Once More From the Top: Thoughts on Anniversary Tours
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Eagerness died in the early 2000s with the icebergs and the American dream. Despite our weary bodies and crushing debt, millennials are more than happy to resurrect our enthusiasm the second a formative band announces an anniversary tour for a beloved album. We dress up our nostalgia in a jean jacket several sizes bigger than the ones we wore during the album’s original release and prop it up in scuffed Doc Martens, now outfitted with extra sole support. We wear the years on our face as we gather a decade (or two) later with a craft beer, often with a non-alcoholic label. Then, when the venues allow it, we set our eagerness down nicely in a chair so it can rest its feet.
Over the past few years, album anniversary tours have grown increasingly popular. Some of the most significant records of our youth are reaching milestones, and the bands are going to let you know, dammit! The ennui-addled have the Ben Gibbard double-feature of Transatlanticism and Give Up by Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service, respectively. The angsty can watch the ten-year anniversary of The Hotelier’s Home Like NoPlace Is There paired with Foxing’s The Albatross. R&B fans can snatch up tickets to the 25th-anniversary tour of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and wait to see if the legend actually shows. Folk fans have My Morning Jacket’s 20th-anniversary tour of It Still Moves. Even the former Christian youth group kids, with their deconstructed beliefs and unused seminary degrees, can go see Switchfoot play The Beautiful Letdown.
These concerts tend to follow the same format: the band will go on stage to uproarious applause and start the first song. They’ll talk here and there about the process of creating the album and its lasting impact, then continue playing through the tracklist in order. If there is time left over (and there is almost always time left over), the band will play their lesser-loved songs while we nod along and pretend this isn’t our first time hearing them.
At their core, these types of concerts are meant to showcase the legacy of the band and, specifically, one of their most formative records. The audience is a combination of people who bought the CD upon its original release and newer fans who might have since discovered the music through streaming sites or a cool older sibling. Occasionally, you’ll see a preteen in the audience standing near a misty-eyed dad, simply happy to share this moment with his kid.
Music has the ability to tuck you inside itself. To suspend memories that you’ll forget about until the song comes on years later. I know a man who refused to listen to any new music throughout 2020 because he didn’t want to find something he loved, only to be transported back to the dark months of early quarantine when he revisited it in the future. Several years later, he wandered into our group chat as though he had caught a helicopter flying over his deserted island, feverishly asking us if we had listened to Phoebe Bridgers’s Punisher. We poked fun, but I stopped doubting his decision when I recently put on “Garden Song” for the first time in a year and felt the loneliness I had since repressed.
These anniversary concerts allow you to relive memories in real time. You’re no longer a thirty-something in a failing marriage getting priced out of your shitty apartment. Instead, you’re wandering across a quiet college campus, heading back to your dorm after staying a bit too late at your boyfriend’s. For a few hours, we live back in the dawn of our youth with the full acknowledgment that, after midnight, the magic will fade, and eagerness will return back to its grave.
While the memories we dig up are often positive, the performances occasionally force you to come face-to-face with how much you’ve edited your perception of self. Because a few of the songs are typically kept relevant thanks to throwback playlists, you see them as sparks in a highlight reel. When you add in the rest of the album, you suddenly remember all the sticky parts of the past few decades.
Language changes. Societal shifts. We continuously transform. This is often very good news as we slowly slog on toward progress, but it’s easy to forget how much of the process involves shedding our skin. When we’re celebrating an album from 15 years ago, we’re listening to a relic from a time before same-sex marriage was even legal in most of the United States. A good majority of the people in the audience have probably gone through some form of self-examination that has brought them to a new conclusion on social issues. We might think we’re pretty untouchable, but if we were forced to step up to a microphone and read our own diaries from ten years ago, we would likely wither in shame. During anniversary concerts, our favorite artists do exactly that.
There is mercy in most standard setlists. They allow the band to curate an image for their fans to perceive. In 2018, for example, Hayley Williams announced Paramore would be retiring their most famous song, “Misery Business,” because of the lyric, “Once a whore you’re nothing more.” Over the next few years, she’d explain her personal growth and say that she was no longer comfortable performing a line filled with such internalized misogyny. In 2022, the song once again made its way into their setlists but was now accompanied by a short explanation of the outdated lyric. On their most recent tour, when it was time for the infamous line, Hayley would hold the mic out to the audience and let them decide whether or not it reverberated through the venue. While Paramore will always be known for that song, they still get a say in whether they want that reminder at every concert.
