By Michael Branigan and Rooks Russell

“Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!” 

Gatbsy’s assertion haunts the close of the title track “Into the Past,” from the band Driveways’ 2022 album. 

Reliving old crimes preoccupies the pop-punk band’s discography, and lead singer Pat Finnegan confronts the question by drawing on symbols from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ray Bradbury, Ernest Hemingway, Ken Kesey, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

The first song, “Into the Past,” reveals the songwriter “gets lost in the fiction” crafted by these authors. He reflects on memory, grief, and experience — both good and bad — through the lens of these stories’ motifs, which still occupy our minds. 

“Salem” depicts a man condemned by his past, “bearing the mark” of shame in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. Drawing from the Puritan view, he feels stained by his past mistakes, “defined by sins that I can’t outrun.” He is shocked by how haunted he feels: “I never thought I’d care enough to lose a piece of my soul.”

He brings the act to the present, separating the “sin” from the sin itself. He places the blame on the scarlet mark, questioning the morality of looking backwards at all. Yet as we all know, no one can escape the sins of the past.  

“Ambulances” takes up Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, which is filled with the after-effects of World War I through the eyes of Frederic Henry, who served in the ambulance corps. Frederic meets a nurse in Montreux, who becomes a salvific impression of peace, “like a clear blue sky on the heels of a storm.” 

Hemingway draws on storm imagery to depict the struggle of war, and the narrator views someone from his own past “like a saving grace back in 1918,” which parallels him and Frederic. The past haunts them both, but the present heals injuries. The song closes with the promise, “the world breaks everyone, but with you I know I’m fine. I’ll never let you go again.” 

But this promise might be its own kind of scarlet mark. 

“Lions on the Beach” uses imagery from The Old Man and the Sea to describe a loss the narrator experienced and his clinging to a dear memory. He laments, “you lost the fight but you’re deserving of a praiseful eulogy,” connecting what was lost and the great swordfish that the Old Man was able to finally kill. 

The present of “Ambulances” now fades into the past. This song shows the struggle to hold onto the good memories, comparing it to the epic struggle of Santiago beating away the sharks trying to eat the fish he had lashed to his boat. The title itself references Santiago’s dreams of lions he saw playing on the shore of Africa, symbolizing his lost prideful youth. He asks at the close, “can I show grace in defeat when everything’s taken from me?” 

“Lights on Long Island” recollects  the green light in Great Gatsby but begins with a memory of looking at the northern lights with a loved one. “A fleeting moment in the sky pales in comparison to your eyes,” and “One look inside of your eyes and it’s like ‘22 on Long Island, I can see your light and its shining again” draws the audience’s mind to Gatsby and the quote at the start of the album: “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” 

The narrator presents a memory of looking at the northern lights with someone, potentially the same figure established in “Ambulances” and at the close of the song, the narrator asserts himself as a Gatsby figure, hoping to recreate the past, “Like boats against the current, borne back into the past, I still chase that green light, I swear the color’s different but I’ll never let you go again.” 

The narrator recognizes the unnatural pattern of going back into the past, but he is still determined to do so, echoing the promise from “Ambulances,” “I’ll never let you go again.” 

“Pandemonium” takes up Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes to show the unnatural and destructive consequences of going into the past. Bradbury presents a carousel which acts as a fountain of youth, reversing the aging process for those who ride it as an inversion of Chopin’s Funeral March plays over the loudspeakers. The second verse describes the narrator’s attempt at return: “Discordant harmonies ripped out a part of me, can’t feel my legs as I’m running towards a distant carousel turning.” 

The return to the past destroys part of him, like the narrator of “Salem” fearing he has lost “a piece of his soul.” Pandemonium also draws on storm imagery throughout this song, as in A Farewell to Arms, to describe the present tragedy of loss and grief. “Black out my eyes, I’ve been haunted by paranoid lies… drown out my fears, I’ve been running for thirty one years.” 

Funny that grief is the result of remembering what was.

“Fog Machines” uses One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to describe the continued anguish of an inaccessible past. If grief is a scream in “Pandemonium,” in “Fog Machines” it is an echo. The narrator laments, “I hate to say it but I think about you all the time, I live inside the darkest corners of our conversation.” 

If grief is a scream in “Pandemonium,” in “Fog Machines” it is an echo.

This is a stark contrast to “Lights on Long Island” and “Ambulances,” where the narrator assures, “You were an idol in my eyes.” The closing lines, “I got my freedom but they got your head” references the state of the two main characters at the close of the novel: Bromden leaves the asylum while McMurphy is left in a vegetative state after an unnecessary lobotomy. 

This image emphasizes the harm of returning too often and deeply into the past, because otherwise you become trapped, like McMurphy in the asylum. The narrator got his freedom, escaping the past. But the subject of the song is trapped there forever.  

“Burning Bright” turns once again to Ray Bradbury with — you guessed it — Fahrenheit 451. The novel itself is a work hugely concerned with forgetting the past, obliterating it because of the danger the past poses to the future. The firefighters in Fahrenheit 451 burn books because they risk people losing themselves in the past. 

The previous two songs show this danger. Employing this book, which encourages remembering the past, is a surprising turn. The narrator is confused: “I don’t know what you’re asking me — said I can’t stay but I can’t go.”

 A symbol that Bradbury uses in the book appears in this song: the sand and sieve. In the book, Montag feels he is trying to hold sand inside of a sieve as he tries to memorize a book before it is taken from him. This shows the struggle of trying to retain the past. It will inevitably fly from us. But “the sieve and sand live inside my head.” The sieve parses out its contents, while sand is the knowledge of the past, (as presented by Bradbury). By saying that the sieve and sand live inside his head, the narrator says he has learned how to interact with the past constructively, while the sand still remains, although it fades over time. He cannot burn them away, but he can process what has happened and the loss he has experienced. 

Driveways’ album “Into the Past” is an honest portrayal of the human desire to return to the good things that we’ve lost, but still properly situates the past behind us and asserts the power of literature and the passing of time to heal grief and help us continue to live.

Michael Branigan is a senior studying Applied Math. Rooks Russell is a senior studying English and Psychology.