The Wonder Years wrote ‘a love letter’ to Philly. And Nick Foles.
On their latest album, "The Hum Goes on Forever," The Wonder Years seem to take their Philly pride to the next level.
Nick Foles might not be an Eagle anymore, but he’s still an almost-religious figure for fans of the team that is shaping up to be a Super Bowl contender once again. Just ask The Wonder Years, the Philly rock outfit whose latest, The Hum Goes on Forever, is out today.
Lead singer Dan Campbell rips through the opening line of the album’s fifth song, “The Paris of Nowhere,” scream-singing about the “shrines to St. Nick Foles” he’d seen in windows around the city.
“I can’t put a sentence together to say, ‘This is what Philadelphia is,’” Campbell recently told The Inquirer in a phone interview. So instead, he wrote about it. “The whole purpose of the song is a love letter to the city.”
The track’s title is Campbell’s take on the way many use the French city as a cultural touchstone to compare to other locations that try to mimic its perceived sophistication.
“We’re the Paris of nowhere … this is our town,” he said.
It’s the kind of gritty hometown pride that may read as standoffish to outsiders. Still, Campbell, who’s a Lansdale native and recently moved with his wife and kids from Fishtown to South Jersey, admitted that there’s “a hidden sweetness” to Philly. (“We’re a city that gets a bad rap … but, man, when it snows, everyone digs out the elderly neighbor’s steps,” he explained.) “Desperate, kind, and cutthroat,” he sings.
Beyond the Nick Foles Super Bowl reference, “Paris” is peppered with some exact callouts — to Market East, the Schuylkill, the Delaware — and inexact ones that are more of an “if you know you know” — like “planting gardens in the potholes when no one comes to fill them in” or “a block party outside a junkyard fire.”
And the local shout-outs are in abundance throughout the album — if you’re paying attention. There’s a throwaway mention of “the [Garden State] Parkway” here, a line about “somewhere in South Jersey” there, almost like a treasure hunt for fans from the area, many of whom have been following the band since its beginnings.
The specificity in the songwriting style has paid off: The band has released seven studio albums since 2007. The three prior to The Hum Goes on Forever cracked the Billboard 200′s Top 20.
The songs often take on a diaristic tone, going deep on grief and death, anxiety and depression, and The Hum Goes on Forever ventures, as Pitchfork notes, “where pop-punk rarely has: parenthood.”
Campbell said he’s not worried about the level of autobiographical detail in his songwriting, noting that it draws in listeners, including himself.
“The music that I like does that, it’s heavy on specificity,” he said.
Sometimes, that might mean convincing people that Philly isn’t the rudest city in the country. Campbell emphatically rebuked anyone who has mixed feelings about Philadelphia: “It is the greatest city in the world.”
Before hanging up, he added, “Go Birds.”