The Burholme Tapes: "Song in My Head"

Joe's weekly reflections on the greatest teenage rock 'n' roll cover band to ever come out of Rockledge, PA in the mid-'00s, covered on the blog one song at a time.

"Song in My Head"

originally by Sherwood

All of a sudden there are like five weeks left. The Burholme Tapes are reaching their final reel. It's been real nice, stepping back into yesteryear in this format. Not just looking back because I miss those days, but looking back because I appreciated the experiences I had and shared with those I loved and still love. Also, we get to listen to some good music (albeit good music played poorly). Come hither and listen to another good song.

This is a good song, right? I don't know. I have a general suspicion that "Song in My Head" is an objectively terrible song that is subjectively bulletproof in my ears only because of the context in which I first heard it, consumed it, lived it. Ya know, through the garage rock band I was part of when I was a kid. Burholme, and all that. There is an alchemy here; nostalgia has a way of turning poison into gold. Like a few other songs found in these digital pages over the past few months, my opinion of "Song in My Head" would have probably been vastly different in 2024, in a negative way, if Burholme hadn't made it their own.

The funny thing about "Song in My Head" is that there was a decade of my life when I could not remember anything about it besides the fact that Burholme played it. I knew there was a song that was kinda cheesy, but pretty darn catchy too, a song that was emo but in a floppy-haired MySpace-core kind of way, a song that we played at the final concert and that we had a guest singer for, old pal Andrew, and I knew that I hadn't heard the song since August 17, 2007. I don't know when my brain deleted the song, but it had to have been during the heavy drinking of college. By the time I graduated La Salle U., it was gone. I recall asking Kev about it in like 2015, but he had no fucking clue what I was talking about. It wasn't until the summer of 2023, when I obtained the VHS'd copy of our final performance, and began the process of digitally converting them into mp4 files, that I rediscovered the song that (sorry about the pun) was not in my head.

While it's been fun seeing me and my friends on the screen, kids up there on stage, playing some fun songs and having a grand old time, and I'm thankful I get to do it every week here on the blog, I also want to step back and appreciate the one and only time that these Burholme videos have added music to my internal library. I have Sherwood back. Probably a bad song, but I don't give a fuck. It makes me feel good to listen to it, even now. It makes me feel good to hear it again after such a long time away. Music is important to me, because it's eternal. I can see how much my friends and I have changed by watching our eighteen-year-old selves up there; Sherwood hasn't changed a fucking bit.

Everything else, though? Everything else has changed. It's not a matter of changing for the better or the worse, just changing for the different. Everything is different than it was then. I was going to say "except our friendships," but let's be real here. The friendships have changed too. They evolved. I consider myself lucky that they exist at all these days, but my friendships with my hometown pals have, by necessity and by the natural process of growing up, changed. I don't want to say "weakened," because that's not true. But if hanging out every night was a bright flame, then our hanging out once a month now is a small glowing ember that couldn't light a room but remains eternally reliable.

Our dear friend Andrew is a great example of this phenomenon. Back in high school, there wasn't a weekend gone by when we weren't hanging out and shooting the shit and getting into trouble. Not just me and him, I'm talking about the whole gang. Andrew was an essential member. In many ways, Andrew was a leader in the neighborhood, just by way of knowing a lot of people and acting as a bridge connecting certain otherwise disparate friend groups and generally being a really great enigmatic guy and attracting the desire for friendship from people from all walks of life. You know the type I'm talking about.

Almost seventeen years later and I don't see Andrew in person all that often anymore. In the intervening seventeen years, a whole bunch of shit happened, most of it personal and most of that personal to Andrew, so I'm not going to shout the fine details from the confines of this somewhat tucked away but very much still public blog, but suffice it to say that some shit went down over the course of let's say the next seven years after the night he got up on stage and sang "Song in My Head," and that shit was enough to create a distance that at this juncture is practically impossible to traverse. Not because I don't want to and not because there is a single ounce of ill-will on either end for anything. More so because... I don't know, because we have five kids between us now, and live far apart, and have different life experiences, and life is fucking busy enough as it is, too busy maybe for attempting to turn old friends from acquaintances back into friends.

Andrew isn't the only person in my life whom I hung out with constantly fifteen years ago and rarely interact with at all today. This kind of shit happens. It's natural. No one is necessarily surprised by it when it happens because it happens to everyone. I'd say that I have done a better job than most at fighting the tides of old age and staying connected with as many friends as I can, but at a certain point it's like trying to ladle out the sea water from a rapidly sinking ship. You can't fight the inevitable.

Still, despite all this, I sent Andrew a link to this video. It wasn't a long conversation. A few texts sent back and forth, a few empathetic words shared between two tired dads. Pictures of the kids, etc. And, yes, a video from way back when, back on a hot night in August 2007, back when we were thick as fucking thieves, the four of us on stage running this fucking town together, back when we were friends.

"Song in My Head" is a great song, but at the same time, I wish it was a song more appropriate thematically for this context. The old MySpace-era Sherwood song is all about regret and deceit and how certain relationships can turn toxic if you don't give them the attention they require. I don't feel any of that when I hear this song, not then and definitely not now. There's no regret here. There was never any bad blood. You can't be upset when people grow apart because who the fuck are you gonna get upset at? Life itself? This is what happens. Friendships are circumstantial, and that makes them tenuous, delicate. Upset the balance, and people drift away from each other.

I have nothing but love in my heart for all my friends who were at that final Burholme concert. The friends in the band, the friends who joined us on stage, the friends in the audience. The friends I still see semi-regularly as an adult, and the friends I haven't seen since that night. Friendships changing and fading but always there to some degree, proof through memory or through hard video, each friendship like a song in my head.