Why This Nineties High School Punk Band Is Suddenly Bigger Than Ever

T
he Palace Theater in Los Angeles was an odd place for a punk show. Its stage once featured worldwide stars like Harry Houdini. For many years it was an ornate movie theater. On this night in 2023, however,  the cavernous five-story building was filled with bearded, flannel-wearing, middle-aged former punks, most of whom came to see Nineties punk titans Unwound play a reunion for the 20th birthday of the archival record label Numero Group. One of these middle-aged punks (sans the beard and flannel) was a youth swimming coach named Chris Sheppard. As Sheppard wandered the venue he overheard a group of men about his age talking about one of the bands playing that night: “Who the hell is this band? How did they end up on this bill?” 

The band was Everyone Asked About You — and Sheppard is a guitarist and one of the singers. The question cut deep, since Sheppard was already nervous about performing in front of the 3,000-plus in attendance (the largest show his band had ever played by several orders of magnitude). But it was also a question he and his bandmates had been asking themselves for months. How did they end up here? 

Guitarist Collins Kilgore and keyboardist John Beachboard had asked their wives to stand by the front of the stage so there’d at least be someone there for them to play to. “When we started playing the first note,” Beachboard says, “they were thrown out of the way by kids immediately moshing and dancing.” 

“As soon as we walked out onstage, it was a bum rush of hundreds of teenagers and young 20-year-olds just running to the front of the stage,” Sheppard says. “Security didn’t know what to do.” 

“I think they were just as stunned as we were,” says Beachboard of their wives. “Because I think they were like, ‘Let’s go up there and support our idiot husbands up there playing their little guitars and their little keyboards.’”  

“We had a stage diver at that show,” Sheppard says. “We never played a stage tall enough to dive off of before.” 

Sheppard started Everyone Asked About You with his friends back in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the late 1990s when they were all teenagers. At the time, Little Rock punched well above its weight within the niche emo and hardcore scenes, anchored by bands like Chino Horde (whose guitarist, Jason White, went on to play for Green Day) and Soophie Nun Squad. After a few years, like most high school groups, Everyone Asked About You broke up and went their separate ways, never to think about the band again. In Sheppard’s case, he stopped playing music altogether. “I sold all of my musical equipment in 2000 to move to Boston,” he says. “I hadn’t played the guitar in 22 years.” 

That was supposed to be the end of Everyone Asked About You. Then one day in 2015, Sheppard saw a YouTube video that would blow his mind. It was a recording of a band in Japan onstage playing the songs he’d written with his friends two decades ago. He says, “That was the first time I had any inclination that people outside of the, like, 65 people that ever saw us back in the Nineties knew who we were.”

CHRIS SHEPPARD MET DRUMMER LEE BUFORD at Little Rock Central High School, and the two of them formed a band called the Low End Theory, playing Unwound-inspired noise rock. Eventually they started listening to bands like Rainer Maria and Braid, bands that came to define the “Midwest emo” sound of the 1990s, a softer and more melodic style of hardcore. The two began experimenting with their sound. Kilgore, who was a couple of years behind them at Central High, joined them for practice sessions. “What we were playing was lots of major chords. It had that pretty vibe, but the songs were fundamentally sad,” Kilgore says. They decided they needed a vocalist, preferably a female, to round out the group. Buford had noticed Hannah Vogan hanging around the benches on Kavanaugh Boulevard, a popular spot for Little Rock punk kids to congregate. He found out she went to the private school Pulaski Academy. He also found out she was taking opera lessons. Buford introduced himself, and invited her to join their band.

The name Everyone Asked About You came from a children’s book Buford found at Books-a-Million. Their songs had names like “Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts” and “Sometimes Memory Fails Me Sometimes.” They played their first show with the local heroes Soophie Nun Squad, a chaotic band with anywhere from seven to 12 members, depending on the night, that played a fun and wild form of punk music that wasn’t anything like Everyone Asked About You’s sound. The bands they regularly played with were often aggressive, dramatic, and heavy. Their sound was more sweet and melancholy. “At the time, I wanted to be edgy and post-hardcore, post-punk kind of sound,” Kilgore says. “And then we were making this sort of twee stuff.” 

