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Music

Senses Fail: Of Closure and Rebirth

The former Warped Tour stars are now a nostalgia act, and Buddy Nielsen is fine with that.

Illustration by Anna Khachiyan

Imagine you peaked at age 20. Not just in terms of being the most youthful and best-looking version of yourself possible, but like, an actual peak, where you did the thing that defined you. The thing that, when people you have never met talk about you after you die, will be the thing they discuss. Imagine looking back, ten years later, at that thing you did and cringing just a little bit because that thing that you created when you were 20 was an expression of your ugliest self. No matter how much more intelligent, mature, compassionate, wise, un-self-centered, decent, etc. you might become, people will never see it. They will always see you for something you did at 20, when you were raw, imperfect, aggressive, and unsure. Now imagine the weirdness of spending an entire summer making money off of that thing you did when you were 20. That’s Buddy Nielson’s problem.

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“A lot of people are like, ‘Why don’t you just break up Senses Fail? You’re the only original member.’ But, like, what’s the point? Maybe we should break up. Maybe we will break up.”

It is a Monday afternoon, and Nielson, the vocalist and sole original member of Senses Fail, is calling me from the road, which is where he’s spent the summer, touring. As we discuss if breaking his band up is physically possible, if Senses Fail is still the same Senses Fail that ruled Warped Tour with an iron fist, or if Senses Fail is now a completely different band that just happens to share a name and a founding member with the original Senses Fail, I get the sense that Nielson is considering these questions pretty much all the time. Every night, he and a crew of replacement players go out onstage and play the now-ten-years-old Let It Enfold You—a third-wave emo classic among kids who lived on MySpace and siphoned their allowance money directly into Hot Topic cash registers—and it’s resulted in Senses Fail’s biggest tour in years.

And trust me—those who still love Senses Fail really love Senses Fail. At a recent gig the band played at Music Hall of Williamsburg, reams of fans moshed, head-banged, and screamed every single word along with Nielson, who commanded the stage with as much gumption as a screaming, board-shorts-wearing born-again Buddhist can muster. It wouldn't have mattered if he'd even sung along; they'd have filled in the lyrics for tracks like "Buried a Lie," "Rum Is for Drinking, Not Burning," and "Bite to Break the Skin" for him. Whether the audience were there because they were still super into Senses Fail in 2014 or because they wanted to relive their own pasts as scene-addled teens doesn’t matter, really. Referring to the tour, Nielson says, “It feels like I’m leading the party for everyone. I want people to feel that a Senses Fail show is a space where you can, regardless of who you are, where you come from, whether you like the music or not be a positive, uplifting thing.”

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“It’s really crazy when you think about it now, but that was the popular music of the time, you know?” Nielson says of the pop-punk scene that birthed him. “That was the last time rock music might ever be that big.” Born in New Jersey, the scion of two of the stars of the soap opera Guiding Light—Nielson put in a tour of duty on the show himself, playing his mother’s newborn son—Buddy Nielson found himself thrust into the Maybellined eye of Hurricane Mallcore at a terrifyingly young age. Senses Fail was signed to Drive-Thru Records in 2003, before even a single member had cracked 20—their drummer, Garrett Zablocki, was 15 when they got signed. The scene the band came up a part of—including Thursday and My Chemical Romance in New Jersey as well as Brand New and Taking Back Sunday in pop-punk Jersey’s spiritual cousin Long Island—was small. Bands who were talented got famous, and they got famous fast.

By the time Let it Enfold You, the band’s proper debut, had been released by Vagrant records in 2004, Senses Fail had gone, as Nielson puts it, from being a “shitty band from New Jersey” to the upper echelon of the Warped Tour set, playing “late-night TV shows and arenas,” which came with all the pluses (Fans! Stardom!) and minuses (Being called a sell-out! Having dumb hair!) that a sudden rise entailed. “You looked around and you were like, ‘This is 80s metal!’ These guys are wearing makeup, you’re out here on tour with Jared Leto who’s a fucking movie star, you’re fucked up, doing wild shit. It was interesting,” Nielson says, “to try and navigate that.”

