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Now, back to your regularly scheduled blog…

We've been asked this question a few times, sometimes in the form of a puzzled statement - "How can you guys write songs aimed at teenagers when you're not exactly teenagers anymore?" I'd like to share my reaction to this puzzle here. It is not only a valid question, but indeed we are no longer teenagers.

First, we don't write songs aimed at anyone or any specific age group, political leaning, religious faith, gender, hair color, height or breakfast cereal preference, although golden grahams and raisin bran and Boo Berry are better than others. Yes indeed, I eat the 80s cereal to this day! We just write songs. We believe great songs are for everyone in every walk of life and experience and emotion. This is Runner Runner's answer and testimony, so I ask you to view it as such, and not as a defensive stance. We LOVE what we do with all our hearts and sincerity. We are IN LOVE with what we do.

I'm sure some of you write: be it songs, poetry, stories, streams of consciousness, creative meanderings or whatever medium you find for getting it all out on paper or into cyberspace. What's the inspiration? Who inspires you? With the pen or iPhone in hand, is it always of that moment? Is it in real time or is it the reflection of a memory, or even the cumulative result of a lifetime?

We may not write deathless prose and we know that. We're certainly not on par with the greats like Bob Dylan, who can spin magic around words and really make you think. We aren't as tortured as Kurt Cobain, or as visionary in our solitude as Ryan Adams and Conor Oberst, but our words tell our story. We write songs of love or a lack thereof, or essentially, about relationships. We are no strangers to heartbreak and heartache and longing and the wildest daydreams, a feeling I know I share with many of the folks who actually support us and our music so far.

Again, I defend not. I'm merely pointing out some examples and certainly NOT putting ourselves on par with these giants of awe inspiring talent. The point is that life is a roller coaster ride. We all have a story to tell, and as we live and love and lose and dream we have more to say. Runner Runner believes in opening up and shouting our story from the rooftops for anyone who will listen. In the case of Green Day, who is a greater master of teenage angst than Billie Joe Armstrong? The three of them have become American icons of angst and counter culture; exemplars that teach young people to make their own way and follow their story on the way out of adversity. Billie is the master, a genius, one of the best in his craft. But in the case of their most recent three albums he is remembering his teenage angst, not living it in the moment. "Wake Me Up When September Ends" remembers the loss of his father, very early on. St. Jimmie is an allegory of the tribulations of teenage rebellion and escapism.

When I sat down to write these words I put on my favorite Green Day tune, "2000 Light Years Away", which speaks to me even more now, than it did when I was thirteen and fell in love with this band. I didn't even consider the lyrical import then. It was all about the incomparable feeling the music and singing along gave me, but, now looking back and listening to the words, I see the way a twenty something can reflect and conjure absolute beauty and purity, illustrating a scene so many teenagers have visited themselves. "I sit alone in my bedroom staring at the walls. I've been up all damn night long, my pulse is beating, my heart is yearning. I hold my breath and close my eyes and dream about her 'cuz she's 2000 light years away." Its the same feeling, perhaps in a different context, that two years later illustrated the hook of their breakout single, "Longview" …."bite my lip and close my eyes, take me away to paradise." Or take the concept behind a true teen anthem like "Coming Clean", where Billie Joe plainly speaks of the awkwardness of sexual discovery in spite of a lack of parental support or sheer misguidance. These reflections come at all times, in all ages, and are meant for something greater when the writer chooses them as a vehicle of truth.

When Tom Petty wrote "Even the Losers" with clear teenage imagery captured in lines like: "It was nearly summer, we sat on your roof, we smoked cigarettes and stared at the moon." Tom was far beyond his teenage years, but beautifully captured that moment from his youth and chose to share that in song.

Bruce Springsteen had long left the Freehold, New Jersey of his teens when he penned the immortal "Born to Run", but the influence and inspiration for those words of genius were rooted in his past, not present. The summer so brilliantly captured by Bruce in "Backstreets" was many years behind him when he wrote it. Bruce wasn't living in "that old abandoned beach house getting wasted in the heat." at that time. He was then living on a farm in Holmdel, NJ, many miles inland.

"I was loud and a little sad, She was visiting from Atlanta, Georgia. She had come to spend the summer with her dad, I thought she was very pretty. We would kiss and hold hands, every night by the football field." Those poignant words belong to John Mellencamp, obviously from a younger point of view and based on a glorious, yet melancholy experience in his youth, but written as an adult. Now maybe if we had the genius of a Springsteen, Petty, or Mellencamp, we could write songs like that, but we feel that there is a long road ahead, winding through inspiration and countless adventures to move us to storytelling.

We do the best we can with who and what we are. A thread of the romantic is one thing we all have in common as a band especially Jon - even heartthrobs get sensitive from time to time, and though I'm not sure that we will ever wax poetic, we will write songs that mean something to us and we hope stir some spark in you too. It's not intentional, but we can't seem to get away from the subject of love, past, present or future. It may not be deep but it's deeply sincere.

Of course there are songs on the Runner Runner album written from a memory, but there are also songs written in and about the moment. That's the beauty of songwriting. Songs take time and turn it on its head and fold it up and twist inside out and see it from many aspects like a Picasso, and sometimes something beautiful and new is born there.

A girl can break your heart and when you rush home to write the feeling down, you might remember a flash from long in your past and recall that you are reliving the same exact emotion. If you have real genius, when you grow up and have children, and your son comes home with a painting from kindergarten and says; "Daddy this is a painting of Lucy, in the sky, with diamonds" you may rush to write a masterpiece.

- Peter (@PRunnerRunner)