All Poets and Heroes – 21

Written By: John J. Tierney

Beautiful memories of carefree times and the cruel torture of nostalgia.

“21” the excellent new single by Syracuse’s indie rock collective All Poets & Heroes is a contemplative, melancholy meditation on that feeling of anticipation upon returning to a place, returning to people…returning to whatever held our muse in those glorious days of early adulthood when were we sure we had it all figured out, but it turns out we knew nothing and our ambitious, optimistic ignorance was truly bliss.

We quickly find out, no matter how many ways we try to put the pieces together, it will never be the same again. That realization, the disappointment can be a cold face slap of reality. A reality that you saw coming, expected, even marched toward with great purpose. But it stings just the same.

The cruel trick the universe plays on us, is that we seem to always want to return there. Return to that place of our newfound adulthood, where working enough bartending gigs or shifts at the coffee shop would cover our expenses. Where our support system is a group of likeminded friends that we thought we will be close to forever.

Rob McCall’s crystal-clear vocals paint a vivid picture of returning, revisiting a place that isn’t the place you left behind anymore. Of grabbing a perch on the “Cambridge side” of the Charles River so he can look at his place, Boston, sacred to his memories and realize the city is still there, but the “place” is gone forever. The melancholy of the lyrics, complemented with acoustic guitar and Corey Jordan’s softly accompanying piano, accented by otherworldly backup vocals and just the slightest bit of feedback as the accompaniment swells with bass and drums by bandmates Nash Robb, Rob Zaccaria and Zach Fitzgerarld and overtakes a mantra of “I’ll be fine” as he stares in the face of the growing realization that it’s not coming back. It can never come back.

“I’ll be fine.” A declarative statement, or perhaps, trying to convince. Maybe convince himself.

The band has an uncanny knack for finding those internal, psychic bruises we all carry deep within us, the pain that nobody sees, and puts a firm finger on them to remind us what that pain feels like and in doing so, in recognizing that, helps us look at that heartbreak through a newer lens, in this case the lens of time.

What All Poets and Heroes does in this 3-minute miracle of music is find that place of longing in all of us. A common point in everyone’s life when the future was wide open, and lived with joyful abandon, so much so that we didn’t see the walls of reality closing in on us until we were already gone.