On August 17, 2015, Bren Lukens almost killed themselves. That night, they went up to the roof of their house with thoughts to end their life. “He doesn’t know it, but I got a text message from Jake [Ewald, Bren’s bandmate and best friend], just like saying something really stupid, something really basic, day-to-day stuff,” Bren said, voice wavering, on Tripping in the Dark, the 2016 Modern Baseball mini-documentary. “I got off the roof and told my friend Cam, and he saved my life by telling Jake.” Jake ended up calling Bren’s mom. He told The Fader in 2016 that it was “the hardest conversation I’ve had with anyone. There was so much heartbreaking stuff that neither of us knew the other side of.” Bren’s parents drove to Philadelphia that same night to take Bren to treatment, which, at first, they vehemently denied—it would mean cancelling a string of gigs in Australia—before self-admitting to a Maryland facility.
On September 28, 2015, Rose almost killed herself. My iPod Touch alarm went off at 7 a.m., same as any other eighth grade Monday, and when I reached over to silence it the Google Hangout messages were already there: casey i did something stupid. I knew what that meant before reading the rest. im going to keep this short. I ripped the blankets off my bed and ran to my parents’ bedroom. i took 55 acetaminophen and i think its supposed to start kicking in soon. I paced as they called her parents. you tried your best. Her mom said “What do you want us to do about it?” and hung up. im sorry. We called 911 instead as I hyperventilated on the floor. i love you.
I played hooky and went to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. They pumped her stomach clean, stuck fluids into her arm. When they finally let me in to see her, she wouldn’t look at me. “They took my pencils,” she told me, flat and empty, staring blankly out the window. “They won’t let me draw.” I thought of the times I’d caught her driving a pencil into her forearm in sixth period—how I’d jump out of my seat, pretend I needed to grab a tissue, grab her wrist, hand her the tissue I pretended to need, and watch her use it to dab up the little bubbles of blood while I sat back down. I did not say any of that. She was mad enough at me as it was. I sat with her for a long time, tried to dredge up inside jokes to make her laugh. I don’t remember if it worked. I do remember her saying the only thing worse than killing yourself was failing to, and the silence that followed as I tried to pull some combination of leaden words from my throat. I don’t know if she ever forgave me.
On October 23, 2015, Modern Baseball released MOBO Presents: The Perfect Cast EP, and I cried listening to “The Waterboy Returns,” thinking of Rose the whole time. I sent her a link as soon as the final chord faded out. It wasn’t subtle; the first lines were “Hey you, that’s no way out / You can’t find help in a bottle or a cut.” I didn’t particularly care; it was easier for the words “Are you okay? You can talk to me. / Do you have anything to say?” to come from Bren Lukens’ mouth than my own. Rose simply wrote back “thanks,” but I saw Modern Baseball pop up on her Spotify “currently listening” tab soon after.
On November 3, 2015, I saw Modern Baseball live at The Orpheum. I had begged my dad to drive me six hours to Tampa—on a school night, no less—so my first concert could be a band I legitimately loved. Rose had been begging me to go to Jacksonville to see twenty one pilots with her later that month (i want the most important person in my life to be there when i see the most important musician, she had texted me. i know that this is something u really don’t want to do, but i just want to have a win, you know?). I fucking hated twenty one pilots, but I loved Rose, so the point was moot. Anything involving Rose had become an extenuating circumstance by then, and my parents wanted me to have a “win,” too—so to Tampa it was.
I posted a collage of the show on Instagram and called it the best night of my life. Jeff Rosenstock opened. PUP would’ve too, but their van had broken down. I screamed along to every song, and left the venue with tear tracks on my pale, round face. At the show’s end, I crowded near the stage in a vain attempt to secure the setlist for myself; I failed, but at least I got all the band members to sign my newly-bought merch while they packed up their gear. All but Bren Lukens, that is, who never came back out after the closing song. They barely talked during the set, instead letting Jake Ewald take the lead; when the crowd chanted for an encore, the band never reemerged. It was odd, maybe, but I didn’t think much of it at the time.
A few days later, when Fairview Middle School took its eighth graders on an overnight field trip to Atlanta, Rose wore my new Modern Baseball sweatshirt. We shared a hotel room with two friends, Andy and Kris. In the middle of an illicit late-night game of Cards Against Humanity, Andy started hallucinating that their father had broken out of prison and come to our hotel room to seek revenge for getting him arrested for abuse and child endangerment. They ran to the balcony to try to jump off. Kris had a panic attack in the corner. Rose hid in the bathroom with a razor.
After talking Andy off the ledge, I sat on the rim of the tub and coaxed the blade out of Rose’s hands. (I was an even hand at that by then: her parents often called mine whenever she was cutting again. I’d get picked up from school to rush to her room, dance around the broken glass on the floor, and pull the jagged shard from her hand.) The next day, at the World of Coca-Cola, my signed MoBo hoodie was returned to me with small stains of dried blood on the inside of the right sleeve.
On May 13, 2016, Modern Baseball released their third—and, although no one knew it then, final—LP, Holy Ghost. It was a split album a la Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below: Jake wrote and sang the first six songs, Bren the last five. I had been eagerly awaiting it for months, both as a fan and, oddly enough, as a critic. I was weeks out from graduating middle school at that point, with little separating me and summer vacation save for a months-long project for my “creative journalism” elective that required me to pair up with another classmate—Rose, obviously—to create our own pseudo-magazine, one chock-full of short stories, open letters, poems, critical essays, whatever we decided. I decided I’d review Holy Ghost for it the moment Mr. Cameron announced the project. It was my first ever piece of music criticism. It’s odd how things work out: ten years later, here I am, rewriting it for my job.
WHEN I READ THAT HOLY GHOST was going to be a split record, I immediately hopped on Google Hangouts to message Rose: “dude would it be funny if i reviewed one half of the album and you did the other? like imitating the album?” After hearing it, I decided I liked Jake’s half better (“i like the less guitar bc you can hear the words more, and the lyrics are so poetic”), while Rose preferred Bren’s (“i just like the more shouty stuff”). We called it “Modern Baseball: Civil War,” because it was 2016 and Captain America: Civil War was in theaters. In the intro, we framed the album as being about Bren’s “accumulating struggle with depression, [their] bipolar disorder, and substance abuse, culminating in intense treatment in the past couple of months. The album goes over both [their] side of the story as well as Jake’s, as [their] band member and best friend.” What’s curious about that is that it’s wrong. Not all of it, but enough of it. Jake’s half was not, in fact, about his experience desperately trying to keep Bren alive, safe, and well in the throes of their mental illness; it was mostly a reflection on the passing of his minister grandfather.
We didn’t like the album all that much, Rose and I. We were too biased in favor of You’re Gonna Miss It All and Sports. As I wrote in 2016, “I do like this new album fine, but not as Modern Baseball. I miss the beautiful and gritty simplicity of Sports and You’re Gonna Miss It All, and although I like the more mature lyrics, part of me wishes it was interspersed with some of their old anthems. With Holy Ghost they’re trying for a different type of charm, which isn’t totally there, at least to me, at least not yet. They’re leaving too much behind, they’re becoming too generic.” It’s a little funny to think back to now, considering I am still notoriously averse to polish in music and production. That being said, I’ve listened to enough hi-fi records in the intervening years to roll my eyes at my middle school pretentiousness; very little of MoBo was actually lost in translation by the shift to proper production, regardless of what my highly opinionated decade-old review might suggest.
Perhaps part of growing up, then, is learning to fully appreciate Holy Ghost. It’s undoubtedly Modern Baseball’s most ambitious and mature record—in sound, lyrics, and concept alike. Gone are the bratty shout-alongs about girls; here it’s regret and dead grandfathers and the passage of time and meta-textual critiques of the band’s own shallowness all the way down. I think part of my issue with it at the time was how transitional it felt; it seemed to be this connective issue between the band Modern Baseball had been and the band they were going to become, and because we couldn’t see the latter yet, I found some of the record hard to swallow. (As I put it back then: “I look forward to their next album, once they’ve found their footing in their new maturity and sound. I think this one will make more sense after that.”) Even now, that feeling remains; it’s a portrait of a band in motion, midway to becoming. How could it be anything else? It ends, after all, on Bren screaming “I’ll be with you the whole way, it’ll take time, that’s fact / I’m not just another face, I’m not just another name / Even if you can’t see it now, we’re proud of what’s to come, and you.” But we know now that “what’s to come,” at least for the band itself, was nothing at all.