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Even in the overstuffed world of pop-punk, Senses Fail set themselves apart from the pack quickly. Buddy’s songwriting, which he chalks up to post-9/11 malaise as well as “dealing with my own shortcomings emotionally” had a more literary-minded bent than his contemporaries (Let it Enfold You’s title comes from a Bukowski poem, and “Buried a Lie” sounds like something Edgar Allen Poe might have written as an angst-ridden suburban teen), and the band’s talents in the studio were matched by their twin senses of rowdiness and self-mythologizing. To wit: A 2005 Alternative Press cover story on the band (written by current Noisey contributor J. Bennett) devoted an entire section to dispelling myths about the band (topics dismissed as hearsay include a member’s glass eye, Nielson getting a girl pregnant on Warped Tour, his dad being a drug dealer in Florida, and that everyone in the band was dating porn stars). In the article, Nielson claimed to have recorded Let it Enfold You in a strip club run by the Russian mob. There was also a story about Senses Fail getting into a brawl on Warped Tour following an incident at a kickball game: A very drunk Senses Fail and My Chemical Romance were supposed to play against Thursday and Taking Back Sunday when SF guitarist Dave Miller enraged a tour manager by wearing a homemade T-shirt that proclaimed “Girls have pussies” and featured a large, erect penis.

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“I was a complete asshole back then,” Nielsen says of this period. “Everyone in the band was coming from a really fucked-up background, and so when you put them on the road, give them a bunch of drugs, and tell them they can do whatever the fuck they want, it’s gonna get…” Nielsen pauses. “We would just get drunk and try throw TVs out of windows. We got invited over to this girl’s house on our first tour, and we just started breaking everything in her house.”

The problem wasn’t just obnoxious behavior, which Nielsen points out would have gotten the band ejected from the music industry in the age of social media. “If we’d been playing shit that sounded like The Casualties, people would have been like, ‘Alright, you guys are fuckin’ punkers!’ But we were playing this angsty, emotional music.” Still, Senses Fail managed to drunkenly stumble upward in spite of their antics. “Maybe that’s why people identified with us,” Nielsen wonders. “We were all upset; it felt very real.”

Senses Fail’s second full-length, Still Searching, debuted at number 15 on the Billboard charts, selling nearly 50,000 copies in its first week. The tours got bigger, the budgets skyrocketed, and pressure began to mount. “You’d have people near the band, like management and shit, saying, ‘We gotta make it to the next step!’ It’s never enough,” Nielsen says, comparing success to a drug high. “We spent six years chasing it.”

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As their peers became bigger and bigger and transcended their emo roots, Senses Fail stagnated. “I never felt like we truly delivered to the extent that everyone thought we would,” Nielsen says. “We were always a step below Fall Out Boy or Taking Back Sunday. There was something you had to engage in to take that next step, and it might have been something I didn’t want to do, or even couldn’t do.”

Members of the band began trickling off and joining the real world. Drummer Garrett Zablocki left the band, went to college, and now works on Wall Street. Bassist Mike Glita now works at William Morris. Miller, the “Girls have pussies” guy, now owns and operates a food truck in Los Angeles (due to “legal issues,” he and Nielsen are no longer on speaking terms). Though Nielsen remained in the band, he took a job at Vagrant, his label, and began managing other acts.

The decreased pressure allowed Senses Fail to become the hardcore band Nielsen always wanted it to be. Their 2012 record, Renacer, is almost unrecognizable from the pop-punk of their debut. It’s muscular, with a robust low end, and though Nielsen is still screaming, he’s at peace. After years of interest in Buddhist philosophy, Nielsen fully converted a year ago and now meditates 25 minutes per day. “That’s the focus of my life,” he says. “I went from being somebody who was very wrapped up in my own head and suffering from a lot of anxiety to being somebody who can really exist in this world without having control.”

Even though he has what he wants, now, Nielson is still realistic about what his fans want. It’s this new perspective that has allowed him to go out and perform Let it Enfold You, a record that’s become a time capsule of who he was in younger, angrier, and decidedly more intoxicated times, every single night. “I almost didn’t do this tour,” he admits. “I can’t really connect with the songs anymore, nor do I want to. But I don’t necessarily think I have to—I really do enjoy watching people have a good time.” With age comes the ability to detach from the ego; you become open to the possibility that there is no shame in singing songs written by the person you once were as the person you are now, even if—as Nielsen hints—they no longer bring you joy. “I just have fun watching people have their fun,” he says. “It feels like I’m leading the party. The people who like that record: it’s their music now, not mine.”

Drew Millard went to Warped Tour two years in a row as a teen but was always more of a Saves the Day guy. Follow Drew Millard on Twitter.

Anna Khachiyan draws and writes. Follow Anna Khachiyan on Twitter.