Emo-Inspired USA Travel Destinations

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The rock genre reluctantly labeled “emo” (practically a slur) wasn’t just about heartbreak and depression. Fans of punk, hardcore, and emo music in the early 2000s also resonated with themes of disillusionment with hometown status quos. In fact, it’s become a trope of the new emo revival that every band will inevitably write about “leaving this town,” probably “with their friends.” If you were never in a band yourself, you may not have gotten the chance to go on tour with your friends, but that doesn’t mean you’re barred from planning your own music-themed road trip!

My travel and road trip itineraries often involve following a muse – chasing Jack Kerouac up Desolation Peak, driving Bonnie & Clyde’s ambush route in Louisiana, visiting places relevant to Edith Piaf’s life and career in Paris. This time I’m throwing it back to my first love and taking a “Cemetery Drive” down memory lane while blasting “At This Velocity” as loud as possible. The emo wave of the early 2000s was a jumping-off point for me to discover other genres and bands like Fugazi and the Mars Volta. It inspired me to get a Bachelor of Science in Music Industry and eventually take jobs at talent agencies and artist management companies in New York City and Los Angeles. I’m a travel writer now, so that was a past life…or was it? The amount of fun I had writing this post proves it must still be in my veins.

Note that these entries are sprinkled with additional “bonus” suggestions beyond what’s mentioned in the table of contents headings. Note also that I’m not including fourth wave revivalist emo bands.

Visit MCR’s “Helena” church and “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” filming locations in Los Angeles

Newcomers to the scene might immediately picture marching band uniforms, parade floats, and ray guns when they hear the name My Chemical Romance, but veterans know the band’s most iconic imagery comes from their sophomore masterpiece Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. It was the music videos for “Helena” and “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” that truly put them on the map and introduced the band to the world, and to many fans, these videos most represent who the band are at their core. The church where Helena (played by dancer Tracy Phillips) spun gracefully up the nave and the school where the uniform-clad band members were shoved into lockers and tackled by bullies during a croquet match are practically synonymous with the early 2000s. 

Luckily for fans, it’s easy to see all of these video shoot locations in one day. The “Helena” church is Immanuel Presbyterian Church at 3300 Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles, and the “I’m Not Okay” video was actually shot at two nearby schools, Loyola High School and Alexander Hamilton High School. 

Loyola High School was also the filming location of Head Automatica’s “Graduation Day,” which Gerard Way sang backing vocals on, and the movie Donnie Darko. Alexander Hamilton High School was the filming location of Panic! At the Disco’s “New Perspective” music video. While you’re stalking around Los Angeles visiting high schools like a creep, you may as well throw in Reseda High School in Reseda, California too – the location of Paramore’s “Misery Business” video shoot.

Meanwhile, east coasters are blessed with plenty of My Chemical Romance-related sites to visit, and not just in their home state of New Jersey. Check out Monroeville Mall in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, where the movie Dawn Of The Dead was shot. MCR’s “Early Sunsets Over Monroeville” from their first album I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love was inspired by the film.

Watch your back on Thursday’s “Division Street” in New Brunswick

The story behind Thursday’s “Division Street” from their stalwart album War All The Time sounds like a brutal series of events. Geoff Rickly told MTV that it’s about a particular night in New Jersey when he was upset to find his friends strung out on drugs. Upon leaving the house in disgust, he was mugged and stabbed in the leg. He hobbled to his girlfriend’s place looking for help, only to find her with another man. Speaking from the future, we know that Rickly would go on to get jumped two more times in later years; the man is downright cursed.

Division Street is located in New Brunswick in between Hamilton Avenue and Somerset Street. It’s practically on the Rutgers campus and isn’t the worst part of New Brunswick, but if you want to visit, maybe it’s best to go in the daytime rather than when it’s “lights out on Division Street.”

Take the right exit while blasting Taking Back Sunday in Menlo Park or Mebane

The cover photo for Taking Back Sunday‘s Tell All Your Friends is innocuous enough to cause confusion among fans. It simply shows a blurry highway overpass. On the back cover is a road sign for “Exit 152.” How many Exit 152s must there be in the United States? The band is from Long Island, so the highway must be in New York, no?

