Lord Huron, and more

My first festival ever was Austin City Limits. I can't remember basic things like the year or who headlined or really anything at all, but I do remember walking around Zilker Park between stages and accidentally stumbling across bands I would not otherwise have listened to, being pulled in by something catchy and staying longer than I planned. It was a now defunct duo called Chiddy Bang that I liked best that year. Their riffs still stand out to me now, and I can recite their lyrics pulled from a part of the brain I long forgot. When I retreat back into them at odd moments, I realize this might have been my first reminder that live music is a fleeting point-in-time experience, because bands, like humans, break up and move on. While you can listen to the streamed song or a physical record, you aren't able to embark on the magic of seeing them play together in person again once they have decided to make a show their last. What I heard that day in Austin I'll never be able to hear again.

I have clearly reached the age where bands take on a nostalgic factor, but lucky for me, many groups I've listened to since I was young and impressionable still play. I've made it a mission to hear as many of them as I can while they are still around, playing catch up, to be sure, but allowing for new takeaways and realizations. Months ago I was shocked at how old and fat the lead singer of Wilco was, sort of an awkward dad on stage, but still belting out perfect melodies. Counting Crows no longer has dreadlocks and his hair is thinning, but his voice sounds strikingly the same. My Morning Jacket comes to Brooklyn this fall, while Mumford and Sons armed with a new banjo player will be at Forest Hills Stadium and Empire of the Sun, which I still remember hearing for the first time at a 24 hour coffee shop in Austin and being floored, will play at The Mirage having put out new collaborations with younger artists. These all served as the soundtrack to my coming of age, pulling from their own unique places, and this transports one back to different times and states of mind like nothing else quite can.

So it was that I found myself at the High Water festival in Charleston this past weekend, embracing this new era of life when live music is something to seek out and travel for. In this case, Lord Huron was the ultimate draw, as no group has quite captured for me this feeling of nostalgia, mythology, the creation of whole little worlds, a longing for things you didn't quite have and lives you never quite lived. The last time I saw them I held someone's hand with the Rocky Mountains behind me and a lightning storm off in the distance dramatically lighting up the sky with each strum of the guitar and hammer of the drum. I had all and then most of you, some and now none of you. The haunting line belted by Ben Schneider fit for the loneliest nights and quietest days, now interlinked with a moment in the outskirts of Denver and a world that was quickly swept away.

But if a band was with you from the beginning, it remains yours until the end. Despite claims of songs being ruined or discolored by those associated with them, I welcome this ability to feel something more, for the meaning to change ever so slightly. It was never just words, but where you were and who you were with when you heard them for the first or hundredth time. This poetry, alive, rings out to me still. I yearn for it as a stable landing place when things are foreign or tumultuous. I seek it out in the subway or during long car rides upstate. I turn to it when cooking or showering, filling the nooks and crannies of my house, as if it will sink itself into the wood and brick, or the parts of me in need, for there is always a part of you in need of your favorite artist.

Oh where did the time go?

It's been delightful,

May you laugh and sing your life full,

May you learn the reasons why,

May you live until you die.

In another life I was a musician on stage, calling my poetry songwriting, my keyboard supporting a lead singer as part of an indie rock band, or perhaps forming an anchor to a jazz trio that jams away in dark secret basements as a crowd dances around. That was another life. In this one, I'm in the back of a crowd, listening, listening, my foot subtly keeping pace with the beat, smiling when another person hits something just right, just so, in a way only they could, to the benefit of all those lucky enough to be there.

Decoupling

My apartment on Richardson Street, just a little deeper into Brooklyn now, might be the nicest place I've been in yet. Someone at some point, no doubt because it was built to own, put a lot of money and thought into the fixtures, the amenities, the details around a wooden shelf here and a warm lamp there. I love how old brick extends from the floor to the ceiling on one side, making the place feel real and lived in. I lay there some nights on a wonderful mattress that holds me, high up in the roomy clouds, before waking in the morning from a deep sleep, and feel above all, comfortable. I can look around at the books and the sheet music and the records, which have all managed to fit in their rightful nook, thinking all has worked out okay.

It wasn't always this way. The pathway here was more than anything a path I didn't want, and I still look back longingly on what it was to pair your life to someone, to be in the world together in partnership, to no longer direct your energy to frivolous things, the search, the chase, the chance, the chaos, and instead be focused and deliberate from the quiet morning coffees to the peaceful tea-filled evenings because you were together and that was enough. I recall fondly thinking what it was to live without the questions that had always plagued me, the hows and the whys and the constant justifications and internal battles, instead leaning in for better or for worse because it just felt right. These were the things that drove me and that I will never regret believing in for the period of time that I did.

I would've asked for the longest time, for a large chunk of adulthood if I was being honest with myself, whether I believed in this whole concept at all. A brief survey of the couples around you, old divorced ones, young miserable ones, overcommitted tired ones, people who feel "tied down" and "in need of a break" and who head to Las Vegas to "let loose," examining any of this even at its most generous point doesn't paint an portrait that is appealing. And I drifted around uncommitted for what feels like the longest time. Then I met her, and for reasons unable to be catalogued on checklists or dating app profiles, and in ways I could never make anyone including her ever quite understand, the great questions of my life about moving in and marriage and children and what it was to look at someone and say yes just drifted away because of a feeling as strong as any I've known.

We are now more than half a year down the road, and in the quieter moments I've found this all breeds some level of confidence and hope, even when baked into the loneliness of packing things back in boxes and saying goodbye to things you love and retreating back out the door the way you came, locking the magnificent empty apartment one last time before venturing back out into a world you're a bit more alone in. Confidence and hope not just because I say I get it, this idea of why we dive back in again and again, the merits of exposing yourself to pain and vulnerability by leaning in and loving and relying on another. Even more, because I know it is something I can do, am capable of, and even might maybe want out of life, should I ever be fortunate enough for it to cross my path again.