Holy Ghost does not provide closure. This might have been unintentional—after all, Modern Baseball had no reason to think it needed to give closure; they were in their twenties, with years and years of albums ahead of them. But now, the album’s refusal of resolution feels very much like the point. It’s not interested in the neat and tidy, but something far messier: the ugly, ongoing work of loving someone while they’re disappearing. The thing about grasping at someone in the midst of fading away is that you end up staring at your own empty hands. Jake’s songs do not simply mourn the past; they keep stumbling into the present, trying to understand what it means to outlive a version of a person, or a friendship, or a self, and still having to wake up the next morning and continue. Bren’s side, meanwhile, is not some clean answer to that grief but the other half of the same wound: relapse, recovery, guilt, clarity, self-disgust, the endless and humiliating fact of still being alive. (The only thing worse than killing yourself, Rose said, is failing to.)
It’s impossible not to hear the distance between Jake and Bren as part of the music itself. Not distance in the dramatic, tabloid sense, but distance as in the ordinary chasm between two people outgrowing each other and/or the thing they made together. Jake’s side of the album is quieter, the lyrics denser than the sound. Bren’s is louder, anthemic; all that anger and self-loathing exorcised via riotous noise and adenoidal howls. Jake circles his losses with the patience of someone who’s had time and distance (he wrote his part across multiple months); Bren hits head-on because that’s all that was available (they wrote their part across three days, because they were discharged from their therapeutic institution seventy-two hours before recording started). But together, they map the full topography of a single hard season—not just the person falling but the person watching, both of them changed, both reaching toward something they can only approximate in song. Jake is mourning a death and Brendan is grieving a life. The irony there is not lost on me, at least not any more.
A LOT HAS CHANGED since Holy Ghost came out ten years ago. Modern Baseball went on “hiatus” in 2017, in large part due to Bren’s ongoing struggles with their mental health. That “hiatus,” of course, has yet to end. I graduated middle school, then high school, then college. I haven’t seen Rose since the summer before ninth grade, because we went to different schools and I let our friendship fizzle out, awash in both guilt and relief. But without her depression as a convenient distraction, my own eventually became impossible to ignore. By junior year, I was eyeing razors and acetaminophen bottles, too. That January, my parents hired strongmen to drag me kicking and screaming to a treatment facility in New Hampshire, then another in Massachusetts, the latter of which has since closed for child abuse allegations. I came out worse than I came in.
It was awful, all of it; I’m still traumatized by so much of what occurred in those six months. But the hardest part was stomaching the mere fact of it: that I was someone like Rose. So much of my identity had been built on my own misperceived well-adjustment. Next to Rose, next to Andy and Kris and all of them, I got to be the stable one. Helping them became evidence I could hold up in mental court whenever my own well-being was tried. Being institutionalized was the rudest possible awakening. I’ve yet to fully reckon with the blow it dealt to my own identity; I still lie that I took a gap year to everyone I meet. Sometimes, when I’m feeling especially masochistic, I wonder what Rose would think of the person I became after she knew me, if she could see the wreckage I eventually made of myself after all that smug little faith in my own stability. I take some horrible comfort in the thought that she’d be shocked. It’s all rather cruel: it’s been seven years, and I still flinch at the thought of being seen the way that I saw Rose, as much as I loved her.
Much like Rose, who didn’t think she’d get to high school, and me, who wasn’t sure I’d make it to college, Holy Ghost has now long outlived the future it was moving toward. I used to think it felt unfinished, but that’s because I was young enough to believe that life owes us some kind of closure. I saw myself and Rose etched into the bones of the album and resented that it wouldn’t tell us how we’d end. Listening to Holy Ghost today, I understand that it’s what doesn’t end that sticks with you. The thing about a holy ghost—in the album’s framing, in whatever approximation of the concept I’ve carried around for a decade now—is that it keeps showing up even when you’ve given it no invitation. It hovers. It doesn’t save you, and it doesn’t leave. There is no secret version of this story where the right text arrives in time, where everyone gets better on schedule, where the people who were supposed to stay do. There is only the record, and the damage, and the growth, and the long aftermath of learning that love is real even when it is not enough—and that even when it is not enough, the fact that it was there at all means something.
Listen to Modern Baseball’s Daytrotter session from 2014 here.
Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
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