I bought tickets to see All Time Low play So Wrong, It’s Right from beginning to end at Radio City Music Hall in February.
And I am having a completely normal and proportionate emotional response to this.
Ok, that’s a lie. When Ticketmaster showed the confirmation screen I cried a little bit.
Which was perhaps partially because it took three tries to get tickets.
10AM Artist Presale for the Friday show: 5,692 in the queue. By the time the page refreshed, tickets were gone. I told myself maybe I wasn’t meant to go.
That night, however, All Time Low announced a second show on Saturday.
10AM Artist Presale for the Saturday show: 3,216 in the queue. Twenty minutes later, I finally got in. Everything was gone again.
Then I noticed there was a Chase Preferred Cardholder presale a couple hours later. I checked my Chase app to make sure I qualified and set an alarm.
12PM Chase Preferred Cardholder Presale for the Saturday show: it didn’t assign me a spot in the queue. There was infinitely less site traffic for that particular presale and it took me directly to the ticket page, where I was able to grab a pair in the back orchestra.
So when that confirmation screen popped up, yeah, I cried a little bit. It was a mix of relief, shock, and excitement.
It wasn’t until after I’d secured the tickets that I even thought about the logistics.
The concert is in New York City. I live in Buffalo. It’s a quick one-hour flight, but it’s certainly not “convenient.” And with the concert being mid-February, I will very likely spend the entire week leading up to it panic-refreshing my weather app to see if a snowstorm is expected. I’ll also need to book a hotel room in the City or couch surf.
And yet… none of that has made me question whether I should go.
Even with all the presale madness, at no point did I consider giving up. Or wonder if the expense and hassle were “worth it.”
Which got me thinking about why.
I’ve seen All Time Low before. Hell, I saw them less than a year ago. And I will presumably have opportunities to see them on tour again.
But this feels different.
This isn’t just an All Time Low concert. This is the anniversary show celebrating 20 years of So Wrong, It’s Right.
And apparently that distinction is enough to turn me into an emotional puddle.
My Brain has a Soundtrack
Music has always been the connective tissue of my memories.
Play me a random song from twenty years ago and there is a high likelihood that my brain will immediately associate it with a year, a place, a person, and an oddly specific anecdote that you didn’t ask to hear. But you’re about to!
“Wannabe” by Spice Girls? Third grade. Emily’s birthday party. 10+ girls climbing the swingset in the dark and shouting the lyrics in unison.
“Move Along” by All-American Rejects? Sophomore year. SJCI dance. Singing and dancing with Patrick.
“Viva La Vida” by Coldplay? Summer before college. Cue memories of graduation parties and car rides with Christopher.
Perhaps it’s the ADHD. Perhaps my brain just came with an unusually detailed soundtrack. Either way, music is one of the ways I organize my life. Songs create timestamps. They connect me to versions of myself I haven’t thought about in years.
But there are a few artists that work differently.
They don’t take me back to one memory.
They take me back to a feeling.
All Time Low is one of them.
Thank you, random MySpace stranger
I first heard All Time Low in late 2006. I was on a random stranger’s MySpace page and “Coffee Shop Soundtrack” started autoplaying.
I despised autoplay. Normally I couldn’t pause or silence that shit fast enough.
But this time I let it play.
Then I went looking for more.
My friends weren’t listening to All Time Low. They weren’t listening to emo or pop punk at all. Since ATL was relatively unknown within my circle, I listened by myself.
On my blue iPod Mini during my morning bus ride.
On the ancient Windows ‘98-powered computer in my bedroom.
On mixed CDs in my 2006 Ford Taurus. CDs that I painstakingly burned, but then couldn’t be bothered to write any identifying information on. Every CD was a mystery, but stumbling across an All Time Low song was always a welcome surprise.
“Coffee Shop Soundtrack” opened the door. “Jasey Rae” and “The Party Scene” quickly followed on repeat.
And then So Wrong, It’s Right came out.
But this time I wasn’t finding the music after it got popular and playing catch up.
I was counting down until it was released.
2007 was less than ideal
So Wrong, It’s Right came out at the start of my senior year of high school.
