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 In 2022, the song once again made its way into their setlists but was now accompanied by a short explanation of the outdated lyric.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.
