VANCOUVER — Clouds of steam billow off my neck and hands as I step, sweat-soaked and exhausted, through the doors of Crosstown Elementary School, into the cold blue night. For the past twelve weeks, I’ve dragged my ass off the couch to play rec basketball with a team of journalists, former journalists, and their partners. We call ourselves Press Pass and we were 4 and 3 heading into tonight’s game.
Now we’re 4 and 4.
So far, I’ve played okay this season. I rarely score, but my defense is good. I put the body on opposing players. I block their dribbles, box them out, get the board.
I was better at basketball when I was fifteen when sports were woven into everyday life, button hooked between Math and Social Studies. In ninth grade, I scored 62 points when our school team played at Saint Albert Catholic High School. It sounds insane because it was.
It was the single greatest performance of my athletic career. It’s also the one I’m least proud of.
We had a double-digit lead when I decided to learn the names of the other team.
As the Catholics went to inbound the ball I called out “Mark! Mark! Mark!”
Mark passed me the ball without even looking.
Easy layup.
If I were lucky I would have been benched for the rest of the game, forced to atone for my unsportsmanlike behaviour.
But nobody said anything. I kept playing.
I unlock the car and throw my basketball and gym bag in the back seat. Tomorrow I’m chatting with Patrick Flynn, the lead singer for the popular bands Have Heart and Fiddlehead. Our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity below, will find Pat recounting his boyhood days in New Bedford, Massachusetts, reflecting on his decision to become a high school history teacher, rejecting nihilism, revealing what’s next for Fiddlehead, and ruminating about the natural life cycle of iconic bands. It will be a wide-ranging conversation, epic in scope. It will remind me of the confusing waters of youth, and the rafts I needed to get across.
I put the Prius in drive and pull out of the parking stall, bound for the quiet hills of Kitsilano, and home.
It’s possible Mark learned something that day: about the world, and the way some people choose to operate within it. But I choose to believe he left the gym ultimately unburdened by the loss. That he doesn’t replay those two seconds every time he touches a basketball.
That he’s never had to excavate the catacombs of his past in hopes of building a better future.
PF: Sorry I’m late, I was watching Little Big League with my son. He’s just coming into consciousness with baseball and is totally obsessed. I promised him I would watch the movie and I thought it would end in time for our chat.
ES: All good. Is he going to the major leagues, do you think?
PF: I don’t know. I’m just happy to see him excited about the sport. We played tee ball outside the other day and he was really animated. You throw stuff at your kids and most of the time it doesn’t take. But yesterday he was like “Oh my god I can’t believe this game.” It’s all very wonderful to witness.
ES: Are you a big sports guy?
PF: I was when I was younger. I played baseball and hockey. Honestly, my love of sports, and the social atmosphere of sports, is why I turned to punk and hardcore… I was kinda good at sports when I was a kid. I was picked first in my little league tryouts. It was in Acushnet, Massachusetts, at Pope Park. I remember we had just moved back to the state so I didn’t know anybody. It was the first little league field I had walked onto. It was a fall morning, and I remember it was my first time getting an actual pitch without a tee. I was just nailing it. My father loved baseball, he was a diehard Boston Red Sox fan. He worked at Fenway Park when he was a kid. We’d be driving on family trips as an army family and he’d be smacking the dashboard whenever the Red Sox would play.
So I was seven and I got on this team. But I didn’t know anybody. A lot of the kids had bonds from playing together the year before, and some of them had dads who were coaching the team. One coach had six of his sons playing. And I was just an outcast. At practice I was great, but when game time rolled around I couldn’t perform. I was petrified. It was discouraging. And as the years went on, I was still on the same team, I got older and noticed I was still in the outfield. Like, wait a minute, the younger kids go in the outfield, what the hell is going on? Laughs. It eventually became a source of discontent with my parents and I wound up quitting. I remember feeling like I let them down, especially my dad. For some reason, after that, I decided to pick up hockey. I think it’s because I had heard my grandfather on my mom’s side had played, and then I saw The Mighty Ducks…
Our team played mostly Cape Cod kids. The problem is that my team, in New Bedford, was kind of this rag-tag Bad News Bears team. The Cape Cod kids weren’t wealthy in the way that I think people associate with Cape Cod, but they were upper middle class and they went to hockey summer camp. That wasn’t the case for kids in New Bedford. But we’d play these kids and we’d kick their asses every time.