I was juggling a lot my senior year. I was taking the SATs, applying to colleges, and struggling to select a major. I was navigating my first relationship and my first breakup. I was trying to get comfortable with moving away from my family and the safety of my childhood home. I was worrying about what my high school and hometown friendships would look like once college started.
Normal teenage growing-up shit.
Then there was the less normal.
I was battling anxiety and depression and resorting to self-injury as my sole source of comfort. I was (reluctantly) starting therapy, while simultaneously trying to hide it from my friends and classmates, since discussing mental health was still considered taboo and therapy was for “crazy” people. Most notably, I was desperately trying to find the right words to explain the trauma I’d experienced that summer.
I knew what had happened, the sequence of events, and I knew something about it felt very wrong. But my sixteen-year-old brain didn’t yet realize it was rape.
So I was trying to do all of the normal senior-year things while my brain quietly short-circuited in the background.
And then there was this album.
So Wrong, It’s Right wasn’t written about assault or therapy or teenage depression. But trauma doesn’t particularly give a shit what a songwriter intended. It takes whatever words fit.
So when I heard “You took what you wanted. You got it, you know it. I’m haunted by everything” (Holly), it felt like it was written for me; the 17-year-old girl who was suddenly scared to sleep and having trust issues she couldn’t yet trace back to her assault.
The Beach, “cave in and believe me, open up and scream it”, and Shameless, “like a weightless currency, your words don’t mean shit to me”, tapped into the resentment and anger I was carrying.
Stay Awake, “get a grip and get out, you’re safe, from the weight of the world. Just take, a second to set things straight”, spoke to my anxiety, reminding me to slow down when the world around me was getting too loud and I was feeling trapped.
I heard Come One, Come All, “you’re just in time to witness my first breakdown”, at a time when my first breakdown felt perpetually right around the corner.
Finally, I heard Poppin’ Champagne, “they can take all of me, but they won’t ever take what I still believe”, and it ignited a spark in me. A glimmer of hope.
Somewhere, in all of it, I felt understood.
I didn’t consciously think, “This music is helping me process my trauma.” I didn’t even understand that I had trauma.
I just knew the music made something inside me quieter.
Emo was never a phase, Mom
All Time Low opened a door. And I happily walked through.
They were my gateway into pop punk and emo music and, as it turns out, that genre was exactly what teenage me needed.
Because I was fucking angry. And sad. And confused. And scared.
And I didn’t know how to say most of that out loud.
But I could put on headphones. I could turn up the volume in my car. I could scream lyrics written about something completely different and somehow make them mine.
There was something incredibly freeing about lyrics that didn’t ask me to cheer up or smile. Music that wasn’t fixated solely on romance or sex. It was honest and messy and loud.
And sometimes I desperately needed loud.
My car became one of my safe places.
That continued after high school. During my first couple years of college, when I was overwhelmed or anxious or avoiding homework or an uncomfortable conversation, I would get in my car and drive the few-mile loop around campus. On repeat.
I’d blast whatever emo song had my brain in a chokehold that week and just drive until things felt a little less impossible.
Then I went to college
A few weeks before moving into my freshman dorm in the fall of 2008, I finally understood that what happened the previous summer had been rape.
Excellent timing.
So I moved away from home for the first time while simultaneously beginning to process something that fundamentally changed the way I understood the previous year of my life.
I was confused, lonely, homesick, traumatized, and trying very hard to appear like a normal college freshman.
A few weeks into the semester, I heard a familiar song coming from down the hall.
Dear Maria, Count Me In.
I immediately went looking for the source.
A guy named Tom had his door open.
I popped my head in and asked him to turn it up. He cranked it and we started loudly serenading each other in the dorm hallway and playing air guitar.
Then the door to the corner suite opened and Ashlie emerged.
She didn’t hesitate to join in.
Another fan!
Suddenly the band I had mostly listened to alone wasn’t something that made me different from everyone around me.
It was the reason I was talking to them.
And then there was Ashlie
A little over a year later, in December 2009, All Time Low was playing a small club in Buffalo.
Ashlie came with me.
