In Conversation: Dan Campbell of The Wonder Years

He started his band as a joke, but 17 years later, Dan Campbell has become one of our community's most honest, incisive, and dead serious lyricists. Helping people, he says, has helped himself.

Dan Campbell, live with The Wonder Years. Terminal 5. New York, NY. September 10, 2023. Photo by Mitchell Wojcik.

When The Wonder Years released their debut album in 2007, there was really no way anyone could have predicted everything that’s happened since. The record was called Get Stoked on It!, for one thing. There were songs called "Bout to Get Fruit Punched, Homie" on it, for another. The band’s singer, Dan Campbell, has since famously called it an “unmitigated disaster,” and has conceded that they probably should have changed their name at some point. But personally, I’m glad they didn’t. The Wonder Years are a testament to the way change necessitates growth, and how growth is a hardcore value. The band they became? We need them.

As I begin to think about what I am leaving behind with this iteration of Anti-Matter, our conversation seemed to have arrived at exactly the right time. Dan is quite possibly one of the most thoughtful and considered people I’ve ever interviewed, and this conversation barely starts before he begins thinking about the existential value of his band and the ways in which living a life like ours is truly “worth it.” It’s an echo of his work as a lyricist: On The Wonder Years’ newest album, The Hum Goes On Forever, Dan is frequently imagining alternate histories and disparate futures for himself. Becoming a parent will do that to you. “I don’t know how you grew up, but for me, it’s poor-kid mentality,” he tells me. “It’s like I gotta have a backup plan to my backup plan to my backup plan… The big thing for me, though, is just making sure that my family feels OK and secure. Whatever is best for them is best for me. Whatever makes my kids’ lives the happiest and the least stressful they can be is what I want to be doing. And right now, that’s playing in a band.”

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Back in 2018, when Sister Cities came out, you kind of put out the impression that this could be the last record—or at the very least, that you wanted to pull the reins on the band quite a bit. To say things like that out loud, it feels like these ideas must have been very present in your consciousness. So I wanted to start there. What was happening for you at that point?

DAN: I think it was twofold. First, there’s a sense that I feel where every record we make could be our last record—because I am completely competitive and self-competitive. So if I don’t feel like the thing we’re making is going to “beat” the last one in some way. Mostly, it has to be valuable.

But also, I think a lot about our band and the space that we take up. Like, I truly do not believe in music to be a zero-sum game. I think there’s room for a lot of people to succeed in a lot of different lanes. At the same time, I understand that resources are finite, right? So even resources like clubs: If we want to play a city on a certain night, that means that club is occupied and we’re the ones playing it—and that takes up space that other people could have. When I think in terms of making a record, if you’re working with a record label—especially indie labels—they only have so much money to put out records that year. And if they’re dedicating a certain amount of resources to your band, those are resources they can’t use for other bands. Even the actual physical properties of a vinyl record and the time it takes at the plant. It’s taking up space. And I want to be wary of using our space well. There are a lot of exciting young new bands. So if I feel like we’re not making something that has a real tangible value, then we should get out of the way and let the other new bands make it. I try to think about it in a pragmatic way and make sure I’m not taking more space than I’ve earned.

This is truly interesting to me and it’s something I think about a lot: How do you measure these things? What are the metrics? I think that’s something that every artist does. It’s something I have to do with Anti-Matter, even. Like, do I think I am doing something valuable? Yes, no doubt. But how do I reconcile the work with the numbers? It’s really fucking hard to say. What do you pay attention to?

DAN: How loud the crowd is when we play the new song [laughs]. As simple as that. Do they still want to come see the show? And when we play the new songs, do people sing them as loud as the old songs? Do I see them viscerally reacting to them?

As far as the internet or streaming goes, it’s not about the play count for me. I mean, that shit is driven by so many factors. I’m more worried about when our fans post about it. Are they saying, “It’s cool to have new Wonder Years music,” or are they saying, “This song shifted my perspective.” When we put out The Hum Goes On Forever, the amount of comments that I saw that were like, you know, “I was also dealing with postpartum anxiety or postpartum depression and this was really useful for me to hear”—that matters so much more to me. That means we did something that was actually tangibly useful in someone’s life. I’ll call that a success.