As I got older, all my teammates went to New Bedford High School but my father, when he retired from the army, went to the Catholic high school to teach Latin so I went there instead. Suddenly, all of the Cape Cod kids were my classmates because they all went to the Catholic school. I’m a freshman and I’m on the same team as these kids I had spent the last four years hating. Laughs. They were extremely rude. Just bullshit, macho locker room talk. I had already been exposed to punk and grunge through my brother. He was into Nirvana, Scratch Acid, and The Melvins. My sister, too. She liked Blur before ‘Song 2’ exploded. I think being exposed to that stuff made it okay, in my mind, to feel weird about locker room culture, so I quit.
I was discovering punk culture and how organic it was. There were no coaches around, there were no deadlines, there were no due dates. There was practice, but it was completely designed by young people, I was leaving this stereotypical world of a young boy in exchange for something that felt otherworldly. It felt like I was leaving something behind, and had good reason to.
ES: I don’t want to get too heady but, man, that’s like The Hero’s Journey. You could have been this New England golden boy but instead, you found yourself on this more difficult, or at least weirder, path. And your memories seem so vivid.
PF: Moving around a bunch sharpens the memory of it because it’s such heightened emotion. I remember the one friend I had when we moved to Columbia, MD. His name we Gregory Surface. All the kids in the neighbourhood were mean to me except him. When my family moved back to Massachusetts, we had a final sleepover. The rest of the family had already left the state, but my father came to pick me up at Gregory’s house. The car was packed, and Gregory ran along with the car waving me goodbye. It was like something out of a movie. He was the one kid who stood up for me. Just having that experience of being an outcast and having him valiantly stick up for me - it’s created these ripple effects and it’s made me more on the dramatic side and, frankly, the sincere side… It’s pushed me to seek out the drama of life
ES: It sounds like you still feel like an outsider to some extent, but you’re also a member of society. You’re a high school teacher, you have a family. Has it gotten easier for you at all? Do you feel like you can express yourself authentically?
PF: I feel like I’m able to express both sides of myself authentically. Do you remember the band The Suicide File?
ES: No.
PF: They’re this hardcore band from Massachusetts. They put out an explosive two EPs and one record. They broke up because the singer wanted to go into teaching. I remember looking at his story, and I had always wanted to teach. I didn’t know how to read in the second grade, which is a long story… But it was terrible. My first day at this tiny Catholic school after moving to New Bedford, the teacher asked me to read in front of the whole class. They just assumed I could.
ES: Oh no!
PF: I remember the fear and anxiety coursing through my veins. Luckily I had this nun who worked with me. I missed recess for the whole year essentially, but I wound up winning the spelling bee and getting on top of my game. Then I got to middle school and discovered history. I had this teacher named Mr. Hall for all three years, and he just welcomed me. I went from being an outsider to being an insider. I felt like I knew how to read and then that I knew how to “do” history. It was hardwired into me. One of the reasons I wanted to be a teacher was because of Mr. Hall, but I look back on it, and it was also the idea of getting students to feel like they can actually do something instead of just memorizing. That was Mr. Hall’s main approach.
All of this is to say… I always wanted to go toward history. When Have Heart broke up, I called Dave Weinberg, that guy from The Suicide File, saying “I’m thinking about checking out some grad programs.” He was like “Oh I’m actually in grad school for Leadership & Administration at Harvard Grad School of Education.” I went with him and there was this principal from Denver speaking. He said something that has always stayed with me. He said, “I’ve always found that the teachers I like the most are the ones who want to be there because of the bad teachers they had.”
When I got to high school, one of my big problems was that it felt like a factory. I went from being in a tiny school to what felt like an assembly line. The teachers didn’t know me. I look back and I can’t blame them for that. They were overstocked. But their approach to history was almost exclusively memorization. No narrative, no biography. There was no human story in it.
I don’t really like the public education system…. Don’t get me wrong there are tons of things I don’t like about private schools, either. But I like the smallness of them. For the life of me, as a historical thinker, I think we made a misstep when it comes to school size. We don’t need to have these super schools that are very much modeled after actual factories. I don’t know why we need to have one school per town. It’d be nice to have 20 schools per town. I envision that kind of world. In the meantime, though, I can take a small school approach to teaching. To me, that feels in line with the ethos of punk and hardcore music.
I’ve never fully believed that nihilism is the best marker of those genres. I remember looking at Sex Pistols and thinking, you know, I get it. It’s fun. But the message is too fashionable in terms of nihilism… A band like Crass, which was a contemporary of the Pistols, observed the nihilism and pessimism rampaging on society and offered ideas of hope. It wasn’t in the most beautiful, positive, cheery way. It was a really aggressive, objective view of how we get things wrong. And I can be very animated in terms of the ways I think we are wrong in our approach to teaching young people. I see the way things operate as rather dystopian. But I choose not to look away. If I see a fire, I feel like it’s my responsibility to help prevent it from spreading.