The Little Rock punks were generally supportive of the band. “When we first started, a lot of that original Little Rock old guard had moved on and gone off to college, and it was just the high school kids left there carrying it on,” Sheppard says. “And Hannah and I were writing lyrics and singing from a perspective of kids in high school going through high school stuff.” They played in public parks and living rooms to an eclectic mix of hardcore punks, metalheads, and indie-rockers, and generally young people they knew from school and around their local scene. Their shows were always upbeat, with plenty of dancing and singing along. When they went on a short tour to play living rooms in other states, they found a less-positive reception. “I was a closeted gay kid and she was a Southern girl, and those are two perspectives that are, I think, unique within the scene that we were a part of,” Sheppard says. “And I think that’s one of the reasons why I don’t feel like we had any sort of traction or launch back then.” Ironically, they found that cities where there was an established “Midwest emo” scene were the toughest crowds of all. “It went over like the plague,” Kilgore jokes.  

They put out a few singles and one full-length, all on vinyl, probably a few hundred copies of each, selling them through the mail or by hand at shows. Heartattack, a widely read hardcore zine, panned their record as “cutesy” and “queasy.” There was a feeling they were too late to their particular style of emo, and the scene had already moved on from twee teenage angst to a more technical, harder sound.

“It had fallen a little out of vogue at that point,” says bassist Matt Bradley. 

In the end, the band didn’t break up out of acrimony. They simply grew up — graduating high school and moving on to jobs and college. Sheppard became a swimming coach. Vogan became a nurse. Buford became the drummer for the experimental metal band the Body (who developed a devoted cult audience with their intense and unusual sound). Bradley became a production designer for the Santa Fe, New Mexico-based art collective Meow Wolf. Beachboard opened a brewery in Little Rock. Kilgore became a lawyer in California. They mostly fell out of touch with one another. 

IN 2015, A STUDENT AT KEIO UNIVERSITY in Tokyo was looking for some music that he and his classmates could play at an upcoming school festival. “There was a strong emo trend in our university music club,” says Akira Sasagawa, now a 33-year-old systems consultant in Japan. Sasagawa searched YouTube for old and obscure emo bands, and came across a 2012 upload of Everyone Asked About You’s vinyl album. “Out of all the bands we listened to, EAAY stood out,” Sasagawa says. “We were also drawn to the low-fi, unpolished production — it gave their music a kind of authenticity that felt more real than anything overly polished ever could. It wasn’t just music; it felt like someone was truly opening up to us.” 

Unbeknownst to the members of EAAY, that YouTube video Sasagawa found already had more than 100,000 views, and interest in their band was growing. “When I first listened to that EP and the second song kicked in, I had just got into my first relationship, and something resonated with me,” says Onat Önol, who lives in Glasgow, but was a teenager living in Istanbul in 2015. That song was called “Me vs. You,” and it opens with Vogan singing the unapologetically cloying lines “Just between me and you, I think I’m in love with you/All of my waking time you’re on my mind/I don’t know why” over a driving drumbeat and guitar feedback. “I was just replaying it over and over, completely obsessed.” 

“This is the definitive sound of being young, emotional, and insecure about your feelings and thoughts,” Önol says. “Which is really impossible to get right in music, for me at least. There are very few bands that I feel really get me, and that I get to a similar degree.” 

By 2019, the YouTube video caught the attention of Ken Shipley, co-founder of the Chicago-based archival record label Numero Group. “I just thought it was cool, and it was a group from my era that I’d never heard of,” Shipley tells me. He knew Buford was a drummer in the Body, and he reached out to him through a mutual friend. Buford was skeptical, dismissive, and maybe even a little embarrassed. The Body played experimental noise and metal that is often described as “scary,” a far cry from the melodic, singsongy emo of Everyone Asked About You. “I don’t think he rated the music that highly, but also, the idea that anyone would seem interested in this was pretty ludicrous,” Shipley says.

Buford shared Shipley’s email with his old bandmates, but they, too, wrote it off. “Lee and I laughed about it and then just kind of let it be,” Sheppard says.

But Shipley didn’t give up. He emailed Buford regularly, maybe once every six months or so, all while monitoring the growth in the band’s video views and comments. “And then it wasn’t until 2021 that I reached out to them and just was like, ‘Hey, I think that y’all are missing something here, and that this is having a moment,’” he says. “And how I knew that is just looking at the number of plays. The Rate Your Music reviews were super through-the-roof for it. And the YouTube comments, anytime you’re seeing a song getting 400, 500, 600 comments — I mean, just affecting somebody enough to type 15 characters into a field, it’s meaningful.” Eventually Shipley asked the band if they’d like to reunite and play the label’s 20th-birthday party show with Unwound. At that point, Buford decided to get the band together on Zoom. 

“I was 100 percent prepared to say, ‘Absolutely not,’” Sheppard says.

“I definitely was like, ‘Who the fuck wants this?’” says Bradley. “Yeah, there’s some YouTube video watches or whatever, but we were not a popular band in the Nineties.” 

In the end, Beachboard convinced the rest of the band to do it. “If we were to tell this story at a bar to our friends and be like, ‘We got asked to play this big show with a bunch of our musical heroes, and we said no’ — that would be a really shitty end to the story,” he says. 

So, begrudgingly, they went to work. On Christmas 2022, they met up in Little Rock, the first time they’d all been in a room together in more than two decades. They helped one another relearn to play guitar, to sing, to be a band, and to try to reconnect with some distant, younger version of themselves. “When we first got together to play these songs that none of us had even really thought about or listened to in that 25 years, it took me straight back there to what it was like to play them and feel those things the first time,” Kilgore says. “Even our group dynamic kind of reverted back to the way that we talked to each other back then. It was fun. It was crazy. It was weird. It was a very strange experience, because I hadn’t experienced anything like that in my life.” 

“I was really good friends with Lee. I went to his wedding,” Beachboard says. “But I’m not sure we had talked in 10 years before this.” 

They spent four days together rehearsing, reconnecting, and trying to find whatever it was in their music that was so captivating to the youth of today. And in February 2023, they took the stage in Los Angeles in front of the bearded, flanneled men who wondered who the hell they were, as well as the hundreds of kids who knew exactly who they were, and sang every word to every song.  

After the show ended, they were shocked to finally come face to face with their new fans. Buford’s band’s booking agent told them he could get them on the bill at the San Francisco Noise Pop Festival the very next day. They’ve kept booking and playing more shows since then, meeting young fans — some of whom fly in from other countries just to see them. “It just keeps snowballing,” Sheppard says. “And each time I feel like it’s more and more fun.”

AS EVERYONE ASKED ABOUT YOU TOOK THE STAGE at Le Poisson Rouge in New York’s West Village this spring, the packed club roared with delight. As the band played, their fans’ dancing eventually turned into a mosh pit. Sheppard gently admonished the crowd: “Be careful of the people around you. Everybody enjoys music differently and you should enjoy it how you want to, but make sure you’re not infringing on other people’s spaces.” A cheer from the crowd, and the mosh pit turned into synchronized bouncing — pure kinetic energy — and singing loudly enough to be heard over the amplification.

“Their fan base is so interesting. It was the coolest crowds we’d ever played for,” says Mabel Canty, the singer for the opening band that night, Birthday Girl DC. “They’re probably in the same boat as us, where they’ve been fans for a while and never thought they’d be able to see them.” 

Birthday Girl DC are a rising punk trio from Washington, D.C. Their members are all teenagers. In fact, on this particular night, it is Canty’s 18th birthday. Canty’s father and bassist Isabella Mackaye’s uncle are members of the legendary D.C. punk band Fugazi. In a very real way, the tour where Birthday Girl DC opened for Everyone Asked About You personified the bridge between the Nineties punk scene and today. 

Birthday Girl DC and Everyone Asked About You met thanks to Chris Wilson, who plays drums for the long-running punk acts Ted Leo and the Pharmacists and Titus Andronicus. When he plays with the Pharmacists, he says, “Our crowd is largely our age.” The first time he saw videos of the Everyone Asked About You show at the now-shut venue St. Vitus in Brooklyn, he was shocked at how young and energetic the audience was. When he met Birthday Girl DC during a show in Washington, he asked them if they had ever heard of Everyone Asked About You. “They literally screamed,” he says. He suggested he could introduce them, and the bands ended up touring together.

Wilson went to watch the two bands play together in the basement of a Unitarian church in Philadelphia, a venue that has been hosting punk shows since 1993, where many of Everyone Asked About You’s contemporaries played. Thirty years on, they played there to a crowd of teenagers who weren’t even born when Everyone Asked About You first formed. Wilson, who lives in Philadelphia and attends shows at the church often, had never seen anything like it. “Seeing the younger people,” he says, “it was insane. It was like being at a show in 1995. It was incredible.” 

“I was fully prepared for them to be dickheads,” Birthday Girl DC drummer Tess Kontarinis says, recalling her first meeting with the members of Everyone Asked About You. “But then I was like, ‘Oh, my God, these are my parents. They’re my friends.’ And it’s an insane dynamic to have that and to make us feel so present and at home with them.” 

“We listen to a lot of bands that are not together,” Kontarinis says. 

“And then this band out of nowhere just reformed,” Mackaye says. 

“With the exact same energy that they had,” finishes Canty. “I think a big reason why they still work and are so cool is because they all went on and lived really normal lives.” 

Following its reunion in 2022, the band wrote and recorded a new album, Never Leave, for Numero Group in 2024. The music is a bit more polished, the lyrics a bit more middle-aged. Sheppard and Vogan sound different than their teenage selves, both in their voices and their lyrics, trading lines about things like cancer, death, losing your hair, giving pets anti-anxiety medication — grown-up stuff. The song “A Vigil,” written in response to the attack and death of nonbinary 16-year-old Nex Benedict in Oklahoma last year, features Sheppard earnestly crying out “Two-sided lies to save who from what? A fence post? A bathroom? A knife in the gut?” On the song “We’re All Losing It,” they lament the sounds of their voices, reflect about their childhood, and in unison sing, “Wish I was an easier kid/When I was younger.” 

Over the past couple of years, the band has continued to attract new fans, particularly through social media. “I think a lot of people discovered them through Numero, but also just on TikTok,” says Kali Flanagan, the 20-year-old bassist for the emo band Holidays in the United States. “People just using their songs in little videos.” 

Everyone Asked About You songs show up in TikToks ranging from the standard fare of people getting ready for school or dancing alone in their bedrooms to clips of Ultimate Fighting Championship matches or NBA games. And when someone is curious about more than the six seconds of a song they hear on TikTok, they go looking for more. What they discover is an entire underground scene — one not too distant in the past, yet far enough to feel completely different from contemporary culture.

“Everyone Asked About You was the first emo band that I got into,” Flanagan says. “And it was even before I knew what emo music really was.” 

The lore and the sound of their early recordings all add to the mystery of the band for new fans. The fact that their original recordings were rough around the edges lends them some authenticity.

“The recordings, they’re fairly rough compared with a Fugazi record or something,” says Önol, the fan from Glasgow, “but they’re going for it.”

“Their production is they just plug in and play and then that’s it,” Canty says. 

It’s a paradox, this idea that a band of people in their forties and fifties are seen by so many teenage punk kids as the most authentic representation of youth, especially when so many of the members of the band have a hard time relating to this generation. “These guys are so much less jaded and so much less uptight about music than we were,” Beachboard says. “I don’t think I learned how to be that open with music until my early forties.” 

“As open and as community-minded as we were, we were pretentious as fuck,” Bradley says. “These kids just don’t have that energy.” 

Ultimately, what could be fueling the excitement around Everyone Asked About You is the relative obscurity and unlikeliness of it all. While Bradley doesn’t see teenagers as pretentious, there is a certain amount of hip “in-the-know” attitude to this band’s fandom. 

“There’s a little bit of ‘I want to find something that nobody knows about,’” Sheppard says. “A lot of kids are looking for something more authentic and real.” 

“It’s just archival culture,” Flanagan says. “Finding something by itself or on its own that doesn’t sound like it’s from today.” 

Shipley has built his label’s success on this archival culture, and sees firsthand how young people today are mining the digital record crates for lost gems. “The Nineties are the Sixties — think about it from when you were a kid,” Shipley says. “All you heard was about peace and love and all that bullshit. And so that’s just the same thing that they’re hearing about the Nineties. It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s the last time before the internet.’ They’re nostalgic for a thing that they didn’t get to experience.”

“A lot of the young people are feeling some form of despair and want to be part of a community,” says Sheppard. “They’re trying to figure out how to feel real connection with other people.”

Today, Everyone Asked About You are preparing to go back out on tour this month, including a stop in their hometown of Little Rock. For now, this is the plan. Nobody has quit their day job. They play shows whenever they can negotiate the time off from work and their families. Meanwhile, their records continue to sell all over the world. 

“It’s worldwide. Is it massive worldwide? No, but they have an opportunity to go play in Japan, and I know that we’ve sold a bunch of their records in Europe, and it will grow as their notoriety grows,” Shipley says. “The more time we put into it, the bigger the thing’s going to grow. And I have an enormous amount of patience for records and artists to bloom. I didn’t get into this for one year, two years, or three years. This might take a decade. I’ll be here.”

The Nineties — the “last time before the internet” — represent a time when young people may have felt more connected to one another, when small things still felt really big and important, when something as superficial as a music scene still tied young people together and played a major role in forming their values, their personalities, and their friendships in ways that would last the rest of their lives. Whether that’s true or not, it’s something the band’s fans seem to long for — and they seem to believe the band’s mere existence proves it’s possible. 

“I think it’s really important to note that the reason that they had a successful reunion is because they are doing it out of love,” Canty says. “They just love being together, and they’re all friends.” 

“We’re all rapidly approaching 50 years old,” Beachboard says, “rekindling friendships from junior high. I mean, nobody gets that opportunity.… Who gets these opportunities? It’s not a story I’ve heard that many times before.”