Key Change: John Green on "You'll Never Walk Alone."

You're listening to Song Exploder where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh, your way. This is Key Change, where I talk to fascinating people about the music that changed their lives. My guest today is John Green. My name is John Green and I'm a novelist and YouTuber. John is the award-winning number one best-selling author of books, including Looking for Alaska, The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down, The Anthropocene Reviewed, and everything is tuberculosis. John and his brother, Hank Green, have co-created a lot of projects together, including their massive YouTube channel, Vlog Brothers, and their podcast, Dear Hank and John. John also serves on the Board of Trustees for the global health nonprofit, Partners in Health. And when I asked John if there was a piece of music that changed his life, he knew the answer right away. It's a song by Jerry and the pacemakers called You'll Never Walk Alone, which is a cover of a cover. It's from the musical carousel, I think. And it's a little bit of a convoluted story how this song came into my life. But, you know, in thinking about your question, have you listened to a song that really changed your life? There are certainly songs that mean more to me than You'll Never Walk Alone. But there's no song that's changed my life more dramatically. How do you parse the difference between those two things? Well, you know, my favorite band is a band called The Mountain Goats. You know, there are songs by Will Oldham that I really treasure. There are, you know, songs by Loretta Lynn that I really treasure from my childhood. But You'll Never Walk Alone had this or has, I guess, this ongoing, deep impact and my daily lived experience, which is very weird for me. I mean, I'm not a music guy like you, like I don't have the relationship with music that you have, but I do find that certain songs kind of carry me through and You'll Never Walk Alone is chief among them. Do you remember the first time that you ever heard it? Oh, yeah, vividly. So when I was 12 years old, I was a soccer player. I was very bad, but I was very passionate. And I worked really hard, but I didn't have any talent. And there was this kid on our middle school soccer team named James, who was from England. This kid was incredible. I mean, he was the best soccer player any of us had ever seen. He was so overwhelmingly the best soccer player on our team. I mean, I don't think we won a single game, but he would score goals from like 30 yards away. It was incredible. Where were you playing soccer when you were on this team? Oh, in Orlando, Florida, the White Hot Center of American Cultural Life. And James told us that in England where he was from, you know, tens of thousands of people would go to soccer games and they would be arm and arm and they would sing these songs together. And he told us that the best team in all of England was called Liverpool Football Club. And I believed him. And I remember the first time I ever heard you'll never walk alone. It was on a VHS tape in high school, a VHS tape of an old game between Liverpool. And I can't remember who. And I heard you'll never walk alone sung from the stands. You know, tens of thousands of people, just like James promised, singing this song together. And it was absolutely magical. And it's been magical in my life ever since. What happened in between, you know, 12-year-old John playing on that soccer team and then high school John watching that Liverpool game? So when I was in high school, I went to a boarding school in Alabama and one of my good friends eventually turned into the novelist Daniel Alarcon. At the time he was just Daniel, our friend. And he was a big soccer player. And he and his friends would get these VHS tapes of games. And that's how I came to watch it. But I mean, I guess the short answer is that I just never stopped loving soccer. I stopped playing it because I was no good, but I never stopped loving the game. But it was only when I heard you'll never walk alone and really started to become a Liverpool fan in my teens and 20s that I started to understand that the game wasn't about the game for lack of a better term. It was about something else, something much deeper. It was about people whose love is oriented in the same direction and how good that feels. You know, there's this great Donald Hall line where he writes about third things and marriages that like a marriage isn't primarily like you looking me in the eyes all the time. It's really about our shared attention intertwining around a third thing, whether that's kids or the New York Times Crossword puzzle or the Boston Symphony Orchestra or whatever it is. And for me, and for tens of thousands of other people, Liverpool Football Club is a third thing. It's a thing that we look at instead of looking at each other and through the looking at it together that that intertwined attention, something like as close to literal magic as I've ever experienced happens. Could you walk me through you hearing that song on the VHS tape? Like what was happening in your brain as the audience started singing? Like was that a surprise to you that they started singing? James had told you that people do this. Yeah, but it's a completely different thing to hear it and to see it and to feel the passion behind it, the connectivity behind it, the community behind it. It's a totally different thing to have that feeling. So as I recall, I am sitting in the TV room at my boarding school. This VHS tape is playing. And I'm listening to this song, never heard the song before. I don't know about the musical carousel. I don't know about the history of the song or anything like that. I can barely even make out the words because they're sung in this very northern English accent. But the way that the actual words you'll never walk alone are sung is such a mix of commitment and desperation. A need to believe that you'll never walk alone, that it just hooked me, man, it just hooked me. And every time I've heard the song since, whether I'm in that stadium, listening to it in real life or I'm watching it on TV or whatever, every single time I feel the same thing, I get goosebumps, I feel overwhelmed, I feel like I'm not alone. And so in high school, especially in college, and then even more in my 20s, it was sort of a slow progression away from being a casual Liverpool fan to being a really committed one. But during that process, the song would come back to me over and over again. Occasionally, I'd hear it on the radio. I had it on a CD, on a burnt CD. I just loved listening to it. I mean, it's a super cheesy song. Like, it's really pretty cliche. But the thing about clichés, right, is that sometimes there's something to them. And I still need to hear that idea that even when you feel like you're walking alone through the world, you're not because you're carried by all the people who've loved you and you're carried by all the people who love you still. And the song is the reason I'm a Liverpool fan. And I don't think that's just true for me. I think that's true for lots of people. Really, it's not the other way around. People don't come to the song because of the team. I think sometimes people come to the song because of the team, but sometimes people come to the team because of the song because the song is so. I mean, I don't know if you've heard the song. It's not technically great. Do you think the song itself is not technically great or the Jerry and the pacemakers cover of it? I'd go so far as to say both, and you know, it's a cheesy song. Like, the chorus is, you know, walk on through the rain, walk on through the wind, and you'll never walk alone. Like, I mean, what are the two most obvious things you could walk through rain and wind? It's not lyrically sophisticated. It's not that musically sophisticated, but the message of it is very clear, very simple. You're not alone, even when you feel like you're alone. And that's a message that I need to hear a lot. I need to hear it reinforced over and over again. And so to have that message reinforced to me every Saturday really does mean something. I mean, I'm a religious person, but I'm not as religious as I used to be and it's sort of what I have instead of him. Could I ask you a little bit about the development of your fandom? How did you go from being a casual Liverpool fan to, as you said, you know, getting more and more into it? What was it about that team that made you want to become more than just a casual fan? I mean, I think initially it was the song. So to some extent, it was the players, like, I loved those players in the 90s and 2000s and everything, but, you know, I didn't have like a favorite player I connected with the way lots of people connect with messy or pale or whatever. I just loved the idea of being part of a community, a community that sang this song before every game. It just seemed so novel to me. It seemed so different from American sports, so much more like a community asset than a franchise. I was going to ask you, is there a moment when this song is traditionally sung in the game? It's before the game? Yeah, so it's sung at the beginning of every game, but it's also sung at the end of every game. And then, most magically, my greatest moment as a Liverpool fan was in 2005. The Champions League final, all the best teams in Europe play in this big competition, and we made it all the way to the final. And we were down 3-0 at halftime, which is a completely insurmountable scoreline. And not only were we down 3-0 at halftime, we were down 3-0 to a much better team. And at halftime of this game, the fans, despite being utterly, hopelessly defeated, started singing "You'll Never Walk Alone" so loudly together that down in the bellows of the stadium, the players could hear it. And they came out, and they scored three goals, and the second half sent the game to extra time and won it in penalties, and became champions of Europe for the fifth time. And it's the ultimate statement of the power of music. It had a real impact on actual people who are not musicians, who are not huge music fans, who may not even love the song. Yeah, so I think we sing at the beginning of the game, we sing at the end of the game, and in times of great need, we sing it in the middle as well. Well, I wonder if, despite the fact that there are maybe hundreds of thousands of fans in England who support Liverpool, the fact that it was maybe a more rare kind of fandom here in the US, did that have any kind of appeal for you, you know, like the feeling like when a band is underground and you're the only one who knows about it? Yes, yes, absolutely. It made me feel very cool to be a Liverpool fan, and now being a Liverpool fan is relatively common and a little bit cliche, but it's very much like falling a band when they're underground where people would be like, do you like basketball and I'd be like, oh no, no, that's not for me, but soccer, European soccer is my game. And I didn't know very much, you know, because I was a kid and also, you know, I didn't have that deeper connection to the city or anything. It's not like I'd traveled the Liverpool at the time, and so I was like not very knowledgeable, but extremely passionate, like a lot of fans when they're young, so yeah, that was definitely me. Do you know why this song is such a big song for the team? Yeah, so they've been singing it on the terraces of the stadium since the song was a popular song, and it was sung by Jerry and the pacemakers are a Liverpool-based band, and so they've been singing it since it was a hit. They used to sing all the Beatles hits too, right, like the Beatles are also a Liverpool band. It's just that song took on a different meaning because it's so much about struggle and toil and moving on through loss and feeling connected to other people, and that's so much of what sports fandom is. So I think that's why it stuck around, but it's, you know, I think it's important for people who don't like sports to understand that sports is theater, it's theater where the actors don't really know what's going to happen necessarily, but it's not that different from any other form of