I don’t give a shit if you remember the Congo Civil War was in 1666. What I do care about is you learning to be the kind of person who can hear their best friend’s mom has cancer and knows how to respond.
ES: Nihilism is interesting because, in a lot of ways, it feels like the easier position. It essentially says everything is fucked and you’re foolish to try and stop it, which is unfortunate because it feels like we’re subsequently living in quite a nihilistic, or at least pessimistic age. Do you see that in the teenagers you're teaching?
PF: This is not a criticism exclusive to teenagers but, you know, you’ve got your face buried in your phone and you’ve got your AirPods in. I joke in class that, now that we’ve got the Vision Pro, the next thing Apple should make is a gag that you stick in your mouth… I’m not a tyrant about cellphones in the classroom, but I’m a parent and I want the teacher to get my kids focusing on the work. I want them to walk out of the door that year with new skills. To think and exist in the world as a critical person who sees themselves as holding agency. I don’t want them being tripped up by their cellphone, or their classmates’ cellphone.
I don’t know how interesting this is to readers, but my cellphone policy is a little bit more clever in that it’s designed to appeal to people who care about their grades. We have a basic cellphone grade where, if I don't see your cellphone, you get five percentage points per quarter. If I see it, I’m taking the points off. And that’s a letter grade. The kids can see how easy it would’ve been to have it away. Underneath the policy is a basic principle of resisting temptation.
ES: That’s interesting.
PF: But even then there’s pushback… Some young people are like, “How dare you tell me that I can’t just fuck around and not give a shit about your learning experience?” Laughs. I find that very nihilistic. It says, “There’s no point to this learning right now. What matters is two seconds of something I actually don’t care about.” That attitude is applied to Drake and Taylor Swift, but also real meaningful events of domestic conflict, and international conflict. We develop this cursory, superficial, tangential relationship with information.
ES: It turns into disaster porn. I think about this a lot working in the news. How the media runs the risk of desensitizing audiences, but also addicting them to bad news. Like, humans react more strongly to threats than rewards.
PF: Yeah and what’s more concerning is some people prefer it this way… Like, I don’t give a shit if you remember the Congo Civil War was in 1666. What I do care about is you learning to be the kind of person who can hear their best friend’s mom has cancer and knows how to respond.
I’ve often thought, when it comes to the news cycle, what would it be like if we got rid of headlines? Like, no headlines. Nothing.
ES: It would probably be great for society.
PF: Because we’re all just reading headlines. Nobody is reading the content that’s within the story.
ES: Yeah, I mean I think it’s important for students, or anybody to remember that headlines are a sort of sales pitch. It’s an offer to the audience to come and read a story. And depending on the organization, they can be torqued up or not.
But I wonder, does history have a selling element to it? If someone writes a book about their research, are they trying to package it, or is the field immune from that sort of capitalist impulse?
PF: It’s funny, history podcasts keep popping up. Like, history podcasts have gotten better and better over the past 12 years. You have actual historians, you know, starting to rake in the dough with these things.
ES: Not the dough! Really? Pat we gotta make you some money.
PF: No way. But there is a sales element to it. Like, stuff about Hitler tends to make a buck. That said, history is such an ancient craft. It has stood the test of time. I think the discipline, on the whole, is in a really good place, in the sense that it’s not cheap. It’s boring, and it’s difficult to climb into. And in an age where we are on our phones tapping away, it’s not trying to serve our lowest impulses…
In the last 15 to 20 years, the approach has been to take the stuff we used to reserve for college students, and bring it to elementary and secondary classrooms. To teach kids how to dissect a primary source account, or how to construct a specific type of argument that historians do. For example, how does a historian decide whether something is significant to history or not? Is it the number of people who died during an event, for example, or is it something more scientific? I’m deeply passionate about this because there are so many wonderful things you can get out of history, particularly empathy. You’re trying to understand the past through the eyes of the present.
I don’t see myself as a company man for punk rock or education. I’m not here to just ascribe to what the higher-ups have to say. But my interpretation has always been that punk and hardcore is a way to possibly heal the world, or heal the self. I’ve always leaned towards the latter. As I mentioned, my freshman year I was going through a lot of pain, and punk was a raft for me. It was a ferry to help me get across.
ES: It’s inspiring to hear how passionate you are about history and teaching, but I wonder if punk is still a raft for you? Like, touring is hard. Why go on the road and leave your family?
PF: It is hard. Fiddlehead doesn’t tour that much, but I used to tour a lot. Even then, this band has a bit of a history of me going out and my kids getting sick. Around the time my daughter was born, we were coming right out of COVID-19, and both of the kids got sick. A few months later we went out on the road and I snapped my Achilles tendon, which put me out of commission for 8 or 9 months.
