Twenty Years Later, We Still Move Along

Almost twenty years after its release, the All-American Rejects’ 2005 album Move Along is still relevant and raw today 

“Dirty Little Secret,” the lead single on the All-American Rejects’ 2005 album Move Along was by no means a political manifesto. It was, in the same vein of its pop punk predecessors and contemporaries, a frisky, flirty anthem to dance and daydream and dally to. The Ramones wanted to be your boyfriend, Avril Lavigne your girlfriend and the All-American Rejects just wanted to be your dirty little secret. It was terrifically equivocal, slipping effortlessly into the pop culture landscape of the time. Under chick-flick montages, over Got Milk? mustaches, through Nokia 1100 ringtones, “Dirty Little Secret” and the All-American Rejects’ broader catalog felt just right.

But paring back the All-American Rejects’ cheeky choruses, intoxicating guitar riffs, endearing brattiness and commercial amiability exposes a center that holds. And it's why even twenty years later, Move Along still moves us.

It's the album’s three singles that lay it all out. “Dirty Little Secret,” with its crass lyrics and punchy instrumentation instantly aligns the All-American Rejects with the inherent brattiness of pop punk. “It Ends Tonight,” is still angsty, but imbued with vulnerability. The slow, subdued production provides the sonic space for lead singer, Tyson Ritter, to bemoan the dissolution of a friendship. The title track, “Move Along,” an earnest anti-suicide anthem, unveils the band’s fully fledged sincerity. Altogether, the singles portray the restlessness of youth. The ineffable friction of being just old enough to know, but not quite old enough to understand. When we are young, everything feels cosmic and final. Every victory a supernova, every misfortune an apocalypse, and the All-American Rejects’ not only provide a voice to that torrential emotion, but a song.

This is the All-American Rejects’ manifesto, or at least that of Move Along.

Even the gentler productions of Move Along like “It Ends Tonight” and “Can’t Take It” fall just this side of melodrama. There’s still urgency when Ritter belts, “A fallin’ star, at least I fall alone / I can’t explain what you can’t explain / You’re findin’ things ” over the slow, steady piano of “It Ends Tonight.” There’s tension in the violin section on “Can’t Take It” as Ritter exclaims, “I know this will be temporary / I know it will be / But I’ve had enough.” 

When you listen to these songs, you don’t allow for the thought that perhaps you’ll find more friends or find love again or find that the world is, in fact, still spinning. Your only thought is, “My life is over.”

Which is why songs like “Move Along” and “Change Your Mind” contribute a thematic feng shui to the album. As more hopeful ballads, these tracks offer a sense of catharsis to the more despairing songs on Move Along without invalidating the passion that inspired them. “Change Your Mind” is just as charged as “It Ends Tonight,” but with more empathy. “Move Along” is just as brooding as “Can’t Take It,” but with more symmetry.   

Move Along is emphatic, compelling even, yet never prescriptive. You won’t be getting “We Are The World” from the All-American Rejects, but you will get “Top of the World,” one of the standouts from the album for its tangy Spanish-style guitar and its vaguely proletariat theme. In “Top of the World,” the band takes aim at someone rich and powerful who preys on the weak, who benefits from society’s failings and who, worst of all, is utterly unempathetic. In a world of All-American Rejects, the cardinal sin is apathy. “Is there anybody out there / That can see what a man can change? / It’s better that you don’t care / Because he knows that he’s in his state.” 

It’s not direct; the All-American Rejects seldom are. But it’s evocative, it takes us beyond the point, past the rationale, straight to the rage. (Which is where we’d rather be anyway.) 

Right down to their name, the All-American Rejects had a novelty to them. A quality of self-awareness that amused some critics and incensed others. But time cures all, novelty ages to nostalgia; the All-American Rejects turn into legends in the starry eyes of the kids who still don’t understand. Pop punk became “real” rock and roll. And we all get a little bit older.