But to jump back, I just wanted to finish up on your other question because I think I’m kind of spinning in different directions. The other thing with Sister Cities is that, at that time frame, I think we felt—as a band—really lonely. All of the bands that we came up with and that we were playing with or that we started in basements with, all of them had broken up. And so suddenly, when we were getting ready to go on tour, we’d be like, “Who do we tour with? I don’t know any of these people.” And we’d bring them, and a lot of these bands were great—they were really great people and I like them—but it was just different. They’re not the close friends that you build relationships with when all four bands ended up staying at someone’s one-bedroom apartment and slept like sardines together. All that shit was gone. So we started to feel like an island. We started to feel really lonely out there. And I think that was kind of getting to me mentally.

I mean, that’s a really universal scenario. That’s definitely how I felt in the early 2000s on tour with New End Original. All the bands that Texas [is the Reason] came up with were gone. I was friends with bands like Saves the Day or the other bands that were coming up at the time, but it just felt like we were never exactly in the same place mentally.

DAN: And I just missed Polar Bear Club. I missed Fireworks. I missed Hostage Calm. It was just a little different. In recent years, it feels like we have found almost a different role where I’m friends with all the bands we bring on tour now—like Anxious and Sweet Pill and Hot Mulligan. Everybody we’ve brought out in the past couple of years have been wonderful people. But I think we almost fall into an uncle role, or a big brother role to a lot of them. I’m starting to really relish that, and the opportunities to hopefully pass some stuff along and just be a support system or a soundboard for a lot of those bands.

That’s a very ideal example of community to me. What we need is to have these different varying levels of experience and ages interacting with each other and creating this wider body of knowledge where we learn from each other—and I’m sure you’ve learned things from the younger bands, too.

DAN: Yeah, for sure.

Actually, hang on. This is making me think of an Instagram Reel I saw last night that blew my mind. It was one of those “advice to younger artists” reels, and this guy was talking about how he believed every new piece of music that you put out should arrive with at least 30 different pieces of content. I mean, that’s fucking wild. You will put more work into doing that than you probably did into the song. You guys came up at a time before “content” dominated the conversation, but I have to imagine you’re not immune from that conversation either.

DAN: It just burns things up really quickly. This is a bad metaphor, but it’s one that I was just thinking about this weekend with my kid’s clothing: Like, sometimes you get a gift and it’s made out of some type of material, and I can’t possibly figure out what it is, but it’s not cotton! [laughs] And you know it’s a tinderbox. That thing would burn up so fucking fast. I think making so much content around songs just makes the song a burn moment—where it’s like, you hear it so many times so quickly that you just burn out on it.

At the same time, I love people being creative. I love ingenuity. I love the fact that young artists have said, “This is the world we’re in and we just have to succeed within it.” It’s not like you get to set the parameters. So there’s no part of me that would shame any of these bands for doing what they need to do to have their art heard. It’s just a different time. For us, when we started we’d literally go to the mall before a show with a bunch of CD players and headphones and we would walk up to every kid that looked like a punk and be like, “Hey, listen to this. We’re playing the VFW down the street tonight and we’d love to have you come out.” That’s how we had to do it because there wasn't another option. So this is what they have to do now. If you go to a mall with a CD player now all you’re going to find are a couple of elderly people taking a walk [laughs]. You just have to meet people where they are.

Unfortunately, we’re not good at the internet. Like, we actually paid for a video to get made from our New Years Eve show last year and just fucking forgot to post it [laughs]. And then we did it again. We paid Michael Herrick to do a really beautiful four-camera live recording of “You’re the Reason I Don’t Want the World to End” and we forgot to post it for eighteen months. We pay for photos all the time and never put them up on the internet because I just don’t think about it. I’m never thinking about Instagram. That’s not what I’m thinking about during my day. We are just not focused on that.

Dan Campbell, live with The Wonder Years. The Barbary. Philadelphia, PA. February 3, 2015. Photo by Mitchell Wojcik.

That’s sort of the point. Earlier you were talking about resources, and how these resources are finite. But human beings also have finite resources, right? If I want to put my resources into learning my instrument, becoming a good player, finding my unique voice, writing a great song—how can I do that when I have to square away a certain amount of resources to also learn how to be a good digital marketer? You only have so much.

DAN: And especially now. I’m 38. I have two kids. It was just Halloween week. I was locked in on them all week. We had a field trip, we went trick or treating. When I was younger, before I had kids, I could have definitely spent some more time “digitally marketing” [laughs]. But at this stage of my life, you have to split things differently. You have to split your time and your energy differently. But, you know, I do want to be better at it. I don’t want to be a band that’s bad on the internet because I think we write really good songs and I want people to hear them. And when we write shit that could be really useful, I want people to hear it.