No. The front cover photograph was actually taken in Menlo Park, California. Fans figured it out by zooming way in to a road sign that points to “280 South to San Jose” and “Sand Hill Road.” Exit 152 on the back cover is a reference to Adam Lazzara’s hometown in North Carolina. Taking Back Sunday has worked the number 152 into the artwork for all of their albums.

“152 is the number of an exit in North Carolina. There’s these two Interstates – Interstate 40 and Interstate 85 – and they kind of connect, northeast, southeast. But for that stretch of highway in North Carolina, they come together to form one super highway. It’s not really that ‘super,’ but it’s just a road that you can drive past on without stop lights. And that’s where the original exit 152 is located. I grew up in a small town, so to go to shows you’d have to drive an hour and a half to two hours away, and that exit was kind of halfway from where we lived to where we were headed. And we would meet there and we’d stop there, and there’s just a lot of memories there. I’ve driven by it recently. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, and if you’re going to Raleigh, North Carolina, you pass it.”

Adam Lazzara, Tone Deaf

Internet sleuths believe the real Exit 152 is at Trollingwood Road on I-40/I-85 near Mebane, North Carolina, about here at 36.0657455,-79.3154807.

Go for a ride when “Nothing Feels Good” on The Promise Ring boardwalk in Ocean City

The bright, deliriously colorful artwork on the cover of The Promise Ring‘s sophomore effort is juxtaposed against its depressing title, Nothing Feels Good. It’s as if visiting the depicted amusement park is an on-the-nose and goofy attempt to force happiness by someone who is out of other ideas. You can’t be sad at an amusement park, right?

The photograph was taken at Trimper Rides on the Ocean City, Maryland boardwalk, and many fan photographs have been taken since. One Redditor referred to it as the “emo Mecca.”

The Promise Ring also referenced specific states and cities in a handful of song titles throughout their career, including “Everywhere in Denver” and “Jersey Shore.” “E. Texas Ave” refers to a real street in their hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the lyrics mention Hartford Union High School in Wisconsin. The lyrics of “Is This Thing On?” read “Delaware are you aware of air supply and television? Delaware are you still there, is this thing on?” They name road trip destinations like it’s James Brown’s “Night Train;” go ahead and let The Promise Ring plan your entire trip.

Book a stay at Panic! At The Disco’s “Miss Jackson” hotel in Barstow

The vaudevillian and particularly emo version of Panic! At The Disco that we think of from the early 2000s is exemplified by their debut album A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out and the music video for “I Write Sins Not Tragedies.” I desperately want to include locations you can visit related to this time period, but unfortunately the farmhouse on Sable Ranch in Santa Clarita, CA where “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” was filmed (as well as Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects) burned down in a wildfire. The elaborately costumed circus troupe that performed in the video, Lucent Dossier Vaudeville Cirque, doesn’t seem to do regular public performances that you can buy tickets to in 2023. Other videos made in Panic!’s early years were filmed on sound stages and movie sets; the street from “Nine in the Afternoon” is not a real street.

If you want to relive this particular era of Panic! At The Disco history on a road trip, you might look at retracing their steps from the day-in-the-life-esque short film Panic At the Disco In American Valley. This video was shot in Baker and Nipton, California and Jean, Nevada.

Otherwise, we can look a few years down the line at Brendan Urie’s more recent career. One industrious fan was able to pinpoint the shooting location for “High Hopes” as 843 S Flower Street in Los Angeles, and the music video for “Miss Jackson” was filmed at the Motel 6 in Barstow, California, which is still in operation.

As long as we’re in California, let us not forget…

Take Green Day landmark walking tours of San Francisco and Los Angeles

Green Day came up as part of the early 1990s punk scene in the Bay Area, but mall emo fans welcomed 2004’s American Idiot with open arms. 

The band’s earlier albums are easy to mine for road trip destination inspiration because they so frequently mention exact place names in their song lyrics. When Billie Joe Armstrong sang “Take me to the tracks at Christie Road,” he meant 1015 Christie Rd in Martinez, CA. When the band remembered “the center of the earth, in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven where I was taught,” they were referring to the 7-Eleven at 2869 Pinole Valley Rd in Pinole, CA near where Billie and Mike went to school. Later, the music video for “Jesus of Suburbia” would be filmed at the 7-Eleven at 1908 Colorado Blvd in Los Angeles, CA. “Exit out the back and never show your head around again” in the song “86” elicited the punk club at 924 Gilman St in Berkeley, CA, which banned Green Day from playing there after they “sold out” by signing to a major label (they eventually lifted the ban).

