everything will change
Dec. 15th, 2023 00:35![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ursamajorThe two Death Cab For Cutie/The Postal Service concerts I treated myself to in October were really a belated present to my early-mid-20s self.
In February 2003, I was, like I had been much of the previous year, getting my heart mangled yet again. Me, twentysomething romantic sap, toughing out the last gasps of a long-term relationship that had been long-distance its entire duration, surviving primarily on chemistry and optimistic interpretation and cycles of naive hope that maybe this time he'd be less afraid of his feelings, that he was ready to stop shying away from any hint of commitment. Oh, honey.
I was also pissed at New England winter for New England wintering, at the more than two feet of snow that fell in the Presidents' Day storm that I had to wade through to get to work. I cursed at it as what I thought would be the final parting gift from our relationship, one record-setting blizzard care of the guy from St. Cloud who loved snow but couldn't say he loved me, who did things like go kayaking in the Boundary Waters over New Year's. (Definitely his fault. Just like it was clearly the fault of the Lawn Guylander that the Sox kept losing crucial postseason games to the Yankees immediately after we broke up, the year they finally reversed the curse. ;) )
I did not want to trudge home through all of that snow after work, now icy and slippery after people had been stomping on it all day, so I went to Newbury Street. Devoured a scoop of El Diablo (chocolate ice cream with cayenne and cinnamon) at JP Licks, topped with Fluff. And wandered into one of the music stores. (I don't remember anymore whether it was Newbury Comics, or the big Tower Records at the foot of Newbury. Or had the Tower become the Virgin Megastore by then? Or maybe it was even the Tower Records in my neighborhood on Boylston, where Max used to work, even though I would not knowingly meet Max until later that summer.)
I'm meandering the aisles, seeing if anything piques my interest, when I hear:
And the mournful ballad that had been playing over the sound system turns into a clubby bop, and my ears perk up, intrigued. "The District sleeps alone tonight after the bars turn out their lights // and send the autos swerving into the loneliest evening." DC boy certainly was sleeping alone that night, having forsaken his chance to come up to Boston for Valentine's Day (🔒), to get dressed up all glam with me and meet more of my friends at Ingrid's James Bond party (🔒), to be more integrated into my life.
When I fly to the counter, ask the intimidatingly tall dude what was playing, he points me towards the New Releases display, where half a dozen copies of The Postal Service's Give Up are sitting. "It's a collab between Ben Gibbard from Death Cab for Cutie and DNTEL. They also sing 'Such Great Heights,' which is getting a lot of hype right now, but I actually like some of their other songs better." I knew and loved Such Great Heights; it had come out around our anniversary, but leaked to various MP3 blogs before that. And I also knew and loved a couple of Death Cab songs at that point (Photobooth, A Movie Script Ending), so I put the giant headphones on, listen to the new song from the beginning. Multiple times.
I stand there for at least an hour, probably longer, swaying to the music, hands clapped over the headphones, until my stomach growls, rudely interrupting the catharsis I'm finding from silently crying in public, other shoppers kindly ignoring my overflowing emotions about the guy who dumped me barely a week prior. (I don't know if I beat my record from the night Rita and I listened to Weezer's Say It Ain't So 47 times in a row; I'm still surprised to this day her mom didn't kill us for that. But I am standing there a long, long while.) Of course the album comes home with me; The District Sleeps Alone Tonight ends up on repeat on my Winamp for weeks, makes that iteration of the breakup mix.
By the time Death Cab for Cutie releases Transatlanticism - their concept album about the ups and downs of long-distance relationships - that fall, I am happily in love with another guy, a quick hop up the Orange Line instead of 450 miles away on the DC shuttle. But god, does the title track stick in my craw; it feels like Ben Gibbard had a camera in that Morningside Heights apartment that last night in August (🔒), the day after his birthday. Or maybe some kind of empathic connection directly with my brain. I'll eschew that song especially for awhile, too painfully intimate and intimately painful. Focus on Passenger Seat directly following it, paean to conversations while driving around with my new love.
So when I heard that The Postal Service was pulling it together for one more reunion tour, and that Death Cab for Cutie would be their costar on the double bill? Of course I was going to try for tickets. (You announce this on my birthday week? Double duh!)
This was the first time I'd even considered going to a large-venue show in decades. Considered battling the bureaucratic behemoth of Ticketmaster to duke it out for tickets. Considered going to a *shudder* general admission show; I am short and GA does not generally work for me. I got medevaced from a GA show at the Mullins Center in college that I only went to because other friends were going, and some tall gangly dude elbowed me right in the nose because their idea of "dancing to the music" was more like "flailing inconsiderately."
But the Berkeley show was at the Greek, an outdoor amphitheatre with some stadium seating. It being an amphitheatre at least addressed some of the ventilation concerns I have with indoor shows since the pandemic began; the stadium seating availability gave me hope I would be able to see over the audience in front of me. These two factors made me decide I was okay buying tickets and then determining closer to the date whether I felt like the risks at the time were worth it. I was able to lock down a ticket for the Monday show! ... now I just had to wait ten months and hope society hadn't collapsed by then. And then, towards the end of summer, when DCFC/TPS announced their headliners, I found out that Iron & Wine, another band I'd been wanting to see forever, would be the opener on the last show of the tour, a Tuesday night at the Hollywood Bowl, with assigned seating. Found a seat, found a place to stay, and booked them both.
And oh, my heart.
Sitting six rows up in the Greek Theatre in shirtsleeves as the fog rolled into the Berkeley Hills and settled on my arms, listening to Ben Gibbard croon to me for two hours about love and long distance and loss, was the best possible present I could have given February 2003 me, however belated. (Sitting a little further back at the Hollywood Bowl for an encore just over a week later, with bonus Iron & Wine? Cherry on top.)
A new-to-me New Zealand band, The Beths, opened the show at the Greek, and they were utterly delightful. 2003 me would have loved their catchy melodies and lines like "future heartbreak, future headaches // wide-eyed nights late lying awake // with future cold shakes from future mistakes // future me hates me for, hates me for" and "you can't let go, you can't stop, you can't rewind // love is learned over time // 'til you're an expert in a dying field."
The Beths setlist, 10/9:
1. Future Me Hates Me
2. Knees Deep
3. Out of Sight
4. I Told You That I Was Afraid
5. Jump Rope Gazers
6. Silence is Golden
7. Expert in a Dying Field
After the opener, Death Cab took the stage in black. Me and my new friends all shouting along to The New Year, "No more airplanes or speed trains or freeways, there’d be no distance that could hold us back."
Swayed with the audience to "Your heart is a river that flows through your chest, through every organ // Your brain is the dam and I am the fish who can’t reach the core."
Belted out every word of Transatlanticism, the poco a poco growing intensity of the "I need you so much closer" ostinato, and I was back on a trundle bed alone with him in the sweltering Manhattan August heat, fumbling for what would remain just beyond our grasp, even as the 8500 other people around me in the cool October evening fog of the Berkeley hills were also reliving similar moments in their own lives.
Smiled nostalgically through Passenger Seat, serenade to so many night drives with loved ones.
I made it all the way to A Lack of Color, somehow, before the waterworks hit me. "I’m reaching for the phone to call at 7:03 // and on your machine I slur a plea for you to come home." The entire stadium singing at the top of their lungs, and I am sobbing too hard to keep up with them, my gulping breaths drawing the mask tight along my face. (I will swap it during intermission; I came well-prepared.) But it’s like choir writ large - we’ve all been singing along the entire evening, covering for each other when someone needs to take a breath, is too overcome in the moment.
I stayed firmly planted in my seat for intermission, knowing exactly what was coming next, and 15 minutes later, Ben and friends re-emerged, this time in gleaming white, launching straight into The District Sleeps Alone Tonight. I’d fully expected to sob through this one as well, but instead, I’m floating on the camaraderie from everyone around me, our joyous, heartfelt accompaniment of the band onstage reverberating throughout the amphitheater. 20 years younger me, hands on headphones isolating me in my little safe, private world in public while tears streamed down my face, couldn't even imagine.
Such Great Heights immediately followed, of course, best known and best beloved to the world. "It may seem like a stretch // but it’s thoughts like this that catch my troubled head when you’re away and I am missing you to death," the optimism and love I’d upheld throughout the entire year prior.
