"Mass Pike" by The Get Up Kids from the album Red Letter Day (1999)

The Kids may have been from Kansas City, but there was always a strong vein of Massachusetts <3 running through their music. A wistful, minor-chord piano lead that builds to a spike-edged punk lament, this 1999 track is a deceptively simple paean to falling in and out of love — “Last night on the Mass Pike/Thought I was losing you/Last night on the Mass Pike/I fell in love with you” — and not being able to tell sometimes which one is which. There’s emo in a nutshell right there. Probably doesn’t hurt my fondness for the song that I was traveling regularly back and forth from Boston to Worcester the year it came out, trying to answer the same question.

_Luke O’Neil