COIN was a band

“How Will You Know if You Never Try,” 2017

I found the band COIN right when I needed them — when I was 14 and helpless and felt almost entirely alone in this world. I’d blast COIN songs with my chords in, kicking rocks and plucking dandelions and tearing leaves to shreds on long walks home from school. I was an angsty high schooler with lots of friends, but a persistent lonely gaping feeling. Call it “Growing Pains.” Call it a COIN-shaped void. 

The truth is, I was never alone when I was with COIN. When I was with them, I was in a dream space on the sidewalk, wondering about all the things I didn’t know yet. Things like love. Things like getting older and looking back on everything that mattered. Things like being alone with someone you love and dancing in the dark.

To be with COIN was to be barefoot, in-touch and always wanting more. To be with COIN was to breathe.

On cold walks home, hands shoved into pockets of my beloved Notre Dame jacket, I’d listen to “I Don’t Wanna Dance,” and somehow I understood, even though no one asked me to dance at my first homecoming (and frankly, no one would ask me to dance till college).

“Malibu 1992” was my cry-on-command song. I cried not because I related, but because I couldn’t relate — not yet. “Sweethearts that high school soured” and “your old bed replaced with a treadmill, now” had me thinking about emotions and seasons of life I hadn’t even unlocked. I’d think about the prospect of having a high school sweetheart and one day looking back on it, the prospect of not spending every night in my childhood bedroom with the pink walls. These are the things I didn’t understand yet.

My parents drove me and Madeleine to their concert our sophomore year at the 9:30 Club in Northwest. We took pictures in front of the tour bus together and wore our 18-and-under stamps with pride and screamed every single word to every single song. 

“Dreamland,” 2020

“Dreamland” came out my junior year of high school. All my friends could drive, except me, and so I became everyone’s designated right-hand woman (passenger) and DJ (always on aux). By this point, I started becoming a little less awkward and angsty, a little more independent and cool. I suddenly had friends who wore thick eyeliner and smoked weed, and I often found myself almost always somewhere between the tennis courts and the theater-kid parties my friends invited me to.

I took this photography class where my friends and I spent all of class walking aimlessly in the parking circle and woods by our school, snapping photos on school cameras. Sometimes — maybe once or twice — we drove off-campus with the windows down to get McDonald’s to feel more alive. COIN was with me through all of that. 

“Valentine” made me feel like wanting love wasn’t so embarrassing. “Cemetery” made me feel like I didn’t want to die rich. “Crash My Car” made me feel reckless and young and also painfully in need of a driver’s license (I just kept putting it off). “Let It All Out (10:05)” made me feel safe and seen and terrified, made me feel lost and found and free and buried and brilliant and breathing (in and out), made me feel like a current, a curtain, a west wind, a shiver — made me feel everything. 

But “Babe Ruth” was the song I played when I learned to drive with my dad, driving through the West End and Del Rey and the Parkway. Everything started making sense. I had purchased orange high-top converse and stopped wearing orange lipstick (Madeline was right; it really wasn’t my color). I was a young girl taking on the world for the very first time.

“Uncanny Valley,” 2022

The album came out my freshman year at Holy Cross. After months of struggling to fit in and find friends and figure this whole college thing (boys) out, I was finally starting to take control of my little life in Notre Dame, Indiana. I had started going on friend dates with Clare (to the library to do anything but study, to Manor Football League games to do anything but spectate); I had started to really love it here.

“Take A Picture” is a song that will forever remind me of this time in the spring of my first year, when the permacloud was alive and well and I was finding my way (flying down sidewalks on a blue vintage Schwinn, wearing clunky timberlands and sunglasses in my hair, though the sun hadn’t shined in weeks). 

The words, “You’re gonna miss this / So take a picture” felt like notes of courage, reminders to take this all in, even when it totally sucks. I figured, even the times that weren’t perfect were still small gifts. Still moments I might return to at some point, somehow.

I’m glad I took it all in. I’m glad I spent my first year here making God-awful mistakes and also catching sunrises at the lake whenever I could because everything was so new and so lovely all the time (and I was determined to take nothing for granted).

I went to the “Uncanny Valley” tour that summer at the Anthem after my work shift. I went with a friend, and although she and I don’t talk anymore, it’s still one of my favorite memories. And I don’t regret a thing.

“I’m Not Afraid of Music Anymore,” 2024

Amelia and I went for drinks after the “I’m Not Afraid of Music Anymore” concert this fall; it was my third COIN concert, but I swear it felt brand new every time. We went to Pour Decisions, then Halligans. I had never been to Halligans, but I knew we were in the right place when I heard COIN songs from the new album blaring from the main bar. There, on the corner of Lincoln and Belden, I knew I was exactly where I needed to be.

To hear “It’s Hard to Care About Everything” live was transcendent, but to hear it playing outside of a bar you’d never been to, in a city you rarely frequent past when the South Shore Line trains stop running, made the place feel like home. It felt like home because of the music and the company. Because I felt something for the first time I’d never felt before — weightlessness and maturity and peace, like I was on the cusp of something. 

This final COIN album felt like the beginning of the rest of my life. It felt like courage. It felt like I wasn’t afraid of love anymore. It felt like the future didn’t totally terrify me. It felt like falling. It felt like melting. It felt like it would never end. 

But then it did. 

One day, you’re going to a COIN concert with one of your best friends, and the next, the lead singer Chase Lawrence is informing you that the band can’t exist any longer.

So it ends. It dies. It kills. It crushes you. You cry. You think about all the stamps you cycled through all these years (under 18, under 21, and then suddenly, you can buy your own High Noons at the concert venue, and you’re in a city you don’t know that well and perhaps you’ll meet someone you’re falling for at Halligans later). You think about all the seasons this band carried you through and all the friends you put onto this group. 

And then you remember that all good things come to an end. It’s just what happens. A good thing can end for a good reason. And it did. 

So, now that COIN is over, you hang your head on your Habitat for Humanity 13-dollar sofa and wonder what’s next. You play every COIN album all the way through, and you think about everything that’s to come (everything that scares you, all the love that’s out there for you, in one breath).