean Avenue, the title track leading the way for Lights and Sounds, “Light up the Sky” introducing Paper Walls, “For You, and Your Denial” breaking the silence after the band’s lengthy hiatus in the leadup to When You’re Through Thinking, Say Yes, and “Always Summer” triumphantly heralding the arrival of Southern Air.

“One Bedroom” sounds nothing like any of those songs. For most of its runtime, it’s a bittersweet little acoustic guitar serenade, written by Key for Alyona, about the early stages of her recovery. The electric guitars eventually do kick in at the end, and the track builds to a big “rock song” climax, but the turn feels almost tacked on. The song isn’t about that big climax, but about the sad, lovelorn fragility of the music that proceeds it. And hearing Yellowcard start a new era with something that sounded fragile and breakable was stark, because they’d so often been a band whose music made me feel invincible.

The whole album is like that. See the delicate build of “Convocation,” the stunningly beautiful violin adagio that Sean Mackin plays to start the album, before the big pounding drums of “Transmission Home” come barreling in. Yellowcard had started an album with a violin intro before, but “Three Flights Up,” which kicks off Lights and Sounds, feels more like the overture before a Broadway show starts – a sneakily bombastic piece of music intended to build anticipation. “Convocation” isn’t bombastic at all. It sounds sad, but maybe a little hopeful at the same time. And that’s Lift a Sail in a nutshell: an album that reaches for hope in the midst of tragedy and struggle and strife.

I don’t know what I would have heard in Lift a Sail had it not been for the hand that fate had chosen to deal me in the fall of 2014. But because I was listening to this album in the weeks where my grandfather was fading, and on the day I saw him last, and on the day he passed away, the songs took on the shape of that loss. Nearly every song had a line or two that seemed to speak to the ache of my grief, and to the magnitude of his presence in my life that was now gone. “You can’t know the way it feels to lose something so fragile and dear to you”; “Do you picture me? What do you see? Maybe a future full of unwritten things”; “I’ve left myself in every song, in every note”; “All these mornings turn into brand new days, everything still hurts, you’re so far away”; “If a storm blows in on me, I am ready now”; “When everything that I can see/Goes dark I feel you here with me.” I collected little bits of these songs on every listen, drawing upon the lyrics like little notes found in the coat pockets and desk drawers of a lost loved one. They seemed like messages from him: to wear my grief as a talisman – as a tribute to my ability to love so deeply – and to carry it with me as I faced the next storm of unwritten days, months, and years.

I think most of us listen to music, primarily, to try to feel young again. It’s why we are drawn to music festivals that trade in nostalgia, or why we buy so much stock in new artists who sound like the artists we loved when we were teenagers. We want to hold on to the way music made us feel when we were 14 or 17 or 21, because that was when life seemed to be most wide open and full of possibility. So many people lose their ability to connect with new music as the years wear on, and that makes sense: Why try to find the appeal of something new when the act of listening to the music you used to love – that you’ve always loved – is the one, single magic trick you can cast to take yourself back in time?

Yellowcard were always a band that operated on the lifeblood of youth, like it was gasoline. Their songs and albums, for years, sounded like that big start-of-summer bonfire party your best friend threw a few days before you graduated from high school. Lift a Sail wasn’t that, by a long shot, and a lot of fans turned up their noses at it as a result. But I’ve always loved the artists who can be lifelong companions – the ones who recognize when it’s time for the party to end, and who turn the wheel into the storm rather than trying to stall out the car at the edge of adulthood. The ones who take the accumulating calendar pages and the dwindling sand in the hourglass and turn those ingredients into sad, unflinching, life-affirming songs about age and mortality.

I get why Lift a Sail was a bridge too far for some Yellowcard fans. Too dark. Too grown up. Too goddamn sad. But all those things are why I love this record, and why I think it might just be the single greatest album Yellowcard ever made. It doesn’t have the singles that Ocean Avenue did, or the back-to-life spark that When You’re Through Thinking, Say Yes did, or the climactic heft that Southern Air did. Lift a Sail doesn’t even have the thing I would have told you was its greatest asset 10 years ago: that it was fearless. To be sure, this album bravely ditches all the trappings of a typical Yellowcard album and embraces darkness, and electronics, and long intros and outros, and all sorts of things you might not have expected from this band. But it’s not the absence of fear that I love about this record today; it’s the presence of it – the way “Illuminate” seems to shiver and shudder at the possibilities of a life full of pain and joy in equal measure; the way “MSK” aches at the beauty and agony of loving someone so much that you’ll never have your armor on again; the way the narrator of the title track plunges their boat into a hurricane, because what could make you feel more alive than recognizing you aren’t invincible after all, but then inviting the world to take a swing at you anyway?

Losing my grandpa broke me in half and left me exposed in a way I’d never experienced before. I was 23 years old and I had never truly been confronted with the permanence of death. For the first few days, it hurt so bad that I wasn’t sure I could survive it. But then I’d press play on Lift a Sail and it would all feel a little different – painful, still, but with the added adrenaline of hearing these big, bruising, heart-on-the-sleeve rock songs reckon with devastation and remind me I wasn’t alone. The pain in the songs never escaped me, but neither did the hope: the faith in “Transmission Home” that your message might find its mark before it’s too late, for instance, or the way “California” seemed to flash back to those beaches from Ocean Avenue with the unflinching belief that all the magic and possibility they held is still there, if only you are brave enough to seek it again. I liked to think my grandpa was sending me messages through the songs – reminders that it was OK to keep going, to put one foot in front of another, to get back to living life. In the words of the title track: “Then I realized I’d gone nowhere/And life is just too sweet to lie in this defeat.”

Writing these words now is bittersweet, because it means that it’s been 10 years since the last time I saw my him, or talked to him, or heard him laugh. I still have days, now and again, when the phone will ring, and I’ll forget for a moment where I am in space and time, and I’ll imagine picking up and hearing his voice again. I think that ghost of him will always be there, just like the people we loved are never really gone, under any circumstance. But I don’t know if I ever feel closer to him than when I play this album loud and let the soundwaves collide with me again like they did back then. They might not sound like the Yellowcard everyone knew before, but they sure sound like the Yellowcard I love most. And, to me, they sound like him.

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