That thing about doing “valuable” or “useful” things is a theme with a lot of ex-teachers, so before I say anything else I should probably welcome you into the club of Anti-Matter Teachers and Former Educators…

DAN: [Laughs] Thank you, thank you.

There are truly so many of us. You and I actually have the same degree [a B.A. in English and Secondary Education]. One of your first records had a lyric like, “Lately I’ve been thinking about being a teacher or a doctor,” so this has really been in your head since the beginning.

DAN: At that time, when I wrote that lyric, I was just about to start going to Temple [University] full-time, and I picked Secondary Ed as a major.

A lot of that lyric seems to be asking, “What am I ‘seriously’ going to do?” The idea that you wanted to do something important is baked into that.

DAN: Yeah, I mean, the lyric is right there. It says, “I just want to be somebody that changes something.” I just wanted to do something with my life that actually helps people. And also I knew that I really did not mind standing up in front of a group of people and talking. It’s actually when I feel the most confident, usually. So I felt pretty suited for teaching. I thought I could do a good job there.

What’s funny is that I don’t consider myself to be extroverted by any stretch. I don’t consider it a natural impulse of mine to want to walk out in front of people—whether it be as part of a band or as a teacher. And yet for some reason, the underlying reasons that make me want to do those things compel me to put myself in positions that are uncomfortable to me, like standing in front of people or talking in front of people. You don't seem to have that problem.

DAN: I’m better like that. If you put me at a party with a bunch of people, I can entertain a group of them for a while, but I have a lot of trouble being put into different combinations. Eventually I will burn out—and pretty quickly—and end up hiding in the corner or something. If I’m in front of the group, though, it’s a totally different mindset for me. And I have no idea why. Maybe it’s just that I’ve always felt like if I’m in control of a situation, if I’m the one with the microphone, if I’m the one at the lectern or whatever it is, I just feel extremely competent.

I had a therapist that I didn’t have very long because she didn’t seem to understand this. I was going to her because I am really uncomfortable with being consistently in the spotlight. And I didn’t mean on stage, I meant in life. I felt like everything that I do is super analyzed and every interaction that I had was, like, who knows who is a fan and who is not a fan or who loves the band and who hates the band. It just felt like everywhere I was in the world, I felt so exposed and uncomfortable. So I was trying to talk to her about that. And every time I would come back in, she’d say, “So how is your stage fright?” And I was like, “I don’t fucking have that!” [laughs] And then, “Have you tried any power poses?” And I’m like, “I never feel better than when I am in front of a room with the microphone. It’s moving through the world otherwise that’s getting me.”

That really resonates with me. There have been so many moments in the internet era where I’ve just wanted to shut everything down and be like, why can’t I just exist with no one looking at me?

DAN: I mean, yeah! None of my friends have to deal with this [laughs]. And I really truly do not mind meeting fans in real life and talking to people when they come up to me—I never mind that. But the constant thought that someone is watching is just so strange that you can never really feel at ease.

The Wonder Years. Irving Plaza. New York, NY. October 13, 2022. Photo by Mitchell Wojcik.

In some ways, I think that my move into education was a little based on that feeling. The years that I was going to school or teaching were the years I felt the most unseen. And I still crave that sometimes. Didn’t you just get an MBA?

DAN: I did. I got an MBA because of the pandemic, mostly. I just didn’t know when they were going to ever let us back in venues. My wife was pregnant with our younger son, Jack, and I was like, “Oh my God. I don’t know how I’m going to pay the mortgage. These kids are going to have this kind of anxious life that I don’t want them to have. That’s not what I want to give them. I want them to feel secure, that their house would always be their house, and that we’d never lose it.” I just started spiraling. So I started calling a lot of people in my life, people who have fucking normal jobs, and asking: “What do you think I’m good at? I wear so many hats for the band, but is there anything that you think that I particularly shine in?” And it’s funny because we talked about being bad at the internet, but everyone was like, “Well, I think that your marketing ideas are phenomenal. Sometimes you don’t think enough to execute them, but the ideas are phenomenal” [laughs]. So I said to one friend, “If I go to a company and say, ‘I would like to work in your marketing department, here is my resume,’ and it says, ‘Singer of Punk Rock Band: 15 years,” are they going to hire me?” And she said, “Well, if they talk to you, I think so. But if you want to get through the filters, you could just go get a master’s [degree].” So I just thought, OK. Fuck it. Let’s go. So I got a master’s degree—partially from my house during the pandemic, and partially from the back lounge of the tour bus when we were back.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always struggled with the idea of marrying myself to playing music completely because it just seemed like a tenuous position to be in. I’ve always asked myself: What else can I do?

