The Song
Title: Are We All Forgotten
Artist: Paper Route
Album: Are We All Forgotten [EP]
Year: 2008
The Story
At my first job out of college, I was one of many managers at a bookstore. My desk was in this little pseudo-office cubby that I shared with one other woman and the computer where all the hourly employees came to punch in and out of their shifts. I worked there for two years and in that time I did about, oh, six hours of actual work. Most of my days were spent exploring the early internet, reading old Bill Simmons columns and everything Daniel O’Brien wrote for Cracked,1 and laughing at the (alien to me) debauchery of my peers, as reported by Texts from Last Night and FML.
A couple of days after I started, I went to the electronics section (shelf?) of the store and grabbed a small pair of desk speakers that couldn’t possibly have run me more than $20. And then I spent two years slowly torturing my poor office-mate by playing music non-stop, every single day, until the minute I left.2
I listened to so much Paper Route during those years. The deepest corners of the internet are filled with all the things I’ve written about Paper Route, and yet I never wrote anything about the band while I was at that bookstore, even as their music felt so revolutionary to me at the time—odd as it may seem now, the way Paper Route incorporated programmed instrumentation into a pop-rock band felt utterly new in 2008. “Are We All Forgotten” sounded like someone had taken The Postal Service’s “This Place is a Prison” out to the club to finally get over its ex—because moving on is the only way to move on—and then, inspired by the night, they both did molly with some new friends in the bathroom. It was unexpected and exciting, is what I’m saying.
At the same time, I was launching my first blog,3 writing on the internet for the first time—evidence of which you can still find!—and, between listening to bands like Paper Route and writing words that actual strangers would read, I felt like I was one of a select few, at the helm of the future. And now every song is programmed and everyone writes on the internet. So it goes.
Anyway, while another song from this EP was sharp and personal and helped me through a breakup,4 “Are We All Forgotten” was poetic5 and expansive and enthralling. The soundscapes and ideas and soaring vocals—I needed all of it in a time when I felt so small, fresh out of college, rudderless, sharing a dark and damp basement office with a woman who, if I’m lucky, has forgotten me.
I give “Are We All Forgotten” four out of five stars.
Even if you don’t know who Daniel O’Brien is, there’s a good chance you like his work. He’s spent the last five years writing for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
I’m not proud of this but my guilty conscience feels compelled to state that I was a real asshole about this. I didn’t play anything too loudly, but I played it constantly. She could not escape. One year, on her birthday, she asked if she could play something off her phone—a reasonable consideration that I had not once thought about extending to her on my own. I let her use the speakers that day. (I’m not a monster!) But that day felt like it lasted forever and I remember hating whatever she played. (Okay, I am a monster.)
I was going to make an “RIP Blogger” joke but apparently Blogger still exists. What!? Whyyyyyy?!?!?!
“You Kill Me,” obviously.
“If we’ve all forgotten you / are we all forgotten, too?” remains a delightful little illumination of the type of solipsism that we’re all guilty of sometimes. And, as I was phasing into a new stage of my life, leaving a lot of people and places behind, lyrics and melodies like that felt so big, you know?