Song Review: "Everything Is Alright" by Motion City Soundtrack

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Is everything alright? Well, that depends on who you ask or when. If you ask anyone now, well, you’re going to get a rather mixed bag of replies. The last year has been everything but “alright”, but for some being “alright” was always a loose term.

For the troubled and ever charismatic frontman of the seminal Minnesoata based emo rockers, Motion City Soundtrack, being alright has been a struggle since his youth. In their signature poppy-punky emo anthem, “Everything Is Alright”, Justin Pierre takes aim at the menial tasks that irked him at the time of the song’s writing.

First and foremost, “Everything Is Alright” is a delightful slice of hook filled emo-pop that showcases MCS’s masterful talent of blending tough to swallow topics with poppy sentiment to sugar coat life’s troubles.

Being a single off MCS’s stellar album, Commit This To Memory, “Everything” probably has the most meaning and power behind it. Inspired by a screenwriting professor while taking classes in college, Pierre channeled his own personal struggles and wrote them into characters of stories he’d write.

The idea behind that process was to “write what you know” as opposed to reaching for something you know nothing about. This idea was formulated as a way to create something personal and try not to write “Goodfellas 2 or Pulp Fiction 2” as Pierre put it in an interview

While Pierre may not have written the song back then (this was during the mid-90s), he began writing stories with characters who had asthma or who were afraid of talking to girls, i.e. what he knew.

This practice translated over to the song’s actual writing when he brought in his struggles with OCD. As referenced above, he mentions how “hates the ocean, theme parks, and airplanes, talking with strangers, and waiting in line”. Telltale signs of social anxiety, am I right?

I’m a fan of grandiose songs with grandiose emotional statements and abstract meanings, but “Everything” is at heart, an expertly crafted pop song that has just the right of emo flair to make it uber relatable to the masses of youths who helped certify this song as gold.

The biggest gestures can mean a lot, but it is often the smaller, more benign ones that make the biggest impacts and “Everything” is a prime example. MCS is a strongly pop-centered group and that can be attributed to the likes of Ric Ocasek and Mark Hoppus.

With the experience and pop sensibilities of Mark Hoppus who produced Commit This To Memory it's no wonder how “Everything” became MCS’s signature song. MTV News writer Jason Montgomery noted how similar it sounded to the recently broken up Blink-182 by saying “The song starts out with a Travis Barker-esque cadence, picks up with some power chords, and then rides to a climax atop some sweet two-part harmony. It’s kind of like Motion City Soundtrack are trying to pick up where Blink-182 left off.”

The drums, guitar and bass, vocals, and the band’s signature Moog synths all meet up in a beautiful marriage to birth a truly indelible piece of modern pop punk-emo. MCS may not have gotten the proper amount of mainstream recognition, but the thousands of loyal fans will always cherish their music. As long as Pierre and company blast “Everything Is Alright” at each of their shows, the group will live on even if everything isn’t alright.