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Ten years ago, The Wonder Years released an album called The Upsides. “There’s no real way to quantify what The Upsides did for us personally or as a band. It’s not like a few things changed. Everything changed,” vocalist Dan Campbell explains.
As plans to properly commemorate the impact of the album’s anniversary come together (including a full-album performance at this year’s Slam Dunk Festival in the UK), the band celebrates the milestone by releasing a totally reinvented version of one of its breakout tracks, “Washington Square Park.” It appears on their forthcoming EP, Burst & Decay Volume II, out February 14.
The Upsides was the true start of a decade-long journey of self-discovery for Campbell. And while we’ve all tried to figure things out alongside him, this new Burst & Decay version of the track not only improves upon the original structure of the song itself but answers some questions we’ve all had along the way. In the original track, he sings “we rode our bikes over to 6th street to Washington Square Park to see if the tides would turn for me,” and then, in one of the EP’s most endearing moments, brilliantly adds, “and they did.”
“This is our consensus favorite song on the EP,” Dan says. “We had such a fun time figuring out a new lens to view it through. The challenge with any of these is how to subvert expectations while still remaining true to what made the song resonate in the first place.”