THE STARTING LINE ON GETTING A TAYLOR SWIFT SHOUT-OUT IN ‘THE BLACK DOG,' 22 YEARS AFTER POP-PUNK BAND'S BREAKOUT: ‘IT'S AN UNEXPECTED SHOWERING OF LOVE'

There's no golden ticket quite like the golden ticket of finding your name in the lyrics of a Taylor Swift song. It's one thing if you're Charlie Puth, and already on a list of Spotify's 150 top monthly artists. But for another musical artist name-checked in Swift's album "The Tortured Poets Department," the impact stands to be much more impactful. The pop-punk band the Starting Line gets mentioned twice in the song "The Black Dog," and suddenly nostalgia for (or newfound curiosity about) the Philadelphia-based group is skyrocketing.

The group exploded into the emo scene in 2002 with a song called "The Best of Me," which presumably is the unnamed Starting Line song Swift keeps referring to in the lyrics. How is the band - which has been active only sporadically in recent years - reacting to getting an unexpected endorsement from the biggest pop star in the universe?

First off, they're glad it's not being used in a diss track. Well, it is a diss track, but it's not certainly not dissing them. "I'm so glad that it seems to be used in a relatively positive light," says singer Kenny Vasoli, in a phone call with Variety. "It's really been quite an unexpected showering of love, and a very grateful moment for the band, because it's not something that we ever could have saw coming, especially not from someone of her magnitude. It's a very sweet name-drop."

The Starting Line actually enjoys the distinction of being the only other artist to get mentioned twice by name in the album lyrics. Take that, Puth, Blue Nile, Patti Smith, Dylan Thomas, Clara Bow and Stevie Nicks! (Actually, it could be three times, since, beyond the two mentions in "The Black Dog," the phrase "the starting line" also pops up separately in the song "Fresh Out the Slammer," but it isn't used as a band reference there, just a figure of speech… or is it?)

The name pops up in the first chorus:

I just don't understand how you don't miss me

In The Black Dog

When someone plays The Starting Line and you jump up

But she's too young to know this song

That was intertwined in the magic fabric of our dreaming

Old habits die screaming

And wait, in the second round, they're back:

And I hope it's shitty

In The Black Dog

When someone plays The Starting Line and you jump up

But she's too young to know this song…

"I feel like it's trying to impart some sort of nostalgia of the time and the kind of music that we were making at that time, and I'm very flattered that we were the representation of that," Vasoli says.

Swift would have been turning 13 the year "Best of Me" came out, a number that obviously holds a special place for her, even possibly as an age. And even though the song was a national hit with emo fans, establishing the Starting Line as Warped Tour material, the group remains hometown heroes in the Philadelphia area, not far from where Swift grew up, which may solidify a nostalgic appeal for her.

Yet the lyrics also clearly establish that excitement over sharing "Best of Me" was something that she and the person she just broke up with in the song had in common… and Swift doesn't often lie in her material. So the question riling fans up has been: If it's not fiction, is it more likely to be about Matty Healy or Joe Alwyn?

"I'm certainly getting a crash course in the backstory between the characters that are involved in this thing," says Vasoli, not picking any sides himself. "So it's been a pretty fascinating study in fandom, for sure."

Lending obvious weight to the argument in favor of Healy, the frontman for the 1975, is that he actually sang "Best of Me" twice in concert while dating Taylor Swift, at least by the timelines laid out on the world wide web. Or at least he sang a snippet of the Starting Line's signature song at a show April 21, 2023 and again on May 3 of last year. "Shout-out to people in their thirties," Healy quipped after performing the song excerpt. Now, it's not easy to say conclusively that no one else who has split with Swift in recent years was a major emo-head, too, but the Internet is just sayin'.

When Healy started showing his love for the Starting Line in concert last spring, "we heard about it, but it certainly didn't get the kind of attention that this did. It seems like now people are kind of checking out those YouTube videos of him covering that song a little bit more, and there's a little bit more investigation to be had about them. At the time it was just sort of a cool thing that was passed around between the guys, but didn't make it much further past that."

(Arguing against the theory that "The Black Dog" is about Healy, though: Based on photographs Jack Antonoff posted of studio sessions from last year, fans believe the song was recorded in mid-May 2023. Which would lend itself to a hypothesis that it's really about Alwyn, and that she played the song for Healy, who was then inspired to cover "Best of Me" in concert. A tangled web.)

Neither does Vasoli have any theories about which real-life Black Dog, if any, Swift is referencing in the lyrics, in which she sees that her recent ex has forgotten to turn off the location sharing on his phone, so she knows exactly which bar he is going into. There is a Black Dog bar in London, but there is also a Black Dog Tavern on Martha's Vineyard, and then there is a heavy metal bar in Paris called the Black Dog, among others.

But they wouldn't be playing "Best of Me" over the PA in a metal bar, so we can probably at least rule the Paris possibility out, right? "I don't know. You know, we're heavier than you would think," Vasoli counters. "We surprise people with our heaviness once we get up there."

But he doesn't have any personal knowledge of any of the Black Dog geo-location possibilities. "No, the only black dogs I've met are just good boys and girls out there at the dog park," he says. "Your guess is as good as mine on that one."

The Starting Line only has two shows on the books at present: a gig at the Novo in Los Angeles on the first day of summer, June 21, followed much further down the line by a set at the When We Were Young festival Oct. 19. The Starting Line actually played quite a few shows in 2023; these were the most the band had done in about a quarter-century.

Could they book a lot more now, and bill themselves as one of the few Swift-endorsed rock ‘n' roll bands of their ilk in the world?

"You know, it's been sort of a point of conversation of, how much do you lean into something like this?" Vasoli admits, a little cagey even with himself about how much to be seen as taking advantage of it. "Because something like this is not something you really plan for in your music career,. The reverberations have been very big and we're just sort of trying to accept it with gratitude at this point, sitting back and just seeing what happens from it."

Although the singer says those two concert dates "are it for now, there's gonna be more that's coming down the pike and more that's getting booked. The vast majority of the band has day jobs that keep them obligated to stay home a little bit, more than some of the other bands. So we don't hit the road for too long on a regular basis, but we're trying to get into a rhythm where we can do more of it."

He also says new music will be heard from the group, for the first time since a 2015 EP.

"There's been an uptick in us playing together, and a really great interpersonal dynamic between the band members recently that has been very creative and inspirational, playing together recently. So we've been into a creative process writing new music since last year. We're just collecting everything and figuring out the best way to get that out there. But we're generating music and have been for a bit of time. With us trying to get back into a more usual pace with the band, after all this time, it's nice that we're getting a little bit of light on us at this moment, especially given that we're engaging more than ever since like 2007, when we kind of let our foot off the gas."

"The Black Dog" is easily one of the three or four most-agreed about new songs among Swifties. Threads devoted to the song turn up a mixture of Joe-or-Matty debaters, incoming emo fans who are delighted to have a place to talk about their longstanding love of the Starting Line, and then that smaller subset of people who are Swifties and go back with the group.

Sample comments on Reddit threads about the Starting Line's name-check: "I am losing my millennial mind over this reference." "This one was for the elder emo swifties." "I screamed! They were my absolute favorite band in high school. My husband and I still listen to them all the time." "All the elder emo millennials screaming: One of us, one of us." "That moment when you realize you're a musical influence to one of the biggest stars on the planet." "Drop the (Starting Line) cover of the song immediately."

And: "THIS IS THE MOST PENNSYLVANIA THING THIS WOMAN HAS EVER DONE. i'm so happy for you guys."

(For those who really pay attention to both intersecting worlds, a joint fan noted: "Funny to think the Starting Line and Jack's first band Steel Train were both on Drive Thru Records.")

The singer still seems wonderstruck, to borrow a Swiftian word, about this stroke of recognition. "It's a trip man, for sure. I can be nothing but really grateful and humbled by this whole thing. And it's nice that I even get to speak with someone like you about our group in any capacity. So very happy about it."

And if more dates are indeed in the offing as a result of this? "Please, everybody come check our band out. If it's good enough for the name drop, come check out the goods." He is suddenly abashed at what he just said. "You don't have to print that part. That sounds so weird." Vasoli can be forgiven for a little enthusiasm: Being embedded in the document that the whole world is scanning - a lyric sheet - is the kind of thing that can make somebody jump up.