02/14/2026
Every so often, in the small independent high school outside of Philadelphia where Adam Goren teaches physics and chemistry, a student will tell him they spotted his face on a sticker behind the bar on the TV show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
“But I don’t think that’s true,” Goren tells me. “I’ve watched a lot of those episodes and I’ve never seen ’em.”
Before that, it was The O.C. “When I first started teaching, The O.C. was very popular and there was a poster on that,” he says, referring to the artwork for his 2003 album, Attention! Blah Blah Blah, which hung on the bedroom wall of Adam Brody’s character, Seth, alongside ones for Ben Folds Five and Rooney. “That bought me about 25 minutes of street cred with my students.”
He’s “Mr. Goren” in the classroom these days, but he once went by another name. In what seems like a lifetime ago, the now 41-year-old teacher was known in the punk community as the one-man band, Atom and His Package. Depending on whom you ask, Atom and His Package was either a brilliant and revolutionary project or it was completely fu***ng stupid and annoying. Goren, who is permanently smiling and shrugging, smiles and shrugs as he weighs in on this one afternoon on his spring break, totally perplexed as to why I asked him to look back on his musical career. “I don’t know!” he offers. “It just started as a joke!”
In the early 90s, when he was the same age as his students are now, Goren played in a punk band called Fracture with his buddies, and, like most high school bands, it eventually came to an end. Soon after, a friend gave him a musical sequencer, one he describes as being like a synthesizer and drum machine mixed together. This equipment, which he dubbed “the Package,” allowed him to overdub instruments, and write and record lo-fi songs. The result sounded like a punk band playing through an 8-bit Nintendo game, or alterna-rock for robots. In a way, the process of creating these songs was integral in helping him get over the breakup of Fracture. Almost accidentally, he started unleashing his music on an unsuspecting public.
“I have some close friends who were in a band called Franklin, and I ended up tagging along to a lot of their shows. I would write songs to annoy them,” he says. “They were like, ‘You should play these before we go on!’ So I started doing that every once in a while.” On Franklin tours, whenever the vibe felt like he would be well-received, or like he would go over terribly, he would warm up the crowd with a few songs. It was just him and the Package, standing on the floor in front of the stage performing like a one-man karaoke act. In his trademark ballcap and thick-framed glasses held on with a strap around the back of his head, he belted through his set with his high voice and off-key singing style. To quote the liner notes of his first seven-inch, if only two people showed up, he would play guitar. No one really knew what to make of him.
By 1996, at the age of 21, Goren was certified to teach high school but was turned off by student teaching experiences, so, armed with a handful of songs, he booked tours for himself up and down the East Coast under the Atom and His Package moniker. “Sometimes I could convince friends to come with me, but a lot of times, it was just me. I’d borrow my mom’s car—only the most punkest of cars: a bright red Ford Explorer,” he laughs. His musical career may have started as him avoiding adulthood, but from these tours, Atom and His Package started to catch on. People even started singing along.
One of his most well-known songs, “Punk Rock Academy,” took place in an imagined high school that catered to the misfits and weirdos instead of the jocks, a place where “there will never, ever be a physical education class.” The song is even funnier now in retrospect given that Goren is back in high school on the other side of the desk.
Perhaps most famously, his song “(Lord It’s Hard to Be Happy When You’re Not) Using the Metric System” was a plea for America to drop the English system of measurement. He even sold shirts with the slogan “GO METRIC NOW.” (Backside: “Stick your foot up your fu***ng ass.”)
But Atom and His Package was at its best when Goren was lampooning punk, hardcore, and metal scenes, calling them out on unchecked idiocy. In “Anarchy Means I Litter,” he fought against the uniformity of punk and the old gutterpunk trope which dictates that being punk is nothing more than throwing empty Olde English bottles on the ground. “Liberate that bottle of malt liquor! Oh, I get it. Anarchy means that you litter!”
