Single Review: “Sidelines” by Ray Hawthorne

By Brittany Davis

Ray Hawthorne’s latest Sidelines finds the perfect balance between nostalgia and current music standards, giving off the vibes of a late 2000s movie soundtrack. This song starts out with a three measure time count on drumsticks followed by instant pounding classic pop-punk drum beats and rhythmic guitar strums.

If you’re like me and a sucker for imaginative, empathic storytelling, isolated vocals, and drums as the main focus, you will enjoy Sidelines.

Hawthorne’s voice is the perfect mix of new age pop-punk and the classic pop-punk that we all know and love. Sidelines is unapologetically relatable with the growing pains and angst of feeling stuck in the same loop; as well as feeling like you let down the people who matter most to you. Throughout this heartache, you’re sitting with yourself going over what could have been done to prevent this, how you could have been different. You know these people didn’t deserve this ending, so you want to make the change, and now you’re left maintaining with the feeling that everything reminds you of them.

This song perfectly executes the raw emotion of frustration that nothing is going how you would have wanted and imagined it to go; now you’re feeling like you’re on the sidelines of your own life and relationships. “I’ll never get my shit together. I’ve been shouting at stoplights and cursing at street signs. This used to be a place that I called home. Suddenly I’m just not right.” There is a lot of self doubt and second-guessing if the right choices were made. The lyrics “If I don’t end this it’s gonna follow me forever,” “I’m lying to my best friends,” feels so haunted by the memories that have brought up the internal battle of trying to change for yourself and those around you, but finding it really hard to know the right place to start. Everyone can relate to the way they might have given themselves a hard time and understood it’s okay to be unsure of things. This song is an earworm; you will find yourself humming and singing in your head to this single.

For fans of: Neck Deep, The All American Rejects, Stateside, Underbrook, State Champs, and Craig Manning from Degrassi the Next Generation.