Taken from First Avenue
Ash Newton | May 22nd 2025
On Sunday, May 3, vocalist and now author Matt Pryor of The Get Up Kids and The New Amsterdams held an informal talk at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C. to promote his new memoir, Red Letter Days.
The first thing Matt Pryor said – after a lengthy introduction from Carlos Iziureta, volunteer for the DC Punk Archive – was, “this is ridiculous.”
With that, he stepped away from the podium and off the stage, gesturing to the small audience of twenty odd-people gathered in the New Books section of Martin Luther King Library, who formed a loose circle around him on the floor.
“That’s better,” he said, and picked up his acoustic guitar and began to strum.
Pryor is used to elevated stages. But for his recent memoir, he decided to eschew the poetic delivery of song lyrics in favor of straightforward storytelling; and when touring the book, he strays from traditional music venues and bookshops alike, synthesizing the intimacy of an underground basement show like the ones chronicled in his memoir with the signings and passage-readings of a book talk.
Red Letter Days captures the origins of his band, The Get Up Kids, and their rise to prominence within the underground music scene of the mid-90’s and then slowly out of it. The book’s release lines up with the 25th anniversary of The Get Up Kids’ sophomore album and most celebrated release, Something To Write Home About.
The book relays chronologically the origins of his career from 1990 to 2000, including childhood stories of growing up in Kansas City, Missouri to the early days of The Get Up Kids. Pryor avoids name-dropping by giving all parties mentioned – people and bands – codenames.
The woman he fell in love with, married and eventually divorced is called Honey White. Michael Dubin, concert photographer, label head and curator of the brand new arts center Lackawanna Station, built out of a derelict mall in Montclair, New Jersey, is called The Curator. Dubin was also present at the library gig, where afterward he mentioned he met Pryor at WMUC, where The Get Up Kids were playing, alongside emo legends Braid, Tomorrow and Challenger Commission.
“They were playing a gig there,” he said, “and I asked them to come up to Baltimore and play at Loyola.”
Later, when touring found The Get Up Kids in Maryland again – this time with Mineral – they had to cancel a second WMUC show due to illness. Dubin allowed them to stay with him in Baltimore, organizing a small acoustic show in his dorm room. A surviving video now lives on his Youtube channel.
“They were all sick, so they cancelled a show and stayed with me and I made that happen the last night,” he said.
Last October, The Get Up Kids performed at the Black Cat barely a mile from the library where the audience now sat. The afternoon sun filtered in through the enormous windows behind him, a far cry from the coordinated spotlights of last year’s tour.
Despite the contrast, Pryor says he approached the two occasions the same. “I didn't have a traditional publisher to send me on a book tour. Book tours, from what I've seen, look a lot like record store signing events, which I've always found incredibly uncomfortable and try to avoid whenever possible,” he said in an interview on Zoom.
“I thought, well, I have songs that go along with the stories in the book. I can just book a gig, basically.”
The songs he played match up with certain events. The first track he performed, titled What If I Fall, describes in poetic abstraction his feelings about striking out as a musician, a scene that comes about halfway through Red Letter Days. “What if I fall? / What if I never make it home?” it asks, after Pryor described how “for the first few years of touring, [The Get Up Kids] drove a van with a two-by-eight nailed to the front of it.”
What If I Fall is not a The Get Up Kids Song; it’s one from his acoustic-focused side project, the New Amsterdams. Regardless, the song gets head nods of recognition from the audience. Afterwards, he asked, “Any questions?” and someone chimed in with an inquiry about whether or not the wooden bumper ever earned any scrutiny from law enforcement while on the road. It didn’t.
Pryor’s down to earth approach to interfacing with audiences was also reflected in the booking of the library event.
“I’m a huge Get Up Kids Fan,” said Iziureta, a volunteer with the DC Punk Archive who helped organize the talk. “I was like, ‘oh, it’d be awesome for him to come to the library and do a book talk.’
I was trying to reach out through Instagram DMs, which wasn’t working. Luckily I had worked with this person, Sophie, who’s from Lawrence, Kansas. I’d asked if she’d ever heard of the band, and she said, ‘oh, yeah, Matt is my next door neighbor in Lawrence.’ She lives in DC, so she reached out to him.”
An MLK Library employee who elected to remain anonymous said that the talk was “up in the air” for a long time due to congressionally imposed funding cuts. Pryor elected to do the event without library funding, “which was a blessing.”
After the library event, Pryor’s tour also visited Ellicott City, Maryland; Baltimore; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Wilmington, Delaware and South Orange, New Jersey. Now, Pryor embarks on the international leg of The Something To Write Home About anniversary tour with The Get Up Kids, visiting Canada, Australia and Japan.
In a post on his Substack, Worse For The Wear, he wrote: “that’ll be fun in a different way."