On the other hand, you lose that ability when dealing with the entire album playthrough. Taylor Swift faced this challenge when releasing her “Taylor’s Version” of Speak Now. In the time since the album was first released, Taylor has tried to establish herself as a feminist icon, calling out the industry’s misogyny and nearly getting a television show canceled after they made a joke regarding her dating life. In the song “Better Than Revenge,” she quietly swapped out the lyric, “she’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress” with “he was a moth to the flame, she was holding the matches.” People quickly noticed, and the typical energy of Swift’s rereleases was now divided as fans and critics alike picked apart the text. Some wondered if Swift’s actions supported this change while others debated whether it was all that problematic to begin with. To this day, the simple lyric change remains the primary conversation regarding Speak Now (Taylor’s Version).
When you’re not one of the most popular acts in modern music, you get the chance to escape relatively unscathed. Sure, you may have done the work and read all the books, but you aren’t often forced to discuss this personal evolution. You can rewrite the setlists as needed, excluding whatever songs are painful to look back on. Anniversary concerts rid you of this opportunity entirely. Most likely, fans have spent weeks relistening to the album in preparation for this night, so if an artist wanted to exclude a song, it’s noticeable. You can either grit your teeth and play through it or offer an explanation.
When The Hotelier was first actively touring, they decided to take the Home Like NoPlace Is There song “Housebroken” off their setlist. While they originally meant it to be an anti-establishment anthem, many fans had visceral reactions and interpreted it as a song that justified abuse. In 2014, the band released a statement on their Tumblr announcing that it would be retired out of respect for those crowd members. When I saw them during their St. Louis anniversary concert in 2023, they played the song with no discussion before or after. A few days later, Christian Holden returned to their Tumblr to address the readdition of the song. He admitted that, while he still stood by his original decision to nix the song, much of his previous reaction was fueled by youth and naivety. He concluded by writing, “And here we circle back to trauma not as a thing done to us by bad people, but now by people we love with every ounce of our being, people we wouldn’t throw out in front of a moving car. Many people will have their own interpretation of what that means to them, and I’ll let them have it. I’m just the messenger.” The band continued to play the song throughout the anniversary tour.
A similar situation came up when I saw Pedro the Lion this past summer for an anniversary tour of Control and It’s Hard to Find A Friend. The lead singer, Dave Bazan, has gone through a very public religious deconversion. For a period of time, the band was signed to the Christian record label, Tooth and Nail. Here, they gained a huge audience of angsty evangelical youth group kids who stayed with them even after Bazan was explicit about leaving Christianity. Before the show, I stood with several people I had never met before, and we all spoke about the comfort we found in the band after experiencing a parallel journey with our own faith. It felt as though we could have written these lyrics ourselves. Halfway through the set that night, Bazan paused the music between tracks. Looking as grizzled as ever in his plain black shirt and zip-up hoodie, he offered an apology, saying he now realizes how misogynistic many of the lyrics were. He then invited people to leave as needed so they could care for themselves. It was a stark reminder of how often the path to improvement is marked by giant missteps.
To be an artist means you’re constantly putting your innermost thoughts on display for the world to judge. As with everyone, you’re allowed growth, but performing anniversary tours forces you to address it firsthand. As audience members, we face a similar reckoning. Of course, we aren’t personally responsible for these lyrics, but they are a part of a band’s identity that we decided to accept as we became lifelong fans. It’s not comfortable to stand there in the crowd and hear a lead singer address the fact that our old favorites are seeped in misogyny and bias, but god, is it important. And while it might halt our trip on the time machine, it allows us to leave behind a layer of nostalgia that creates a faultless view of a time that was actually pretty damn harmful for much of the population.
Anniversary tours are likely not going anywhere any time soon. Most of the people from my generation feel hopeless, whether we’re thinking about rising house costs, increased fascism, or the very real threats of climate change. While the announcements of these tours make us reach for the retinol, they’re also a way to relive our youthfulness in one of the most immersive ways imaginable. At the same time, we’re going to have to continue facing the painful aspects of the past. In a few years, Brand New’s The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me will turn 20, and while I doubt they’ll have a tour, I’m confident we’ll be having a conversation over the seminal album while also keeping the misdeeds of Jesse Lacey at the forefront. Likely, we will see this with similar bands we let go of during the #MeToo conversation.
The internet has entirely shifted how we talk about music from this era. The same technology that allowed us to listen to these formerly obscure artists has since brought about hyperawareness about the environment in which they arose. Even our nostalgia is painted with a shade of reality, forcing us to wrestle with the systems we once were complicit in upholding. Personally, I’ll continue to attend these concerts as long as I can. And while I’ll happily come home too late with blisters from my Docs and too much adrenaline to fall asleep, I’ll be grateful for the suspension of memories followed by a realization that I am still becoming a better version of myself.
Lindsay Fickas is a freelance writer based near St. Louis. When she’s not busy chasing around her kids or vehemently defending provel cheese, she is most likely at a concert, crying. She spends far too much time on social media, and you can find her on pretty much every site at @lindsayfickas.
