Frank Turner’s “The Ballad of Me and My Friends” is an ode to the people around the music scene that aren’t quite making it but refuse to give up. Whether you’ve lived this or not, anyone who’s stuck with something out of love can relate to these lyrics. There’s a point where you can (at least partially) let go of the big dream and accept the process as what brings meaning to your life. From there, the chips fall where the chips fall. It’s an adventure. And, in the most stoic of senses, we can accept our fate and relish in the stories, good and bad, we’ve picked up along the way. The surest way to really live is to live for something we really love.
Everybody’s got themselves a plan
And everybody thinks they’ll be the man, including the girls
The musicians who lack the friends to form a band are singer-songwriters
The rest of us are DJ’s or official club photographers
And tonight I’m playing another Nambucca show
So I’m going through my phonebook, texting everyone I know
And quite a few I don’t, whose numbers found their way into my phone
But they might come along anyway, you never really know
None of this is going anywhere
Pretty soon we’ll all be old
And no one left alive will really care
About our glory days, when we sold our souls
But if you’re all about the destination, then take a fucking flight
We’re going nowhere slowly, but we’re seeing all the sights
And we’re definitely going to hell
But we’ll have all the best stories to tell
Yes, I am definitely going to hell
But, I’ll have all the best stories to tell
The version I first fell in love with:
One for the visual live experience (that’s how you sing along):
And the version NOFX did on their split covers album with Frank Turner that put it back into my head:
