Something to Write Home About (Silver Nugget Vinyl)

But Something to Write Home About's success wasn't limited to its immeasurable influence. It also positioned Vagrant, which would later add emo luminaries like Saves the Day and Dashboard Confessional to its roster, as the genre's preeminent label. It also led to the band's opening slots for Green Day and Weezer, and sold-out shows across a two-year headline tour that, by its end, had pushed the album's Billboard Heatseekers chart summit to #31 and its unit sales into six figures (a rarity for an indie record in the late '90s).
For the 2024 reissue, the original album tracks were remastered by Joe LaPorta at Sterling Sound, and the packaging features expanded artwork plus an album's worth of demos, including four-track acoustic recordings by Pryor. This combined effort reveals the sturdiness of Something to Write Home About's songs - a tracklist battle-tested in hundreds of live settings. The demos also reveal key changes to lyrics, as in opener "Holiday," and abandoned instrumental ideas; Pryor points to a "twangy" guitar line in "Valentine" jettisoned by Suptic. "It's so funny listening to it now," Suptic says. "My better taste prevailed." For the Get Up Kids, these demos also have the same transportative quality as the finished album, warping them right back to downtown Kansas City and the five-story decommissioned ROTC training facility that – for $100 a month – served as their practice space. "When I hear those particular demos," says Rob Pope, "it takes me right back to that rehearsal room."
In both the early drafts and remastered tracks contained on this definitive version of Something to Write Home About, longtime fans will return to places familiar and formative, and rediscover plenty of moments as vivid as they were on first listen.