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.