in the crowd

The sprwinter of 2008 was not the best time for me. We were living in Madison in an apartment I didn't much like, and we were too far from downtown to make dinner and pints a regular post-workday experience, and the snowfall was the second-highest Madison had experienced in one hundred years. Every weekeday morning, Monday through Friday, I woke up to a car covered in soggy flakes and a Beltline sluggishly creeping west, the direction of the marketing firm.

But there were spots of light in that sprwinter: the people we met, the friends who visited, the acceptance letters in the mail, and the shows. Oh, the shows. Every once in a while, the B will turn to me and say, God, I miss Madison, and I know this means that he has just finished another unimpressive flip through the Revue. He means the music. We saw everyone we wanted to see that year. Each week, we sat down with the copy of the Isthmus and made hard decisions: The Weakerthans or Stars? Cloud Cult or The Avett Brothers? It was a little bit like having to choose between carrot cake or red velvet cake, chocolate-chip cookies with sea salt or white chocolate chip with macademia nuts.

They were hard, those problems we had.

The shows got me through that year. Most days I felt a little bit like I had a balloon for a head, always blowing sideways in the wind. But at those shows, I could push my way forward in the crowd and nurse a beer and scream--or sometimes just sing; you can't really scream along to Bon Iver or Todd Snider--and feel the heat of the bodies around me and the lights overhead. Those times, I felt totally fucking normal. One night I stood next the to soundboard at The Weakerthans and cried, actually cried; another night, as we stood in front of Josh Ritter's then-fiancee-now-wife, and watched her man kick and beam his way through "To the Dogs or Whoever," it took everything I had to not turn to that total stranger and mention just how much her boyfriend happened to mean to me.

You know what it's like, don't you? Swap out the name of my bands for yours, and it's the same thing. There's that moment when the music is just a touch too loud (or you forgot your earplugs--I know, Dad, I know), and you can feel the hairs deep in your inner ear stand straight up, and your face hurts from smiling so hard, and there's a moment of sudden and profound slowing. The world stops, just for a second. And even though it's so very loud and someone else's beer is seeping into your canvas shoes, you can hear that voice, the one you don't listen to often enough: You, it says, you are going to be just fine.

And Friday night. We were in a tiny club listening to Ben Nichols growl and holler and sing his way through the songs we first heard in Minnesota. We were sweating through our gray t-shirts. I was flanked by the B and our friend Jake,  grinning like an idiot at both of them, swiveling my head like an owl. That was when the slowing happened, and that night the voice said, We're doing pretty good if we can just get out alive, and honestly, nothing has ever sounded truer. And nothing will until the next time, the next show.