The Green Day Landmark Tour website offers tons of additional ideas for themed Green Day road trip stops, mostly throughout their home state of California.

Take a photo at the American Football house in Urbana

For two decades now, music fans have been pilgrimaging to the lonely, unassuming white house at 704 W. High Street in Urbana, Illinois. It doesn’t look like much, but it holds a special place in emo hearts because it graces the cover of not one but two self-titled American Football albums. It also provides the setting to their music video for “Never Meant.” I can only assume it’s the inspiration for about 5000 subsequent emo album covers.

“I think the house is a thing because for 20 years there were no visuals associated with that band at all,” says Chris Strong, the photographer who captured the iconic, tilted shot. “Everyone just sort of held onto the house because there really wasn’t anything else to look at.”

VICE

The house is so important to fans and the band alike that American Football decided to buy it earlier this year. With so many sacred sites of the scene being closed, sold, remodeled, and demolished over time, it’s nice to hear that at least some of our holy places will be preserved. As an aside, thankfully the 309 house in Pensacola, Florida, the “oldest continuously inhabited Punk House in the south,” is also being preserved thanks to the 309 Punk Project.

One such location that has not endured is the outside wall of Farmingdale Lanes bowling alley on Long Island where the title of Brand New’s The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me was once spray painted. Savvy fans were able to quietly venture there for pictures for a decade after the album came out, until the city decided to crack down on graffiti. Instead, if you want to drive into Brand New history, try following the route directions detailed in the lyrics of Straylight Run’s “Sunrise Highway”; the song is apparently about Jesse Lacey.

Seek out Fall Out Boy memorabilia in Chicago

If you only know one thing about Fall Out Boy, it’s probably that they’re from Chicago. They talk about it almost as much as Frank Iero talks about New Jersey. References to their hometown are sprinkled throughout their discography, most obviously in the song “Chicago is So Two Years Ago” which gave us the ridiculously catchy refrain “there’s a LIGHT on in ChiCAGo.” The cover photograph for their EP An Evening Out With Your Girlfriend was taken at Pick Me Up Cafe on N. Clark Street. For over a decade fans went there to recreate the cover, but the cafe moved locations in 2020.

Not to fear – there are plenty of other Chicago restaurants relevant to Fall Out Boy. If you’re looking to try the famous Chicago-style deep dish pizza, Pete Wentz has some history with Lou Malnati’s Pizzeria on the north side of Chicago; he played on the Malnati’s baseball team as a kid. Or, if you head to Gino’s East at 162 East Superior Street, you’ll find an autographed picture of Wentz alongside a note about his love for Gino’s. Wentz also recommends the divey Chuck Wagon Restaurant in his hometown suburb of Wilmette. And, I’ve confirmed that the Hard Rock Cafe in Chicago still has Patrick Stump’s jacket from the “Dance, Dance” music video on display.

Fall Out Boy aren’t the only band to pay homage to Chicago. While you’re at it, head to the intersection of Damen Avenue and Division Street, the subject of Alkaline Trio’s “Demon and Division.”

Celebrate music history at the Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas

Sadly the Warped Tour exhibit at the Rock Hall of Fame in Cleveland was only temporary, but with Fat Mike from NOFX at the helm, I have to assume that the new Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas is bound to include some younger bands of skate punk Warped Tour ilk, maybe even some that misguided journalists would call “emo,” alongside OG punk behemoths like the Sex Pistols.

“There’s no Billboard chart for punk, although there’s one for bluegrass. There’s no Grammy for punks. There’s no award show anywhere for punk. We needed a place where any punk rocker can go and celebrate our heritage.”

Fat Mike, New York Times

This museum has an onsite bar, tattoo parlor, jam room where you can play the actual instruments once owned by punk musicians, historic artifacts and photographs, and even Pennywise’s rehearsal studio which was airlifted onto the site. You can tour the museum self-guided or pay a fee to have a guided tour led by a punk luminary. Members of Circle Jerks, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Fishbone, the Germs, NOFX, and Suicidal Tendencies have given tours.

