Matt Pryor of The Get Up Kids announces memoir, Red Letter Days

Matt Pryor of The Get Up Kids has announced a new memoir. On January 23, Pryor will release Red Letter Days via Washed Up Books. The book is based around journal entries from 1990 to 2000, and features short vignettes about his early days in the Get Up Kids, touring before smartphones, growing up with childhood diabetes and other various topics.

“This was never meant to be a book about emo or even the band in particular, I didn’t want to write about the ‘scene.’ That is already well documented,” Pryor said in a statement. “Every one of the stories in the book is one that I’ve told backstage, at a bar, or on a porch. I wanted to translate them from an oral tradition to a written one.” 

He added, in reference to the emotional impact of revisiting this era in his life, “I have found—and this is fairly recently—that things I write don’t really hit me like that until later. In the moment I just think that’s a cool song, lyric or story; it seems to be that I can only really connect on that level once I’ve had some distance from it.” 

Check out the book’s cover below.