Jen Wood appeared as a special guest to sing her original part in Nothing Better, and that was a treat. I would get to compare her rendition to Jenny Lewis’ the following week at the Hollywood Bowl, and I preferred Wood’s bell-like tone on this particular song to Lewis’ more typical twang. "Don’t you feed me lines about some idealistic future." Paired with "I want so badly to believe that there is truth, that love is real," two songs later in Clark Gable, two lines delineating the tension and healing of spring and early summer 2003 for me.
All of it coming full circle to an a cappella round in harmony, everybody on their feet for Brand New Colony. "Everything will change, ooh." Thousands of voices soaring above the amphitheater, above the hills, filtering into the night.
And I got an encore of this a week later at the Hollywood Bowl. This time, Iron & Wine opened, and my tears started flowing at Flightless Bird, American Mouth. Sam Beam singing a cappella is one of the most goddamn beautiful things I have heard in my life.
Of course, earlier in the set, he did also banter with the audience, "You guys ready for some hot licks and electronic love?" So of course I had to texthyounpark the hilarity :D
Iron & Wine setlist, 10/17:
1. Thomas County Law
2. On Your Wings
3. Upward Over the Mountain
4. Lovers' Revolution
5. Father Mountain
6. Flightless Bird, American Mouth
7. Call It Dreaming
The setlist for the main acts was exactly the same as the previous concerts, as is to be expected for these nostalgia tours, but it was lovely to have one more chance to immerse myself among these songs I knew so well in the beauty of the Hollywood Hills on a warm fall evening, harmonize along from the audience. Feel at peace with myself and my life and loves and choices, send these thoughts and feelings and reassurances back to my angsty younger self.
The one thing I do feel was a real missed opportunity - they had Sam Beam there. How do you *not* figure out a way for Sam *and* Ben *and* Jenny to do a three-part harmony version of the acoustic version of Such Great Heights in the encore, when you even jokingly introduce it as "Alright, this next song is an Iron & Wine cover." I already knew how I'd harmonize it, how I'd buff up Jenny's part and add in more close harmonies from Sam. Somebody pass me a copy of Finale and Ben Gibbard's email, please :P
(And as I was heading back to the Metro after the concert with the other transit-takers, close to 11 pm on a Tuesday night, I had the most LA moment. Walking down Hollywood Boulevard, gliding past one person filming another person peeing on Ryan Reynolds' star, while a third person was art directing the shot. OH HOLLYWOOD, this is why you wear sunglasses at night, got it.)
But oh, 2003 self. I hope you enjoyed this present. Take heart. Go see more shows. Keep singing. (The choir you'll join that fall will do wonders for your soul.) Continue to fall in love as quickly and fiercely as you always do. Maintain that openness, that willingness to be vulnerable, to take risks. You have so much good coming your way. You were, and are, and will be loved.
In February 2003, I was, like I had been much of the previous year, getting my heart mangled yet again. Me, twentysomething romantic sap, toughing out the last gasps of a long-term relationship that had been long-distance its entire duration, surviving primarily on chemistry and optimistic interpretation and cycles of naive hope that maybe this time he'd be less afraid of his feelings, that he was ready to stop shying away from any hint of commitment. Oh, honey.
I was also pissed at New England winter for New England wintering, at the more than two feet of snow that fell in the Presidents' Day storm that I had to wade through to get to work. I cursed at it as what I thought would be the final parting gift from our relationship, one record-setting blizzard care of the guy from St. Cloud who loved snow but couldn't say he loved me, who did things like go kayaking in the Boundary Waters over New Year's. (Definitely his fault. Just like it was clearly the fault of the Lawn Guylander that the Sox kept losing crucial postseason games to the Yankees immediately after we broke up, the year they finally reversed the curse. ;) )
I did not want to trudge home through all of that snow after work, now icy and slippery after people had been stomping on it all day, so I went to Newbury Street. Devoured a scoop of El Diablo (chocolate ice cream with cayenne and cinnamon) at JP Licks, topped with Fluff. And wandered into one of the music stores. (I don't remember anymore whether it was Newbury Comics, or the big Tower Records at the foot of Newbury. Or had the Tower become the Virgin Megastore by then? Or maybe it was even the Tower Records in my neighborhood on Boylston, where Max used to work, even though I would not knowingly meet Max until later that summer.)