Honor your favorite album covers by attending an art show

It wasn’t just the bands that captured us during the alt-rock, post-hardcore, pop-punk, emo, whatever-it-was revolution at the turn of the 21st century. Through the album artwork, the music scene turned us on to visual artists as well. Some bands hired the same artists repeatedly; Alex Pardee became synonymous with The Used, Esao Andrews was inextricably tied to Circa Survive, and Sonny Kay designed again and again for Sargent House, Three One G, and Rodriguez Lopez Productions releases, a couple of which were at least emo-adjacent when you look at their peer group. I remember taking the record out so I could frame the vinyl sleeve Kay designed for RX Bandits’ Mandala.

All of these guys are still producing incredible work and periodically hold exhibitions at art galleries in the United States. While Alex Pardee’s last exhibition was in October 2022 and Sonny Kay hasn’t done an exhibition since 2017, Esao Andrews happens to have a solo show coming up in May 2024 at Thinkspace in Los Angeles. 

Drink to nostalgia at emo-themed restaurants and events

As much as I resent that our millennial nostalgia is being pandered to and exploited at an alarming rate these days, I can’t help but feel giddy at the idea of attending an emo-themed event. These promoters and business owners have us in a chokehold and they know it.

The difference between this and the official Emo Nite© tours is that it was extremely lowkey. Attendees were paying more attention to their own friends and the drink menu than we really were to whoever was standing behind the “DJ booth,” which was just someone’s laptop plugged into a speaker in the corner. This was before the emo wave had entirely washed up, though it was well past its prime. The fact that the event was cheekily called “emo night” showed that we were moving into a post-emo era, but the community lingered on into the early 2010s before the final death knell was tolled. Today’s Emo Nite events advertise nostalgia, but the Idle Hands hangs were about raising a glass to the genre in its final days. Regardless, all emo-themed events are about allowing those of us who grew up on this music to finally celebrate it unapologetically.

If you want to continue supporting the original artists so that it’s not the pockets of random DJs that you’re lining, look into band members’ newest ventures. Some have started new bands, like the Circa Survive, Coheed & Cambria, Thursday, and My Chemical Romance supergroup LS Dunes. Those that aren’t still touring haven’t floated off into the ether. A few have launched new businesses; Inside Hook’s article “From Portland to Paris, Indie Rockers Are Taking Over the Restaurant Biz” is the perfect example.

These emo-inspired travel destinations and road trip ideas are tangible, specific sites that you can add to an itinerary, but don’t forget there are plenty of other songs that mention general regions of the country. Taking Back Sunday song titles include “Brooklyn” and “Miami,” Plain White T’s mentioned New York City in “Hey There, Delilah,” Against Me! has a song called “Sink, Florida, Sink,” Hawthorne Heights‘ biggest hit was “Ohio is for Lovers,” Bright Eyes mentioned the Black Hills and Badlands in “Four Winds,” The Get Up Kids wrote “Campfire Kansas,” Braid had “Milwaukee Sky Rocket,” and, both presumably about the Hollywood Hills, there was Death Cab For Cutie’s “The Ghosts of Beverly Drive” and The Gaslight Anthem’s “Mulholland Drive.” An early 2000s soundtrack can accompany you across the United States regardless of your destination.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the psychological power of pilgrimage. Emo tourism isn’t as ubiquitous as tourism related to older rock genres, perhaps because our altars and shrines aren’t particularly dramatic. Emo legends didn’t die under mysterious circumstances in drug-fueled Chelsea Hotel binges. Sometimes emo lore referenced unremarkable suburban neighborhoods, and other times it was abstract and not narratively tied to real places. I wasn’t able to find any physical sites relevant to Sunny Day Real Estate‘s music, for instance. But now that music is becoming less and less tangible across the board because of the internet, the landmarks we do have access to are more important. They ground our fleeting memories and they are a form of proof, a testament. They’re still there when the taste of ink is getting old.

🏨 Looking to save money on your road trip? Find budget hostels here and save on gas here.
🏕️ Find free or paid campsites throughout the States via The Dyrt.
✈️ Coming to the States from further afield? Use an Airalo eSIM for affordable international cell data.

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