1 Photo, 1 Song: #2
When was the last time we went to a concert? I texted my wife last week as I sat at Red Rocks. I literally couldn’t remember, and my wife’s memory has always been better than mine. After some thinking, we determined it was Brandi Carlile at The Gorge; we couldn’t quite remember if it had been before or after we had Kiddo. (Kiddo has been with us for five years. In other words, whatever the specifics, it was a long-ass time ago.) I understand, thoroughly, at this point, the effects of the pandemic on all of our lives, but realizing it had been that long since I’d seen live music still felt like a bit of a shock. Maybe because I didn’t know if the reality was actually due to the pandemic, or becoming a parent, or making better financial decisions, or just…forgetting, as tends to happen as you get older, about making time for the things you love.
And I used to really, really love live music.
The decision to make a roughly forty-eight hour trip to Colorado to see Noah Kahan at Red Rocks was one of the more impulsive and financially irresponsible decisions I’ve made in a long time (and also wouldn’t have been possible without my wife staying home and taking off of work to watch Kiddo, so thank you, love). As I sat there surrounded by those red rocks only a few hours after getting off a plane, it most reminded me of the time my dad accompanied me on a train ride from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to Chicago—a roughly twenty hour trip—to see my favorite band for my sixteenth birthday. (I don’t know if I’ll ever actually write another YA novel, but if I do, it will be inspired by that trip.) To be clear, my dad didn’t actually go to the concert with me; he got dinner down the street while I walked in alone, like I would walk into so, so many shows by myself over the next decade of my life, as I moved to a new city and didn’t quite know how to make friends but knew how to buy concert tickets.
I first met the friend I saw Noah Kahan at Red Rocks with around that same time, when I was sixteen, at the Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC. We reminisced about it over breakfast the next morning, how we’d traveled here to Red Rocks over twenty years after that Hammerstein show, and the one at the Tower Theater in Philly, and about the weird hotel room in Koreatown where we stayed for the Saddle Creek Showcase in college, and all the other shows and venues we had seen. We have tickets for another show this fall in Seattle (the Death Cab/Postal Service tour, obviously), and I’m now itching to see what other shows will be coming around next summer, and the summer after that, like this important piece of ourselves has finally clicked back into place.
My WIP involves two characters in their forties who start the book—as they so often do!—at odds with each other. Even though, of course, as they get to know each other, they discover they actually have a lot in common. And the first key to unlocking this truth is the discovery of how much they both loved seeing live music when they were young. When I had this thought about them, about how they both used to love going to shows, it was this ahh moment of like, how have I not written about this before? I’ve covered karaoke pretty thoroughly at this point, of course, but live shows are a whole other thing. The only place I’ve really inserted it before is at the end of Wherever Is Your Heart, when June reminisces about seeing shows at Convention Hall in Asbury Park, and it remains one of my favorite paragraphs I’ve ever written. (As the one show I saw at Convention Hall in my youth remains one of my favorite memories.)
There is something so appealing to me about writing these characters in their forties who had whole other lives before they met each other, mostly because I will be forty this year, and there are times now, like when I’m sitting at Red Rocks and thinking about all the different shows I’ve seen throughout my life, when it’s like I forget these whole other lives I’ve lived. How special, to have lived all those lives, to have discovered all these things on your own. And when your bones are a little more tired, getting to share all those stories with someone else. Getting to hear theirs, in return.
The other reason sitting at Red Rocks made me feel so nostalgic, aside from how long it had been since I’d been at a concert, was likely because Noah Kahan is 26. Most of the people at the concert were younger than us. There’s something about that—a certain joy in being able to laugh at your age; an acknowledged truth of the universal nature of music. But perhaps the ever present knowledge in my head that this dude is in his twenties made “Maine” hit even more.
This tour is in support of Stick Season, the album that has made Kahan blow up, so obviously most of the set list was comprised of that (and he sang every single one of the bonus Deluxe songs!). But what’s really been hitting this summer for me is his entire previous discography, and my heart leapt each time he sang an older track. And the oldest one he sang was the last track from his Cape Elizabeth EP, “Maine.” I love this song because the intro is so beautiful, and the chorus simply states I want to go to Maine, and, well. I want to go to Maine, too.
My own twenties were…a time, full of some really poor decisions I don’t like thinking about; likely too much drinking (another major theme of Kahan’s music); a string of shitty jobs until I went back to school for something I actually wanted at the end of the decade. My twenties were also full of some of the best times of my life, and in particular, they were full of weddings. My own, but also the weddings of so many friends and siblings and cousins. I grew up in a big family on the East Coast, and while my wife and I had already moved out West in my early twenties, we flew back so many times throughout the rest of the decade to party with loved ones during their nuptials. To New York and Pennsylvania and Maine and North Carolina and Texas and Pennsylvania again (and again) and Maine again, and probably some others thrown in there. We couldn’t exactly afford all the plane tickets and we still can’t now, but I miss those days, having excuses to return anyway. The last time I saw all my cousins (I believe) was at one of those weddings in Maine far too many years ago. Their kids wouldn’t recognize me now.
Living so far away was a choice we made, and I love my home. But some of my favorite people in the world live in Boston and in Maine, so very many thousands of miles away, and listening to Noah Kahan and his pure love of New England has made my heart ache in a particularly acute way, these days.
I want to go to Maine. I love you, everyone I miss.
& 1 article—
To stay on topic, Kate Clayborn recently shared an op-ed from The Washington Post by Theodore Johnson called “How the summer of music is healing the nation.” I read it right after I returned from Red Rocks and cried at nearly every paragraph. It’s a lovely read about the importance of large scale, in person, communal events, especially for young people who are possibly experiencing concerts for the first time this summer at Taylor Swift or Beyoncé shows. But it’s also an experience that's important for all of us. “Aside from how technologically advanced a major concert is now,” Johnson writes, “I’m most struck by the diversity of the crowds. Maybe there is some social and civic magic to be found in our return to shared, in-person experiences.”
I also particularly loved this:
Music can be “a means to help formulate identities and meet certain emotional needs” — critical especially to the development of young people. At a stage of life in which everyone is seeking to fit in somewhere, shared music is a crew, a family, a nation. At concerts, individually meaningful moments converge into collective joy. People — especially young people — bond over creative expression and the sheer excitement of being alive together.
I’m very grateful, even during all those shows I went to by myself when I was finding my way in the world, to everyone who has shared in the excitement of being alive with me.
xo
anita