Album Review: Dan Campbell Gets Personal & Universal on “Other People’s Lives”
How an experiment in songwriting & connection from the Wonder Years & Aaron West frontman underscores the relevancy of his previous work
Dan Campbell has been exploring universality — the notion that there are ties that bind us together as humans, amidst all our differences. Leave it to the isolating experience of quarantine, of all things, to help him clinch the proof of this theorem.
On November 19th, the Wonder Years frontman released Other People’s Lives, his first solo album under his own name — a collection of ten songs that — ironically, and as the title suggests — are all about other people. Well, at least at face value. In March 2020, after a pandemic had swept the music industry and stalled life as he knew it, Campbell announced a new endeavor: taking song commissions from fans.
“I’ll write and record a song for you — for your wedding, for your anniversary, in memory of someone, or just because. A gift for someone. A gift for yourself. Whatever.” It was an idea he apparently kicked around for a while, but he took it on now to, as he said, “jump start my brain into songwriting mode, to ward off insanity from self-quarantining and to make sure I can keep [my son] diapered and fed and happy.”
Roughly 500 requests poured in, and Campbell took on upwards of 20 of them. What resulted was a batch of songs Campbell was particularly happy with — so, after getting permission from his customers, he re-recorded a handful of the previously private songs for a public release.
Sonically, it’s an album that feels at once evolved and on par with the sound he has developed in both his Aaron West side project and the Wonder Years’ Burst and Decay acoustic releases. Compared to both of those projects, his vocals mostly remain more subdued here. Fans who prefer the louder, more intense side of his singing will find the album reaches their desired energy in tracks six and eight: The bridge of “Gull Lake” and entirety of “In Love in Various Rooms” find Campbell at his loudest and feel like the record’s crescendo.
Lyrically, there’s more to be said (or, you know, a larger tangent to be had).
To ensure quality and authenticity, Campbell began the song commission process with in-depth video calls with his customers, trying to excavate as many details as possible to inform the lyrics. This is evident in the final product — To step into other people’s experiences, he relies on specifics like locations, ages, and dates. The emotion he puts into the singing these stories further rounds out the effect.
In a recent livestream, he explained, “I wanted people to hear these and be like, ‘I don’t see any reason that this shouldn’t just be on an Aaron West or Wonder Years record, except that the lyrics are about me.’ That was kind of the goal, as far as the level of songwriting.”
While the record is effective all around, it’s what the songwriting conveys that’s most striking — at least when you step back and consider (read: overanalyze) the breadth of Campbell’s output across his career.
Campbell is best known as the lead singer and lyricist for The Wonder Years, a band who attracted a significant part of their audience (and established a core part of their identity) with a trilogy of albums about depression and growing up that became something of a biblical text to a whole generation of pop-punk fans. While the band’s 2007 debut, Get Stoked On It!, often skewed more humorous and juvenile in its lyrics, Campbell found his niche over the next three — 2010’s The Upsides, 2011’s Suburbia I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing, and 2013’s The Greatest Generation — all of which were built upon autobiographical songs more concerned with conveying direct emotions and feelings than metaphors.
Underscoring the fact that Campbell’s words came straight from his own mind and notebook — and perhaps to leave Easter eggs for fans — his lyricism is known for the inclusion of references to previous songs and even previous albums. From symbols and phrases like cardinals, flowers, and “the devil in [one’s] bloodstream” to stories like punching holes in walls, callbacks and recurring themes serve as a through-line in his work — some conscious, and some probably not. Even simple words and sentiments recur. When Campbell rails against the college frat party scene on The Upsides’ “This Party Sucks,” you don’t expect a concept as simple as “staying” to reappear on two more consecutive tracks, but it does. And it doesn’t stop there. Two albums later, “I was kinda hoping you’d stay” becomes the refrain of “Passing Through A Screen Door”. The following record, 2015’s No Closer To Heaven, works it into a chorus once more as Campbell tells his significant other “I’m glad that you stayed”.
By the Wonder Years’ fifth record, 2018’s Sister Cities, Campbell managed to grow while still adhering to his autobiographical brand, writing an album about seeing himself in others. With songs that shift from personal narrative to similar stories of people in other places, it’s a record about the universality of the human experience — how we have more commonality than we do differences.
But five years earlier, Campbell had also embarked on a new exploration by abandoning the self, shifting from personal memoir to personal fiction. In his side-project Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties, Campbell writes entire concept albums around the titular fictional frontman, singing about the chronology of this made-up life and even performing entirely in character during live shows. Inspired by the Mountain Goats’ and the Weakerthans’ abilities to craft characters that compelled him, Campbell realized that well-illustrated stories about someone fake could resonate as powerfully as the detailed accounts of his own life — That age-old writer’s trick of universality through specificity. (After all, who is Campbell but a character to his listeners who only know him parasocially?) It’s a venture based entirely on Campbell’s realizing the universality of our stories.
Now for the first time (directly and cohesively, at least), Campbell is welcoming new characters from reality, directly structuring an entire record around the stories of others.
For an album of ten separate assignments, Other People’s Lives flows together well enough. Of course, packaging the collection as “Other People’s Lives” assures some level of cohesiveness, but even aside from that, thematically it feels unified. Songs about loss are covered back-to-back in “Gull Lake (In A Pleach-Plum Dawn)” and “The Kings of Halloween.” The next two, “In Love in Various Rooms” and “Streetlights Painted You Gold,” offer chronological accounts of relationships. In a nice bit of synchronicity between the latter pair, one song culminates in a couple’s “names carved into a tree” before being followed by a song whose refrain is built around that same timeless tradition.
But more than thematic cohesion, what these recurrent details really drive home is all of that Sister Cities- and Aaron West-era work that led Campbell to this point. Across the myriad of differences in people’s lives, our experiences can parallel so closely; our similarities can be curiously specific. This is most highlighted by the lyrics that echo back not to other songs on Other People’s Lives, but to songs on those other Campbell records. When on “Gull Lake,” Campbell sings “I know you gotta go / but I was hoping that you’d stay”, pausing the song’s reflection of a sick loved one here to repeat that line — “Hoping you’d stay / Hoping you’d stay” — you can’t help but think back to all those lines about staying that he penned with the Wonder Years. The narrators are different; the situations vary; the “staying” means something different — but they’re all desperate pleas for a loved one to stay nonetheless.
Likewise, when flowers pop up in various capacities on Other People’s Lives tracks like “When I Face Into the Wind,” “The Kings of Halloween”, and (naturally) “Conversations with the Flowers”, you’re reminded of the floral imagery Campbell has employed elsewhere — namely autobiographical Wonder Years love song “Flowers Where Your Face Should Be,” and the significance of daylilies in the fictional Aaron West story. In some stories on this record they illustrate love and in others they illustrate loss, but regardless, the commonality of the symbol across disparate individuals’ stories feels like a comforting takeaway from the album.
It’s become a cliche to highlight the irony of COVID isolation bringing people closer together, but for a project about other people written at Dan Campbell’s most alone (in a sense, at least), you can’t ignore that that same paradox is at play here. What began by necessity — or as a desperate attempt for normalcy and occupation in the restriction and isolation of a world standing still and apart — resulted in a record that combines and confirms the theses of Sister Cities and the Aaron West discography. Other People’s Lives is not only a logical next step for Campbell’s musical trajectory but supporting evidence of the data he has found across his career.
Other People’s Lives is out now via Loneliest Place On Earth & Miscellaneous Recordings.