DAN: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know how you grew up, but for me, it’s poor-kid mentality. It’s like I gotta have a backup plan to my backup plan to my backup plan. I gotta be ready for anything. This might be the imposter syndrome that every artist deals with, but I’ve always felt like tomorrow I’m going to wake up and everyone that likes my band is going to say, “Actually, this shit sucks and I’m only into free jazz now” [laughs]. I’ve expected that since the day we first had any success.

The big thing for me, though, is just making sure that my family feels OK and secure. Whatever is best for them is best for me. Whatever makes my kids’ lives the happiest and the least stressful they can be is what I want to be doing. And right now, that’s playing in a band. You know, I get to offer them a lot of opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have. Like, they were playing tag in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame after closing a couple of days ago. They live these cool, charmed little lives. But if, at some point, it’s not right for them or it’s detrimental to them, I want to have the ability to pivot. Because I’ve gotten to do it. It’s the coolest job in the fucking world and I’ve had it for decades now. So I can go do the most boring, tedious shit on Earth knowing that I am giving them the life that I want them to have.

I wanted to talk about melancholy, which to me has always been a defining characteristic of The Wonder Years. In the beginning, I felt like you expressed a sadness that was cloaked in optimism, though. It was almost like you didn’t want to be “a bum-out.”

DAN: Well, it’s almost like I didn’t want to do that to myself. It’s a mixture of that line from High Fidelity—what came first, the music or the misery?—and also posi-hardcore. It’s this confluence of asking, “Is the reason I’m so sad all the time because all I’m listening to is so defeated?” It felt like everything I was listening to was sad and hopeless. And I felt sad and hopeless. So I thought, what if I try to make something that is sad and hopeful? I was basically stuck in this idea that I was perpetuating my own sadness, and that the way out was effort. The way out was trying. So I wanted to write a record, The Upsides, about that idea.

Which is sort of interesting when you juxtapose that with The Hum Goes On Forever, where there’s almost this sense of resignation to it. There’s this idea that we’re all just floating alongside sadness and it’s not so much about “making it to the other side” anymore.

DAN: Yeah, I think it’s about recognizing that it’s always there and it will be quieter and it will be louder at different points in my life, depending on what’s happening. But the throughline is that quitting isn’t an option. With Hum, I think I got to a point in the postpartum months where it was like, OK. The things I’ve been doing before aren’t working. The PMA or whatever else isn’t working. So let’s try therapy. Let’s try an SSRI. Let’s be better for your son. Let’s get your shit together here. It almost runs parallel, which is to say that there will always be an undercurrent of sadness. I think that’s even recognized on The Upsides, maybe even implicitly. But with work, we can see brightness as well.

Dan Campbell, live with The Wonder Years. Chain Reaction. Anaheim, CA. January 7, 2011. Photo by Mitchell Wojcik.

I don’t know what you know about me, but I’ve had a lifelong struggle with depression. It’s something I’ve been living with for so long that I can’t actually pinpoint the beginning. I’m open about that, but I find that people are still tempted to talk to me with this language that I am “overcoming depression,” and I’m always so careful to say that I think “overcoming depression” is a weird, mythy narrative that I don’t want to perpetuate. Like, right now I’m doing fine. But I don’t believe I’ve made it to some mythical “other side.”

DAN: After The Upsides, people were talking to me after shows and they’d ask, “How did you cure your depression?” And I would be like, “I am deeply depressed right now. Right now. Things are bad for me at this exact moment” [laughs]. That’s where that line in “Local Man [Ruins Everything]” comes from: “I’m not a self-help book / I’m just a fucked-up kid.” It’s to say I don’t have the answers. All I can tell you is that you need to try. I can give you some techniques I’ve used, I could tell you that I am not a professional and you could maybe seek some therapy, but I don’t have this magic bullet for it. It’s just going to be about effort and consistency and accepting that there will be low days.

One of the things on Hum that you’re really good at expressing is this fear, both in a general sense and also with a lot of the fears that come with parenthood. It’s almost this ambient anxiety that you’re going to miss things and you won’t always be able to be there for your kids. Did writing about that help you through it or does that get in the way?

DAN: I think it’s both. It’s always going to do both. I think there are times where you are so paralyzed by the depression and the fear that you’re incapable of creating. And then there are times when you’re having days where, through creating, you are alleviating it and processing it and understanding things better. I think that’s true of any record you make or whatever subject you’re writing about.

