Capturing nostalgia with “Someday” by The Strokes

One of my favorite things that music and other works of art do is imprint on many aspects of my life. For me, many works of media and art are vital to one’s identity: maybe not like the shallowness of Rob Gordon in the movie “High Fidelity,” which is exclusionary, judgmental and pretentious, but in the sense that it can help you understand and interpret the world around you and appreciate its beauty and richness. I absolutely cherish the feeling of listening to a song or album and having it instantly take me back to a bygone era and allow me to access the person I used to be in another time. Media has the power to almost make me remember the feelings I felt, and give me comfort, especially in instances where I feel particularly lost or down in life. For me, one album I go back to whenever I want to experience this is The Stroke’s 2001 debut album “Is This It,” a seminal garage rock album which opened the door for bands such as Arctic Monkeys, The Killers, Franz Ferdinand, LCD Soundsystem and The White Stripes to gain substantial success with its influence. That is not to say that “Is This It” is not beloved in itself, being an album of absolutely superb songs (“all killer, no filler”) which ooze with the confident and gritty energy of the band’s native New York City. The album also has a profound nostalgic energy to it, and I think that this quality is evident in the third single from the album, “Someday.”

The track enters immediately with the bounce in Fabrizio Morietti’s drums and Albert Hammond Jr.’s guitar are reminiscent of “American Girl” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, which introduces sonically the theme of nostalgia by harkening back to the power pop of the 1970s. The guitar chords themselves are very chipper and bright but also carry a slight fuzz in tone and twinge of melancholy in its structure. It is then that lead singer Julian Casablancas further drives home this thesis by giving the listener the line “in many ways we’ll miss the good old days, someday,” which very directly addresses the feeling of having nostalgia for the time you’re already in. Like the food critic in Ratatouille, I immediately am taken back to those late nights with friends where the plan is that there is no plan, and you get into a bunch of shenanigans that you laugh about in the coming weeks. I think of wandering the streets of Madison and Chicago with my best friend in the world and getting into goofy and random situations. I think of being out in the crowd with my friend and sister the night before the Indy 500 and chatting with partygoers outside the speedway. I also think of the drives on 50th in Minneapolis that I would take during my free period in high school where I would get a slice of pizza or a coffee to clear my mind and daydream about what my life would be like in the coming years.

Another theme of the song is the inherently uncontrollable nature of fate. An often-sour reality of life we find that many facets are often out of our control. Friends drift apart: some move away, sometimes you can’t relate like you used to or you simply grow apart. As Casablancas states in the second verse, “Say, ‘fate my friend, you say the strangest things’ I find, sometimes.” This beautifully highlights the unpredictability of the way life itself ebbs and flows, placing us in unexpected situations and allowing us to meet new people and experience new things.