Back before the internet was a mere series of tubes aflutter
in Al Gore’s head—or something along those lines—Sunny Day
Real Estate was the single most mysterious band on this planet. Their
videos were relegated to the barren graveyard hours of Sunday night
(technically Monday morning) on MTV, their shadowy genre of emo was so
secretive that no one dared utter the “e word” out loud, and the band
vehemently refused to set foot, or perform, in my former home state of
California. In the winter of 1994, the closest thing most of us could
come to picturing the band—they had no promotional
photos—was to witness the sad Playmobil people that adorned the
lyric book to Diary.
While this life spent in the shadows might have helped hone their
mystique, guitarist Dan Hoerner remembers that era slightly less
fondly. “It was kind of silly in hindsight, it’s almost embarrassing to
talk about it, but really it all stemmed from a true belief that our
music was going to say everything that we couldn’t say with words, and
we would let that be our vehicle for communicating.” He continues, “We
didn’t really care about becoming popular—we thought all the rest
of the stuff was just a distraction anyway.”
He’s right. As time rolls by it seems that the more you know about
SDRE, the worse off you are. From their furtive start in some
miscellaneous suburb of Washington to the band’s rise as Seattle’s
first wave of flannel-free saviors, it was a wondrous era, where a band
could sit at the helm of an entire genre of their own—even if
they never really wanted to be known as the act that wrestled the emo
crown from Rites of Spring—and still never spill a single detail
about themselves. Of course, that all changed.
Following the flurry of success that spread around Diary, the
band had a messy split. SDRE had their very own Yoko (here’s a hint: he
was a Jewish carpenter) and allegedly split onstage in DC after
frontman Jeremy Enigk decided to break out in prayer at the end of a
set. They posthumously delivered LP2—people often
refer to this as The Pink Album, long before that phrase would
be ruined by the singer of “Get the Party Started”—and half the
band dissolved into the Washington abysses while the other half
suffered a worse fate: backing Dave Grohl in the Foo Fighters. Later,
three-quarters of SDRE came together to release the underrated How
it Feels to Be Something On, a contract fulfillment live album, and
finally their lackluster swan song, The Rising Tide. By the time
their last record was released, emo was well out of their hands,
spawning a generation primarily known for bad music, worse hair, and
shrill local news segments claiming it as the preferred slicing
soundtrack for teenage cutters.
But Diary, oh sweet Diary. My copy of its lyric book
is so dog-eared and severely damaged from overuse, that it has evolved
into a sort of Dead Sea Scrolls of teenage emo obsession, a weathered
and finger-smudged testament to the staying power of Enigk’s wounded
pen. But it’s not just the legacy that the record carries; the songs on
Diary still sound as relevant today as they did when it first
graced store shelves in 1994. Judging from the band’s beaming comments,
this current reunion—all original members, all old
songs—feels like a sincere gesture, and while it’s hard to ignore
the nostalgia and historical revisionism (let us never speak of the
Fire Theft again) of it all, it’s just nice to have Sunny Day Real
Estate back in our lives.