I’ll be frank, touring helps pay the bills. I’m not making a million bucks with my idealistic vision of history education. However, I’ll be dead before I’m punching in for a show… I’m attracted to writing music with other people. We take nothing and create something. It’s the greatest joy in life.
ES: There’s nothing better than creating something.
PF: Yeah. But is it still a raft? I think I have an innate desire like any human to express myself. On this last tour, my daughter got sick and I had to leave early because she was in the hospital. She’s home now. But in the past couple of days, I have wondered if Fiddlehead is done. We’ve written three LPs that we are so deeply satisfied with. It’s not like we’re trying to take over the world. That’s not in our interests. We talk about breaking up all the time, which is funny because we’re all deeply satisfied with each other. But we all live spread apart. I dunno, I think music is a raft…
ES: It doesn’t sound like it’s your main raft at the moment.
PF: No, because I feel like it’s served its purpose. I’m pretty sure I could survive without it.
For human society to flourish, I think it’s good to have this feeling that things aren’t eternal. It’s more in line with the reality of our species. We are not eternal. Our ideas are.
ES: You do seem like you have a lot to keep yourself occupied.
PF: This world has taught me the art of being curious and creating a passion. I think I would be just fine. But my life as a musician is a wonderful privilege and I try to remember that. I’m lucky to have this knowledge about songwriting and the process. I’m always starting little projects with people. I don’t know. I have been thinking I’m done with all this shit. But I don’t know. I’ve been doing this since 1999 and I’ve never quit. I’d have to unplug myself from it completely to figure out if I need it anymore.
ES: That would be a trip. But it’s interesting because emo and hardcore bands always break up. That’s the natural lifecycle. You write the great album then move on to the next thing.
PF: It’s funny you say that because this is a big issue of mine with the band. I agree that that’s the natural life cycle. What’s unnatural now is that bands have been existing for way too fucking long. Like, why are Foo Fighters still a band?
ES: Buddy, I’ve been asking myself that question for 15 years. Laughs.
PF: The best answer is it brings a lot of joy to a lot of people, and, in the case of arena shows, all at once. I’m not one for arena shows. I’m not some Ted Kaczynski, Unabomber, anti-industrialist but I think there’s something so powerful about experiencing music in a small setting. The only time I’ve seen an arena setting work was Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds at Barclays in New York. That felt like a rare triumph. Like, with Have Heart, we decided to play some shows this summer. Part of that decision was because we enjoyed the last reunion, but it’s also because some of us have family members who never saw our last show, and now they’re here…
ES: Mitchell Wojcik wanted me to ask you about the reunion.
PF: Yeah, we also ended our last tour in Leeds, U.K., which we don’t have the closest affiliation with. This time around the last show is in Boston. It feels like we’re bringing it home. We’re only doing five shows and that’s it. I feel at peace with it. We aren’t “back” as an active band. We aren’t recording new music. We don’t want to take up too much space.
Again, it’s the natural life cycle. In Boston, bands went away; they passed the torch to the next generation. When they stick around, it’s like an overdue dictator or something. A calcified husk. Like, what are you doing here? There’s a new generation, you’re holding onto the past and getting in the way of new ideas that could emerge. For human society to flourish, I think it’s good to have this feeling that things aren’t eternal. It’s more in line with the reality of our species. We are not eternal. Our ideas are.
ES: It seems like you’re interested in endings. Maybe they’re more front of mind for you right now with the Have Heart shows?
PF: It’s less about endings and more about what comes after them. Life is a page-turner and sometimes a chapter needs to end… But with Fiddlehead I wonder if there’s a middle path, an alternative to a breakup.
ES: I was listening to Death Is Nothing To Us today and I was imagining what a record of Fiddlehead love songs would sound like. Like, I know you told Norman Brannon all of your songs are love songs, but I’m thinking of stuff in the vein of ‘Fifteen To Infinity’. I think that song is so cool.
PF: You know, that might be it. God willing, it would be a good thing for me to write about. I love my wife… I wouldn’t want to be too exposing, but I could write a lot… I don’t know if it’s possible. It might not be that interesting.
ES: Have you tried?
PF: That’s a really good point. I’ve been circling back to how I’m drawn to the big things. I look for it everywhere. I’d love to write a song about Gregory Surface running alongside the car waving. That’s a song. Maybe music is still a raft in my life. I don’t know if I want to experiment with removing it. I might need to cross a new river.
You’ve probably just increased the chances of a band writing another record.
ES: Fuck yeah.
Last question, then, is what do you think happens when we die?
PF: I like to think that the energy we’ve pulled up in our lifetime is thrown into the world, into the universe. I don’t know. That’s the big mystery.
Pat Flynn is the lead singer of Fiddlehead. He lives in Boston.