I'll never cease to keep your words alive...

Hey Patrick Flynn,
Everyone is like hardcore sucks, and yeah it kinda does sometimes, but then, I listen to your Have Heart albums and I’m thinking this is way bigger than hardcore. That seems silly and lame and lofty, but I think it’s true.

I’ve heard people say Have Heart sounds like this band or that band and it’s probably true. Myspace is full of tough guys and kids with X’s on their hands. That’s okay. At least they believe in something is what I always say (I’M SORRY I LIED I DON’T ALWAYS SAY THIS I AM HUMAN I LIE I’M SURE YOU UNDERSTAND THIS).

When I think of Have Heart, I think of September 16, 2009, 9 days before my twenty-first birthday, me still drug-free, seeing you guys play on your final tour in a grungy bar in the worst city I’ve ever been to, Covington, Kentucky. How’s that for symbolic?

I’ve never met you, but I’ve touched your hand and that was cool. It was a high-five. Your face was all squinched up and I was sweating all over fat kids and girls in tank tops. You called some kid a d-bag for standing on the stage too long, so I never climbed onto the stage; I just stayed smashed against the railing, reaching out. I think the only words that I could muster were the “Fucks” in your songs. How’s that for symbolic?

I haven’t even gotten into how much your albums mean to me. Let me try: there’s a sense of wanting music to matter that pushed me towards loud, socially-conscious jams. It has a pulse, and I think Have Heart’s was the most rapid, most honestly brutal that I’ve heard. It was also the most meaningful hardcore music I’d found. I mean seriously, there’s an e.e. cummings poem on the inside of Songs To Scream At The Sun. What I found in your band, and in you as a lead singer, was a sense of it’s-okay-to-be-loud-and-meaningful.

I wanted to thank you for showing me that. I’m not drug-free anymore, and I don’t know what you’d think of that. The seriousness of your message though still resonates with me. It’s about thinking and feeling and acting, all that meshed together. It’s like you said, “I'm gonna strengthen my action with thought.” I’ve thought about this letter and now I’m writing it to you.

Cool,
Tyler