F- you Aurora//Alkaline Trio//Maybe I’ll catch fire//March 14th 2000

Death is something that is always a huge question mark, ir terms of how one must deal with it. Some people become sad, some become angry or some become indifferent because they feel both of the emotions. One of the reasons why I love this song so much is because the singer takes his rage out on the place where his friend died and curses it with the entirety of his heart. I think we all connect to the idea of having to put the blame on something or the other, so as to justify all the anger we actually feel about ourselves. It is quite evident that the reason why the singer blames Aurora is because he feels like he had some kind of incompleteness with his friend, perhaps someone he dearly loves but hadn’t really given enough attention to. I think we’ve all felt that sense of regret when we lose something forever and we realise that we never appreciated it as much as we should have,

Alkaline Trio has always been overshadowed by the likes of other mainstream bands such as Green day or Blink 182 but their incredibly powerful sound, with dark lyrics, makes them quite unprecedented. Instances such as calling the city a ‘cute grave digger’ is what really gets to me, because he realizes that despite his rage against the city, it was still a beautiful place. Carrying immense rage and hatred implies that we sometimes overlook everything that we ever loved about it, in the first place. We see that the singer blames himself for the death but realizes that somehow blaming the place where his friend died, would make more sense. There is nothing worse than losing that one person that you’ve held close to yourself. What is worse, is when you know that it was of no one’s fault and then you start blaming yourself because you think you could’ve done better. What also really sticks to me, as a listener, is the fear that has been instilled in the singer’s mind, as he refuses to ever drive the same car, that his friend crashed in. Their is an obvious romantic undertone to all this, as he talks about wirting letters and tearing them up or the uselessness of his ‘i love you’s and ‘i miss you’s. It’s sad that when something ends, we start to doubt everything about the authenticity of our feelings.

As someone who’s been to Aurora, I am not particularly fond of the memories there, either. I would like to believe that, I too, lost my friend in this place, metaphorically speaking and that is why this song connects to me on a personal level. Matt Skiba’s incredibly heartfelt lyrics genuinely make me hate that place and think about all the places that I’ve lost people in. Of course, I can’t imagine hating those places because they are too dear to me and perhaps like Matt Skiba, instead of blaming ourselves or some inanimate aspect attached to the memory, we should just learn from it. It’s important to understand that everything happens for a particular reason, whether or not we are aware of it. So please don’t blame yourself for the loss of your friend; it”s probably just Aurora.