Running Music: All American Rejects 'Move Along'

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All American Rejects ‘Move Along’

This is one of those more tenuous choices, included thanks to a combination of lyrics, personal memories and, the deciding factor, because I like it.

I’ve never been one for analysing lyrics, not least because I’m not very good at it. To me, this song appears to be a person speaking to someone that is having a hard time, giving them the “stick at it” speech and offering to be there in the moment of need.

“So a day when you've lost yourself completely
Could be a night when your life ends
Such a heart that will lead you to deceiving
All the pain held in your
Hands are shaking cold
Your hands are mine to hold
Speak to me”

The part of ‘Move Along’ which stood out to me, and which I’m relating to marathon running, is the chorus. So when the person in the song is telling their friend to keep at it, to me their saying “you might be ready to quit, your legs might feel like their on fire, but you can do this, you really can”.

“When all you got to keep is strong
Move along, move along like I know you do
And even when your hope is gone
Move along, move along just to make it through”

I warned you it was tenuous.

The memory relates to the bike challenge I did in 2006, six days from London to Berlin as a fundraiser for Scope, arriving for the opening weekend of the World Cup.

I burnt a load of songs onto a couple of CDs, and this one from All American Rejects was my favourite at the time.

About forty of us met at
Wembley Stadium, or the building site that it was then, early one Sunday morning. We spent the next couple of days getting to Harwich for our ferry crossing. The next four days saw us travelling through Northern Germany, where it struck us how little signs there were that one of the biggest sporting events in the world was about to start. In England flags were everywhere, giving the impression that the competition was in the UK, and we were cycling to Berlin to get away from it. The first football image to be discovered was in Hamburg. One of our party went for a walk and discovered our hostel was on the edge of the red light district, what a careless mistake to make. On one window a person kicking a ball had been drawn.

Day four was a one hundred miler, something I’d done before so wasn’t too concerned about. Many on the trip hadn’t and, with the exception of the Irish bloke that never seemed far from a beer (stereotype ahoy), there was lots of good behaviour on show.

Not unreasonably, the three digits on the milometer was a cause for much celebration for those for whom this was a first time, and of course it would have been rude for the rest of us not to show our support and share in their feeling of achievement.

So for the rest of the distance the trip took on the appearance of a stag week on wheels. Once in Berlin and in free time mode, many of us were up for forty eight hours straight, longer if you include the full day on a coach back to London. The story of that weekend can wait for another day though.

‘Move Along’ is the title track from the All American Rejects second album, released in July 2005. The single didn’t come out until 2006 however.

The song didn’t make the top forty in the UK, but has to date sold over one million downloads in the US.

It has been used in US TV advertising campaigns for coverage of the 2008 Olympic Games, and, more excitingly, Lego!