I’ve been on an Incident Management Team since 2020. We’re the folks who support wildland firefighters on the federal side ensuring folks are feed, paid, and have everything they and the community needs when a wildfire breaks out.
One of the more interesting things about this gig is the peculiarity of fire shirts. Let’s try and get this out of the way quickly – a third party creates shirts and hoodies memorializing the fire. Firefighters and staff associated with the shirts buy them out every time. I used to buy them, all of them, but last year I stopped and came up with a different way to note – I was there.
Record stores and albums.
I made a custom sticker with a blank space to write in the assignment and year. Good for my music collection and good for whatever local economy I was visiting and a much more personal touchstone of my experiences. That brings me to the Avett Brothers and their May 2007 release, Emotionalism.
My wife, K, she likes music, but on some level, she indulges me my vinyl addition. This last fire assignment found me in Spokane and amongst the four or five records I picked, Emotionalism was one – it contains mine and K’s song – “All My Mistakes.” Remember I said K indulges me? Every time I get home from an assignment, I would proudly pull each record out of the bag and show it to her and she oohs and ahhs at each reveal. I had saved Emotionalism for last and didn’t say a word. The smile that spread across her face — genuine, immediate, a smile of recognition rather than politeness — told me everything I needed to hear about whether I’d made the right choice bringing it home.
I came to the Avett Brothers in 2005, catching them open for BR549 in a mid-level venue in Columbus, Ohio, right in the stretch between Mignonette and the record that would go on to change everything for them. I was there to see BR549 and was not prepared to have my mind blown away by this band that I’d never heard of at that point.
Emotionalism was released on Ramseur Records, catching Rick Rubin’s attention it led directly to I and Love and You – their major label debut. It’s also just a genuinely strange, eclectic record — bluegrass sliding into something like hard rock for a moment, then cabaret, then back again, often inside the same three minutes. I was there for the hinge point, watching a scrappy string band on the edge of becoming something bigger, before the rest of the world caught up to what I’d already found.
But none of that history is really why this album matters to me. What matters is what happened after I found someone to share it with.
K and I found each other later in life — both of us already carrying full histories by the time we met. On paper, we made no sense at all: a Marine and combat veteran and a self-proclaimed Hippie, two people who shouldn’t have understood each other, let alone built something lasting. And yet, when we were together, we made perfect sense to each other. Emotionalism became the soundtrack to the part that came next — road trips, beach trips, long stretches of just being in the same room together, working through pieces of our pasts neither of us was particularly proud of. There were things about ourselves we had to say out loud that we didn’t like hearing or saying, conversations that took more than one sitting to finish.
None of it was easy. All of it, it turns out, was necessary.
Every hard conversation, every uncomfortable admission, every mistake either of us had ever made, had been quietly building the exact two people who finally saw each other during an Occupy Wall Street action.
“All My Mistakes” is our wedding song, and I don’t think that was ever really a choice so much as an inevitability. It runs over five minutes, unhurried, willing to sit inside its own reckoning rather than rush toward something tidier. That’s not an accident, and it’s not really about the song either — it’s about what kind of love actually gets built. Not the kind that shows up clean and finished. The kind that has to survive its own history first, that must sit in the mess before it earns the right to call itself something real.
That’s what I was handing K when I finally pulled that record out. Not just an album I loved. The whole shape of how we got here — every wrong turn, every version of ourselves we had to leave behind, all of it stacked up in one record, still sounding, all these years later, like coming home.
