This is the story of the band that almost was.

You won’t hear what this band sounds like. You won’t even learn their name. But you know this band, even if you don’t.

Even If It Kills Me chronicles four high school friends — a gang, bonded together by dead-end small town upbringings and dreams of something bigger. When [REDACTED] signed to [REDACTED] Records in the early ‘00s, Jon, Ryan, Mac and Pete were thrust headlong into the rockstar whirlwind they had only barely imagined possible. At least, that’s how it seemed. 

Over six episodes, writer/narrator Aaron Joy documents his time spent on the road with his friends as they flirted with stardom through the ‘00s. The project began in a spurt of pandemic-era rediscovery, Joy unearthing boxes of tapes he recorded, always with a camera in hand as these five men came of age in tour vans criss-crossing America. After digitizing it all, he teamed with FANG workshop — the production outfit behind films including Mark, Mary, & Some Other People and Wrinkles The Clown — to create a non-fiction podcast that’s a hybrid of Almost Famous and The Bad News Bears filtered through This American Life. 

Contrary to the usual pat music biz biopics tracing well-worn tropes in the already-mythologized lives of iconic singers, Even If It Kills Me tells a small story, a real story, compiled through Joy’s recollections, archival recordings, and contemporary interviews with the former band members. “It’s a universal story for people who always wanted to be in bands,” Joy says. This is what it looks like for untold thousands of groups that get this close to making it. 

In the early days, everything was happening for Jon, Ryan, Mac and Pete. In the wake of 9/11, they left their suburban New York state surroundings for Los Angeles, and soon secured a record deal. Drunk on cheap beer and youthful abandon — not to mention dazzled by the idea they were somehow getting away with it all — they powered through glorious hometown shows and disaster gigs in far-flung corners of the country alike. They spent listless summers grinding as tow-truck drivers and warehouse packers to fund their next shot on tour, and they watched friends’ bands start to slowly eclipse them. That was all a part of it then, the soaring highs and the banal lows. For a time, the young men continued on gleefully, sure that something was happening. 

Over the course of Even If It Kills Me, the quartet pull back the curtain, showing the listener the nitty-gritty inner workings of tour life, the arcane politics and pecking orders. For each time there was a great show and wild night out, there were that many more hours spent scrounging gas money or figuring out if they had a stranger’s floor to sleep on after a gig. They grappled with all the pitfalls anyone knows from being on the road, but rarely admits — everything from mental health crises to finding the solace of a clean restroom on a brutal summer festival tour. 

These four men underwent their particular attempt at scaling rock ’n’ roll’s Mount Olympus during a fraught, transitional time. During the ‘00s, an ongoing wave of massive technological shifts were just beginning to change everything about how we interact with media. The music industry wasn’t spared, and suddenly the whole equation of how you made a band catch on was thrown into upheaval. This was the fall of Rome, and plenty of artists were cut off at the knees by a shuddering industry with no backup plan. Throughout, Joy contextualizes the band’s own story amidst these larger historical mechanisms, almost writing a prologue for the struggles many artists face today in a streaming climate that yields almost zero profits from recordings, and necessitates that bands stay on the road forever, no matter how spiritually or financially unsustainable it becomes. 

Even If It Kills Me isn’t just a story for all the bands who never made it, but for anyone who had a wild dream and crash landed into adulthood. Through every stop and start, Joy captures his friends’ wanderlust and hopes and not-quite-victorious end destination, making for a poignant reflection on what it looks like to graze everything you’ve ever wanted, and watch it slip just past your fingertips.