When I say, “I don’t want to die” on that record, I think that’s almost entirely about suicidal ideation. Because it wasn’t just about postpartum depression, it was about pandemic depression and lockdown depression and all of these anxieties from looking at the world as a whole. It was the first time in my life where I was like, “What if I just fucking drove my care into a river”—and it wasn’t just a fleeting thought. It was a real one. There are times with postpartum depression or postpartum anxiety or any of those things where you think things like, I’m so fucked up that my child’s life will be better if I was never in it. The process of making this record helped in my understanding of that being an intrusive thought, that it’s not rooted in reality. And also—this is kind of my competitive nature coming in—that’s quitter talk. What’s real is going out there and doing the work to be the parent that they need you to be. It’s not just saying, “I can’t do it,” and stopping. So a lot of that record was me realizing that this is going to take a lot of work. Just like everything else in life, if you’re not good at something, that doesn’t mean you stop doing it. That means you practice. Writing the songs helped me zero in on that idea.

With Aaron West [and the Roaring Twenties] you write from a fictional voice, and often about things you haven’t personally experienced—like alcoholism or abuse. I’m wondering what kind of ethics you try to keep about that kind of storytelling.

DAN: I think that if everyone only wrote their lived experience, we wouldn’t have most of the greatest art on Earth. What’s important is that you’re honoring the experiences, and the way I try to do that with Aaron West is by interviewing friends that have had them and trying to really understand. You know, not just writing about something because “it’s part of the story.”

Like, there’s a song on the newest Aaron West record about Aaron going to rehab. I’ve been straight-edge my whole life. So I called a friend of mine, Bobby—I put his name into the song as a wink to him—and I spent a couple of hours with him trying to understand not only the machinations of a day [in rehab], but I wanted to understand how he felt in all those phases of those days and how he felt overall. How did the change happen throughout his time there? What made you go in the first place? What was the decision like? Did you almost back out? How did you get your courage up? And how did your understanding of your own disease progress through your time there? And when I’m done with it and I feel like I have a song, I want to go back to that persona and say, “Do you feel this accurately captures what’s happening here? Do you think I did it justice? Do you think I honored your experience?” If it’s a no, then it’s more work. And if it’s a yes, then I feel confident that I did the right thing and I can put it out.

OK, I wanted to end things with this. The last time we saw each other was at the When We Were Young festival, which is where I tore a calf muscle on stage, on the first day, and essentially couldn’t walk for two weeks after that. So I’ve been off my feet since then, and I’ve had some time to feel this kind of push/pull between being grateful that I’ve been able to do it for this long at this level, while also acknowledging that the injuries are coming more frequently with age.

DAN: For sure. I very much feel that.

And that gives me anxiety about the future. So I wanted to talk about where you’re at. How are you holding up as an aging band person?

DAN: It hurts a lot more, for sure. We’ve always played in a way that hurt. I think it was kind of that way from the beginning. And my body is… Well, I played that entire [last] tour with a hernia-support band on. I have to get this umbilical hernia fixed right after some shows I had this month. I’ve had it for a long time and I got it from singing really hard and it just is what it is.

I really didn’t know you could do that from singing.

DAN: That’s what the doctor thinks because it’s right at my belly-button, right at the place where I put all the pressure when I’m singing to kind of support the notes. I think the thing I realized is… Man, how do I say this gently? I look at a lot of older-generation bands and I think they’ve been doing the same thing the same way with somewhat diminishing returns on how they’re able to perform. And I know there is an inevitability there, but I think what I realized is that, just like everything else, working harder can help prevent that.

I used to just go on tour and fucking sing, man. That’s my job as the singer. I just show up and sing. That shit doesn’t work anymore. Now before a tour I get on the Peloton. I’ve long since canceled the subscription, but you don’t need the subscription to ride the bike. I set the resistance to 80 and ride at a 20-mile-an-hour pace and I sing the set—while out of breath. I’m building those muscles. I’m conditioning myself to do the thing when I’m on tour. It’s really nice to see the comments from people who have been coming to see us for ten years, going, “Somehow they’re even better now.” That’s what I want. I really take seriously the covenant of: You paid for your ticket and I’m going to give you everything I fucking have tonight. It almost comes full circle to what we were talking about at the beginning of this whole thing: If I can’t put on the show that I think you deserve, then I am taking up space that I do not deserve to take up and I better get out of the fucking way.

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