By this point we were sophomores. We didn’t live on the same floor anymore. We didn’t have classes together. She had never been to my house. She had barely met my parents, except in passing.
None of that mattered. It was All Time Low!
We left campus after we both finished our afternoon classes and drove the hour and a half to Buffalo. We went to the concert and then crashed in my childhood bedroom. We got up obscenely early the next morning and drove the hour and a half back to campus before heading immediately to class.
On that drive back, we talked. Not small talk. Real talk. I told her about my rapes and she listened. Not an occasional nod or feigned interest. She really listened.
She believed me without hesitation, never making me feel like I was too much. She didn’t make me edit the story into something more comfortable for her to hear.
Ashlie became one of the few people in my life at that time that I didn’t feel like I needed to censor myself around.
I don’t know if she knows how much that mattered. But it did.
And the whole thing traces back to her walking out of her dorm room because she heard Tom and me screaming All Time Low lyrics in the hallway.
Music does that. It creates weird little threads between people. You don’t realize they’re important until years later when you follow one backward and realize it changed something.
Sixteen years later
After the show in 2009, I didn’t see All Time Low live again until almost sixteen years later, in November 2025.
I wasn’t prepared for how emotional I would be hearing “Missing You” live.
I stood there tearing up because I kept thinking about how desperately I needed that song when I was 19 and suicidal.
There’s a particular kind of grief in finding something meaningful years after the version of you who needed it most.
But there’s something beautiful about it too. Because I had survived and I was there to hear it.
So why am I flying to New York?
That’s the question I’ve been trying to answer.
When you lay out the logistics, it sounds ridiculous to fly to NYC to hear an album I’ve been able to listen to whenever I want for twenty years. Except that’s not really what I’m going there to hear.
I’m going to hear twenty years of becoming the person I am now.
And maybe that’s why this concert feels different.
All Time Low has been part of my life for twenty years. Other albums came later and found me during other chapters. Other songs (e.g. Weightless, Too Much, Painting Flowers, Nightmares, etc.) became important for entirely different reasons.
But So Wrong, It’s Right was there at the beginning.
It was the first full-length ATL album that became mine. It arrived during this bizarre dividing line in my life when I was still doing all the things a normal 17-year-old does while unknowingly beginning to carry something that would shape huge pieces of my adulthood.
I didn’t know I had PTSD. I didn’t know why certain lyrics made my chest hurt. I didn’t know why I needed to drive around with the music so loud.
I just knew it helped.
And twenty years later, I get to hear that album from beginning to end.
The same songs.
In the same order.
But I’m not the same person.
Twenty years later
The 17-year-old girl who first heard this album had absolutely no fucking idea what was coming.
She didn’t know how bad things were going to get before they got better.
She didn’t know there would be another assault. Or suicidal thoughts and a three-day emergency psych hold. She didn’t know she would take a leave from college. She didn’t know PTSD would follow her into adulthood. That it would change how she let herself show up in the world.
But she also didn’t know about the incredible friends she would make. The vacations she’d go on. The career she’d have. The college boyfriend she’d marry. The dog they’d get. The house they’d buy. And she especially didn’t know how much healing she would do.
She didn’t know she would eventually have words for what happened to her. And that she would build an entire blog around refusing to stay quiet about it.
In all honesty, she didn’t know that twenty years later, she would be here.
Alive.
And still listening to All Time Low.
Maybe that’s why getting those tickets made me cry.
Because in February, All Time Low is going to walk onto the stage at Radio City Music Hall and play So Wrong, It’s Right from beginning to end.
For a couple of hours, the music is going to sound like 2007.
My brain, with its bizarre little musical filing system, will undoubtedly do what it always does. It will fill in the rest.
The places. The people. The memories. The feelings.
Except this time, I won’t be listening from a school bus or my childhood bedroom or behind the wheel of my old Ford Taurus.
I’ll be 36 years old, sitting inside Radio City Music Hall with twenty years of evidence that I survived everything that girl didn’t know was coming.
Music usually takes me back to a moment.
All Time Low takes me back to myself.
And in February, for one night, every version gets to be there.
