Artist

The Get Up Kids

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The most popular songs by The Get Up Kids.

Did You Know?

Interesting facts and trivia about The Get Up Kids. By Songfacts®.

The Suburban Get Up Kids formed on October 14, 1995, on guitarist Jim Suptic's 18th birthday. They later decided to shorten their name to The Get Up Kids. Matt Pryor explained to Spin how the name came about: "I said something about the band I was in previously: the Suburban Get Up Kids. We all kind of liked that, but I'd been in three other bands already that had names that started with 'S' and all three broke up pretty quickly. There was Sevasch, Secular Theme, and Secret Decoder Ring. None of them had much longevity. So I was superstitious about dropping the 'Suburban' part. And also, I'm not a suburban kid, so it didn't make sense. As far as the 'Get Up' part, we liked the action verb aspect. The idea of being motivated was appealing."

In 1996, The Get Up Kids spent their savings on the recording of their first single, "Shorty/The Breathing Method." Matt Pryor spoke to 17 Dots about the experience: "There was a guy in Lincoln, Nebraska…this guy, Mike Mogis, who does Bright Eyes and stuff now - he would charge you by the song instead of by the hour - so it was like 300 bucks, we could drive up to Lincoln, three hours away, the van broke down on the way there… We put it out ourselves and then mailed 7 inches to everybody that we could possibly think of."

The success of "Shorty/The Breathing Method" lead to The Get Up Kids signing a deal with Doghouse Records, who gave the band $4000 to record their debut album. Four Minute Mile was recorded over the course of two days and released on September 30, 1997.

Pete Wentz said that this album had a major influence on his band, Fall Out Boy, saying, "There was an honesty and sincerity to the album. It seemed more about the fact that this music was emotional, than an actual sound than labeled them. Fall Out Boy would not be a band if it were not for The Get Up Kids." Despite Wentz's complimentary comments, in 2009, guitarist, Jim Suptic, admitted to Drowned in Sound that he prefers to dissociate himself from many of the bands The Get Up Kids influenced: "If a band gets huge and they say we inspired them, great. The problem is most of them aren't very good. What does that say about us? I don't know. Maybe we sucked."

The Get Up Kids left Doghouse Records and went on to sign with Vagrant Records in 1999. Vagrant Records co-owner, John Cohen, managed to convince his parents to re-mortgage their house in order to help fund the recording and production of the band's second album, Something to Write Home About. The risk paid off after the album was released on September 21, 1999 to commercial success, peaking at #31 on Heatseekers album chart.

This album lead to The Get Up Kids being labeled pioneers of the "emo" genre. The band would later go on to apologize for 'inventing' said genre - which has spawned artists like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance - with guitarist, Jim Suptic, stating at a gig in 2009: "If this is the world we helped create then I apologize."

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5.8MArtists
73.5MSongs
12.3MAlbums
6.3KGenres
2.5MLabels
493KPlaylists