“Let us die, let us die, and dying we reply:

someday I’ll find me.”

These two lines bookend the discography of mewithoutYou. One screamed out in anguish, in a voice furious at the world and itself, already resigned to a darker fate; one sung peacefully, almost with acceptance, as if the 16 years inbetween were just a pitstop on a lifelong journey of self-discovery. What a stop it was, though: crafty foxes and existential elephants, porcupines with threatening auras and spiders on leaves, apocalyptic prophecies and silly little fables. I could write for days and not begin to sift the multitudes mewithoutYou contained – truly, if any band has ever had cause to lay claim to being more than just the members it was comprised of, this was the one. Perhaps if I stick to their final night, I may find the words before the world ends.

mewithoutYou played their last show on August 20^th 2022, and it’s hard to ask for a better setlist with which to say goodbye. Having burned through the big fan favourites on night one, the second night of the farewell tour was almost wall-to-wall deep cuts that would never get airtime within the confines of a normal tour. From their early rippers, receiving one final acknowledgement (god did “Bullet to Binary” go off though) to mid-career deep cuts that rank as some of the band’s best (“Nine Stories”, “The King Beetle on a Coconut Estate” and the bizarrely overlooked “Bethlehem, WV”) to a genuinely baffling cut that I have to imagine was a request from some family member of another (“Julian the Onion”, really?) It was as if Aaron Weiss was stepping in and out of the various selves he’s inhabited since the beginning of the band, whether crowdsurfing into the pit to scream his lungs out on “Nice and Blue”, strapping on an accordion for a genuinely haunting rendition of “Son of a Widow”, or just strumming the hell out of an acoustic guitar for a rousing singalong of “The Fox, The Crow and the Cookie”. When Josh Scogin came out on stage to murder a rendition of “Memphis Will be Laid to Waste”, it was a spine-tingling moment which doubled as a reminder that mewithoutYou was never Just Another Scene Band. They’ve always been more, haven’t they? Something unique unto themselves, thoughtful and generous beyond measure both as people and in their writing, wise beyond the years and claiming to know nothing.

“BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME”

These words flashed on the backdrop of the stage right before mewithoutYou returned for their second and final (final) encore. You can’t say the boys didn’t have a sense of humour about the proceedings, and the feeling was doubled when brightly coloured balloons streamed down from above stage halfway through the philosophical treatise of “All Circles”, almost jarring against the misty eyes in the crowd – which turned to outright sobs when the family members of the entire band came out to dance along to the final rendition of “In a Sweater Poorly Knit”. Still, that’s the band in a nutshell, isn’t it? The strange, childish humour sitting against the harshest of realities, an accordion jig soundtracking the apocalypse? I couldn’t blame anyone for laughing at the moment which fully made me cry, when Aaron, looking at the crowd and seemingly let the full weight of the moment hit him after an acoustic “Cardiff Giant”, raised his hand to his head in a heartfelt salute.

Better luck next time, indeed: there’ll never be another band like mewithoutYou, and I can’t imagine how anyone would even try.  There may be no other band who fostered such a sense of community, for 21 years and across so many genres. The late, great David Berman said “songs build little rooms in time”; mewithoutYou built houses, warm and welcoming for anyone to enter. Everything ends, of course, but the best things keep mattering long after they do, and the art mewithoutYou made will always matter.

“I’ll tear my shirts, shatter windows, do my best to act surprised

…but you can leave me anytime.”

mewithoutYou, 2001-2022 forever.