The Get Up Kids and the New Amsterdams vocalist Matt Pryor has announced a memoir, Red Letter Days, due Jan. 23, 2024 via Washed Up Books. To quote the announcement, “Taken from journal entries between 1990-2000, the collection of short vignettes follows the life of a musician growing up, pursuing his dream of being a successful musician, and his earliest experiences crisscrossing the country (and continents) with his seminal band, the Get Up Kids. For the first time ever, Pryor reveals intimate stories about his struggle with childhood diabetes, what it was like on tour in the days before texting, and all the larger-than-life characters he meets along the way.”
“This was never meant to be a book about emo or even the band in particular. I didn’t want to write about the ‘scene.’ That is already well documented,” Pryor says. “Every one of the stories in the book is one that I’ve told backstage, at a bar, or on a porch. I wanted to translate them from an oral tradition to a written one.
Read more: Braid’s Frame & Canvas at 25: the oral history of an emo landmark
“I have found — and this is fairly recently — that things I write don’t really hit me like that until later,” he continues. “In the moment, I just think that’s a cool song, lyric, or story; it seems to be that I can only really connect on that level once I’ve had some distance from it.”
The book also features 22 rare and never-before-seen photographs from the book’s time period by Michael Dubin and Paul Drake. The cover artwork looks like this:
