Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jessie Wallace | Videos | October 31, 2025
You know what’s funny about being an elder Millennial? You still feel like you belong way more on the ‘young’ side of the spectrum of humanity rather than the older side, and by many objective measures, that might be largely true. Still, you rarely go a week or a day without feeling the ground shifting underneath your feet and the balance tilting gradually towards the other side. For those of us musically inclined, we often feel it in the release date of certain albums, and how some things are forever frozen in time: Green Day’s American Idiot—now over two decades old and which I saw the band perform on its twentieth anniversary—is still the ‘new Green Day album’. Iron Maiden’s Brave New World is still the ‘new Iron Maiden record’. It’s a quarter of a century old. And one that always hits me pretty hard: Blink-182’s self-titled fifth album will also always be ‘the brand new Blink-182 album’.
It came out almost exactly twenty-two years ago.
Just throw my desiccated corpse into the river and be done with it already.
Blink-182, the perennial, ultimate avatars of late-90s and early-2000s juvenile energy (for better and worse) have somehow aged along with the world, and time has truly gone soft. It was such a curious and powerful moment when they reunited a few years ago, announcing the reunion with the single, ‘One More Time’, a mathematically precision-guided missile to the heart of every Millennial of a certain inclination, packed with somber and reflective lyrics and mood as it was—even including Travis Barker on the brushes and a literal ‘I miss you’ line in the lyrics for god’s sake!.
It’s into these vibes that Frank Watkinson rides. Mr Watkinson is a YouTuber whom I’ve somehow never heard of before, who specializes in acoustic covers of popular tunes, and he has on this occasion decided to reach into a generation’s chest and rip out their collective hearts. Take it away, Frank:
