REVIEW: Let's Be Enemies-Everyone Asked About You
"You don't understand me/Words come out backwards...”
In the 90s, the second-wave emo bands that dominated the underground were as niche as they can be. Sunny Day Real Estate didn’t want to be famous, American Football hadn't become the widely-loved (and memed) band people worship now, and I feel like a lot of people only started coming back to these bands once the emo revival-a specific brand of emo featuring yelpy vocals and noodly guitars-started to gain steam in the 2010s. But as ahead of their time as a lot of these 90s bands were, I’d wager that one of the nichest bands in this scene would be a little band hailing from Little Rock, Arkansas, named after a children’s book from 1990.
Consisting of Chris Sheppard (guitar/vocals), Hannah Vogan (vocals), Collins Kilgore (guitar), Matt Bradley (bass), John Beachboard (keyboards) and Lee Buford (drums and later drummer of the noisy experimental metal band The Body). Everyone Asked About You toured with likeminded bands Braid, Rainer Maria and Joan of Arc, yet despite this emo style’s resurgence later on, they didn’t catch on for 3 decades. They also had the proudest worship of Matt Sharp’s post-Weezer band The Rentals more than any other band in the 90s, borrowing from their lovestruck Moog-driven power pop sound. Also heavily influenced by bands like Superchunk, Belle and Sebastian and their peers in Rainer Maria, the band mixed in indie pop in an infectious way that a lot of emo bands honestly weren’t really doing at all. Everyone Asked About You also had a personal element to them that really made them stand out from other bands in their scene. Singer Chris Sheppard is gay, and the realization that he’s gay informed the writing of their debut album Let’s Be Enemies-a topic that, in the 90s, emo bands weren’t writing about back then.
The band has quite some music that I can write on, including their retroactive Tik Tok hit “Sometimes Memory Fails Me Sometimes” and their comeback EP Never Leave, but for the sake of this post I’m gonna talk about the album that made me fall in love with them in the first place, Let’s Be Enemies. Recorded in 1998 but shelved for release until quietly coming out in 2012 (although according to the Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts booklet, the experiences of the song “Boston” took place in 1999…I don't know what to make of that time screw), Let’s Be Enemies actually covers a lot of ground musically. We have the explosive synthy opener “Crazy”, Superchunk-style charged indie-punk of “Song for Chris” and “Greek to Me”, the Midwest emo ballad “Taxi” and even the wistful instrumental indie folk closer “Outro”, which is a musical callback to earlier song “Letters Never Sent”. And throughout this album we get to hear Chris and Hannah reckon with those all-too familiar feelings of getting your heart broken, but their lyrics and dual vocals keep these kind of songs too clever and refreshing from ever getting stale.
Lines like “You don’t understand me/Words come out backwards”, “I laughed/But I wasn’t joking/But you weren’t joking” and “Your sooooooongs are all saaaaaaad songs!” are some of the catchiest and punchiest emo one-liners to come out of the 90s. We also hear Chris grappling with his sexuality head-on and queer crushes breaking his heart on songs like “Last Dance” (“For rubbing noses and crushing your toes/Could I have this last dance with you?") and the experimental pop songs “Boston” (“Sat down in the seat in front of me/He had a handsome face, a bit short, and short blonde hair”) and “Let’s Be Enemies”, which are both radical departures for the band in general. He lays these emotional experiences out as personal stories where you hold on to every word, and they’re put to tape with the kind of in-depth heartbreak that’s a little more unique than other bands of their ilk. The centerpiece of this album though is “Solitare/Across Puddles”, by their standards a 7-minute epic that acts as a grand culmination of their emotions on this record. That chorus of “Don’t leave me alone tonight” is to me an emo version of the chorus to the Semisonic hit “Closing Time”, a partner wanting their love to come to them when they feel lonely. And when Chris comes in near the end to sing “Broken hearts hurt/Maybe we should just shake hands”, the heartache in his voice just feels too real.
After playing their last show with Les Savy Fav and Sean Na Na (Har Mar Superstar’s band) on February 26, 2000, the band called it a day. There was no huge falling out, but their paper hearts weren’t into it anymore. Chris became a swimming coach, Collins and John went on form the indie rock band American Princes, and Lee had his real musical breakthrough with experimental metal band The Body (try listening to “Letters Never Sent” and then "To Carry The Seeds of Death Within Me” by The Body back-to-back and then report to me). Everyone Asked About You went unnoticed for two decades, and then starting in 2020, many people stuck in pandemic boredom-myself included-discovered the band organically, and slowly but steadily this high school band finally started gaining the popularity they never had.
And just like that, Everyone Asked About You were dormant no more. Feeling this newfound love and appreciation from new fans, many of which skewing young, the band finally reunited. They played a warm-up gig in Little Rock followed by the Numero Twenty festival featuring dozens of other reunited niche bands in their scene. A couple of NYC shows came after, and then the Numero Group reissued their whole hour-long catalog as a double album called Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts, featuring the song of the same name (and a song that very smartly reprises the title called “Handsome, Beautiful”.) The band was inspired enough to get back in the studio to record a reunion EP called Never Leave, chronicling new life experiences in the 20+ years they were gone such as anxiety and going against LGBT hate. That latter topic is discussed in the song “A Vigil”, written as a response to the death of Nex Benedict, and it cements Everyone Asked About You as a relevant and forward-thinking band writing about queerness as much as they were in the 90s.
As for Let’s Be Enemies, having listened to it a bunch over the past four years, I can safely regard it as one of the greatest emo albums of the 90s. Right on par with Clarity by Jimmy Eat World and LP1 by American Football-it may seem like hyperbole on my end, but it’s true. It’s got a lot of musical variety to it, the lyrics hold up incredibly well-the fact that this is a queer emo album really made them ahead of their time-and it’s just got those catchy heart-on-sleeve hooks for days. This is a special band that has rightfully deserved their long-overdue recognition, and I’m so happy they’re keeping at this dream. The name of this album may be Let’s Be Enemies, but if from this review you become obsessed with this record like I am, I wouldn’t mind becoming friends with you.
-Matthew D’iorio