'Cute Without the E (Cut From the Team)' Taking Back Sunday - Throwback Thursday

Wow, can you believe Taking Back Sunday's debut album Tell All Your Friends came out 11 years ago?! It's really blowing my mind. TBS's first album is a certified classic among rock in the 2000s. You'd be pressed to find someone who didn't "grow up" on this album, or even say it was great despite their musical taste. You'd be even harder pressed to find someone who doesn't agree that every subsequent album of theirs has gotten worse.

The reason this record blew TBS out of the water was the very unique, sometimes, blunt, and even graphic depictions of teenage angst at it's finest. "Best friend's means I pull the trigger," "You've got this gun to my head," "If I could slit my throat...I'd apologize for bleeding on your shirt," couple lines like these with punky, still developing at the time as a genre, "post hardcore" music and incredible back-up vocals; you have the recipe for success.

Adam Lazzara is the charismatic frontman to the group, but many thought John Nolan the guitarist and other vocalist, was the brains. This is believable due to them not being able to match the song quality of Tell All Your Friends once Nolan left the group after the first release. However, it wasn't until their second album, Where You Want to Be (2004) that they received global success, and 2006s Louder Now where they were heralded as a superstar band because of their new found mainstream appeal. However, that signature raw sound from the first album was lacking.

After 2006 the band had a couple more lineup changes before going back to the original lineup with Nolan in 2010.

The song this week is "Cute Without the E (Cut From the Team." This is probably the band's most well known song and the video is styled after Fight Club (How cool is that?)

This song, along with the rest of the album was instrumental in my development as a song writer. In those days before I did rap/rock, I played drums and did backups for a couple of bands while writing a lot of the lyrics. Taking Back Sunday has the ability to make you try to figure out what the heck they were talking about, and that's what I wanted to do. The same can be said for Brand New, which is a whole other blog completely. I wanted to have Adam's stage presence too with his patented head shake and looking like he's destroying the mic. (Watch me next time and think about that...) Also, TBS, Brand New, and The Used pretty much helped popularize the whole cringe worthily said, "emo" now known as post hardcore genre.

Without further adieu, here's the video for one of my favorite songs of all time!