theater. And because the fans in much of the world sing all through the game, it's musical theater, and so it's actually not that surprising that a song from Carousel would become this sort of classic song sung by Liverpool fans. I mean, Manchester City fans sing songs from a musical, like it's not that uncommon. It's just that you'll never walk alone is in my opinion, my extremely biased opinion by far the best one. My conversation with John Green continues after this. What was the first time that you ever went to a Liverpool game in person? So the first time I went to a Liverpool game, it was in the US. It was actually I think in Charlotte or somewhere in the US. It was a preseason game, you know, so it kind of didn't count, but we did sing. You'll never walk alone. And it was awesome. It was awe inspiring. It was borderline sacred. It was so cool. And then I really wanted to have that experience, you know, in and field, Liverpool Stadium. And so I got to go not that long ago, a few years ago, went to Liverpool game for the first time. And that was an amazing experience to sing the song with all those fans who sing it every Saturday. The other cool thing about the experience actually was that I happened to be seated about eight seats away from a young player's dad. And the young player came on and scored his first goal for Liverpool. And I got to watch his dad watch his son score, which was pretty special. So what was the experience of singing that song actually like when you were there in the stadium? So you get to the stadium. You maybe have a pint of beer. You make your way to your seat. Were you just buzzing with anticipation about singing? Oh, yeah. I was so excited. I was with my buddy Stewart. I was so excited. I just couldn't believe the whole thing, you know, it was all magical. I keep saying magical, but I don't know what other word to use because there is something about music that takes me as close to magic as I care to get as I can experience. So I think that's why I keep using the word magical. But anyway, I was absolutely buzzing. I was thrilled. I was, I mean, it's a pilgrimage site for a lot of people, you know, like I've been a Liverpool fan for 20 years at that point. And we make our way to our seats. And then they start playing like the first notes right before kick off. They start playing the first notes. And then you hear this wall of sound from the area called the cop when you walk through the rain, hold your head up high. And you just hear this wall of sound coming to you. And then you realize that you are also like pushing the wall of sound back and forward and left and right. And 80,000 people or however, I don't know how many people fit in an field, but all those people can't actually sing a song at the same time like it's too big. So this song is sort of echoing around and, you know, this side of the stadium is half a bar ahead of this side of the stadium. And it's just super intense. More than anything, it feels like a, like a revival or something, you know, like one of those old, tiny revivals. That's how I felt. I sometimes say about books that the thing I love about reading is that you can visit places in your mind that you can't get to any other way that are like inaccessible to me, except when I'm reading. And that's true for music too. I was able to visit a place within me during that song that I simply can't get to any other way. As you were describing the experience of seeing the dad see his son scores first goal, I mean, I have to admit that I like started to get a tiny bit choked up. And I was wondering how much crying do you do during Liverpool games? So much. I love a good cry. For me, sports is a great way to get to crying. I remember Liverpool won the league a couple of years ago. It was during the pandemic. So there were no fans allowed in the stadium. It was sort of awful. I wanted, you know, 60,000 fans in that stadium singing. You'll never walk alone along with the players. I wanted all those things and we didn't get any of them. But I just remember when it was finally confirmed that we were going to be champions, I think like Chelsea had to lose a game. We weren't even playing. We weren't even on the pitch. Right. I just remember like bowling and I had just recorded a podcast with my brother and I hadn't stopped the recording. And so I was able to listen back later to me being like, come on, come on. Blow the whistle. Blow. Yes. And then just bursting into tears. So yeah, it's, it's a way into feeling. You know, one of my friends, Roger Bennett, sometimes says that football is a way to feel things that are hard to feel in real life. And one of the things I love about sports is the purity of feeling. It's actually pretty rare for me to have a really pure joy. Even when something good happens, I'm always like, well, that pretends something bad or when something bad happens, I tell myself, well, maybe, you know, this will be the start of something good. I just, I always have mixed up muddled emotions, except when I'm watching football when I have the purest emotions in the world. And in that way, it is more like opera. It's so, it really is like opera. That's a great point. I mean, that's, that's why we watch opera is because of the purity of emotion, even if it's a little bit over the top and everything. It's pure. You know exactly what you're supposed to feel in that moment. In terms of feelings, does singing the song feel different for you after Liverpool has won a game versus after they have lost a game? Absolutely. It works as both lamentation and thanksgiving, right? Like, that's the magic of that song is that it works as both a this sucks, but you'll never walk alone. And as I've been telling you, you'll never walk alone and feel this joy together. Yeah, it really works as both kinds of song. Well, do you have a preference between the two? Like, yeah, I prefer it when Liverpool win. Because you, you connected the song to a feeling of struggle. Yeah. And of course, everybody wants their team to win. But I think about teams like the Mets or just teams that they have fans who have for