A song is a key for locked memory boxes. A song can transport you back through time, giving you a chance to relive moments and ideas that occurred back when you first heard that song. A song is not just a song; it is also a story.

My cooler older cousin put this song on a mixtape for me when I was in grade 6. I would walk around the schoolyard listening to it on my walkman thinking it was so cool, and thinking that I was so cool for having it on my walkman. I knew with utmost certainty that I was the only kid at St. Vincent’s Elementary School in Thunder Bay, Ontario with that song on his walkman.

For me, a horror fanatic since I was way too young to watch horror films, the fact that there was this band that had written all of these amazingly catchy and badass songs inspired by horror movies… this was earth-shattering for me. I had no idea that music could be that cool. And aside from having ridiculously childish and disgusting, macabre lyrics, and a really catchy tune and cool sort of dark attitude about it, I felt, and still feel, that there’s something genuinely melancholic and tragic about that song (aside from little girls’ heads being hacked off and mounted on some creep’s wall being tragic). It still makes me feel emotional today.

- Adam Waito (guitar/vocals) of Adam & The Amethysts
Photos by Ming Wu

Read “Flickering Flashlight” by Adam & The Amethysts