their entire life only known losing streak. And that is just part of the fandom. And so to experience, I don't know, it's easy to be a fan of something when you're a winner. You know, when your team's a winner, it feels like the fandom is a little bit, it costs less. Yeah. And so I wonder if it means more when it costs more. I think it does. I think it definitely does. I think that, you know, those 30 years that we went without a Premier League title were there was a lot of heartbreak in those years. There was a lot of finishing second. There was a lot of almost. There was a lot of one game away. And to hear the song at the end of those seasons where we didn't end up winning the title where circumstance or fate conspired against us. Those moments are also really lovely to share in their way. I remember the year my book The Fault in Our Stars came out or the year the movie came out. I was on the road constantly. I was away from my family. It was it was wonderful. I was grateful for it, but it was also hard. And Liverpool almost won the title that year. They took it to the last game. And I remember hearing you'll never walk alone song at the end of that season and just thinking, well, Liverpool and the fandom really accompanied me through this hard time. And of course I wish we'd won the title, but what I actually needed was the accompaniment. You said that you had a burnt CD of the song originally and that was how you could listen to it. These days do you still just put the song on to listen to? Yes, especially when I want to cry. So I take a medicine now that makes it harder for me to cry. I used to cry all the time. I used to cry every day, which it turns out is too much. So now I have to take a medicine. And it makes it hard for me to cry. And so on the last day of the movie shoot for this movie adaptation of my book Turtles all the way down, I was really emotional. I'd gone through such an intense experience with all these people who made the movie and I was so grateful for that experience. And I was driving in the car on the way home and listening to a different song. And then I was like, I bet if I put you'll never walk alone on I'll start crying. And then that's what did it. That's what opened the floodgates for me. And I love to cry. I love the purity of emotion and crying. So yeah, I listen to it when I need to cry. But if you had never heard the song in connection with Liverpool, it might not have that kind of effect on you, right? No, I don't think it would. I don't think it would. If I had never heard it sung in community, I don't think it would have that impact on me. You know, that's what makes music magical to me is the community aspect of it, the shared aspect of it. Well, do you get to have a feeling of community? Like, are there people around you that you can experience some kind of group catharsis with in that way outside of, you know, traveling to Liverpool? So there's a Liverpool bar in Indianapolis, believe it or not, called the Union Jack, where all the Liverpool fans go every Saturday and watch the games. Now I don't go every week, partly because, you know, like I have a life where I have to take care of the kids on on Saturday mornings a lot of times. But I love going there and, you know, feeling that sense of camaraderie and they sing the song before every game. So, you know, it's not as many people, but it's that same sense of togetherness in the song. And you get that same feeling. I do. Yeah. It lights me up every time. And I went there with my dad for the game where last season, where Liverpool clinched the title. And I mean, I have to emphasize that we did used to be like the Mets. It was very difficult for many years, but then we've had some great joy in the last few years. So anyway, when we clinched the title last season, I took my dad to that bar and sang with those people and felt that sense that I just can't get anywhere else. You know, I think a lot of why I do the things that I do outside of like making music is because I want people to understand how great something is that I love. And I was wondering if have you tried to convert people to love this song the way that you do. And in order to do that, do you also have to make them a Liverpool fan to get them there? Yeah, I actually wrote an essay in my book, the Anthropocene Review, about this song in an attempt to evangelize for the song to get people to love it like I love it and to understand that even though it's cheesy, it contains a power within it that's really special. And I do evangelize for Liverpool, whenever I meet a young kid, wherever I am, who likes a football team, usually Manchester City or Manchester United, I try to explain to them that it's not too late to turn back. Like when you're young, you can still you have some plasticity to your brain. You can still find your way to Liverpool football club. It's not too late. John, thank you so much. Oh my gosh. What a joy to be with you. You've successfully converted me. Now you got to watch. We're really bad right now. So this is the perfect time to become a Liverpool fan. We've lost four games in a row. I don't want to feel like I'm jumping on a bandwagon. I want to feel like I've earned. Yeah, this is the perfect time. You'll earn your fandom stripes. By low. John's website is johngreenbooks.com, where you can get his books, including his latest one. Everything is tuberculosis. You can follow him on Instagram @johngreenrightsbooks. His podcast with his brother Hank is called Dear Hank and John. Visit songexploter.net/keychange for more key change episodes and for a playlist with all the music that's been discussed on the show. This episode was produced by me, Craig Ealy and Mary Dolan, with production assistance from Tiger Biscope. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent listener supported artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to hear more from me, you can subscribe to my newsletter. You can find a link to it on the song exploder website. And you can also get a song exploder shirt at songexploder.net/shirt. I'm Rishikesh your way. Thanks for listening.