I'm meandering the aisles, seeing if anything piques my interest, when I hear:
DC sleeps alone ... tonight.
And the mournful ballad that had been playing over the sound system turns into a clubby bop, and my ears perk up, intrigued. "The District sleeps alone tonight after the bars turn out their lights // and send the autos swerving into the loneliest evening." DC boy certainly was sleeping alone that night, having forsaken his chance to come up to Boston for Valentine's Day (🔒), to get dressed up all glam with me and meet more of my friends at Ingrid's James Bond party (🔒), to be more integrated into my life.
When I fly to the counter, ask the intimidatingly tall dude what was playing, he points me towards the New Releases display, where half a dozen copies of The Postal Service's Give Up are sitting. "It's a collab between Ben Gibbard from Death Cab for Cutie and DNTEL. They also sing 'Such Great Heights,' which is getting a lot of hype right now, but I actually like some of their other songs better." I knew and loved Such Great Heights; it had come out around our anniversary, but leaked to various MP3 blogs before that. And I also knew and loved a couple of Death Cab songs at that point (Photobooth, A Movie Script Ending), so I put the giant headphones on, listen to the new song from the beginning. Multiple times.
I stand there for at least an hour, probably longer, swaying to the music, hands clapped over the headphones, until my stomach growls, rudely interrupting the catharsis I'm finding from silently crying in public, other shoppers kindly ignoring my overflowing emotions about the guy who dumped me barely a week prior. (I don't know if I beat my record from the night Rita and I listened to Weezer's Say It Ain't So 47 times in a row; I'm still surprised to this day her mom didn't kill us for that. But I am standing there a long, long while.) Of course the album comes home with me; The District Sleeps Alone Tonight ends up on repeat on my Winamp for weeks, makes that iteration of the breakup mix.
By the time Death Cab for Cutie releases Transatlanticism - their concept album about the ups and downs of long-distance relationships - that fall, I am happily in love with another guy, a quick hop up the Orange Line instead of 450 miles away on the DC shuttle. But god, does the title track stick in my craw; it feels like Ben Gibbard had a camera in that Morningside Heights apartment that last night in August (🔒), the day after his birthday. Or maybe some kind of empathic connection directly with my brain. I'll eschew that song especially for awhile, too painfully intimate and intimately painful. Focus on Passenger Seat directly following it, paean to conversations while driving around with my new love.
So when I heard that The Postal Service was pulling it together for one more reunion tour, and that Death Cab for Cutie would be their costar on the double bill? Of course I was going to try for tickets. (You announce this on my birthday week? Double duh!)
This was the first time I'd even considered going to a large-venue show in decades. Considered battling the bureaucratic behemoth of Ticketmaster to duke it out for tickets. Considered going to a *shudder* general admission show; I am short and GA does not generally work for me. I got medevaced from a GA show at the Mullins Center in college that I only went to because other friends were going, and some tall gangly dude elbowed me right in the nose because their idea of "dancing to the music" was more like "flailing inconsiderately."
But the Berkeley show was at the Greek, an outdoor amphitheatre with some stadium seating. It being an amphitheatre at least addressed some of the ventilation concerns I have with indoor shows since the pandemic began; the stadium seating availability gave me hope I would be able to see over the audience in front of me. These two factors made me decide I was okay buying tickets and then determining closer to the date whether I felt like the risks at the time were worth it. I was able to lock down a ticket for the Monday show! ... now I just had to wait ten months and hope society hadn't collapsed by then. And then, towards the end of summer, when DCFC/TPS announced their headliners, I found out that Iron & Wine, another band I'd been wanting to see forever, would be the opener on the last show of the tour, a Tuesday night at the Hollywood Bowl, with assigned seating. Found a seat, found a place to stay, and booked them both.
And oh, my heart.
Sitting six rows up in the Greek Theatre in shirtsleeves as the fog rolled into the Berkeley Hills and settled on my arms, listening to Ben Gibbard croon to me for two hours about love and long distance and loss, was the best possible present I could have given February 2003 me, however belated. (Sitting a little further back at the Hollywood Bowl for an encore just over a week later, with bonus Iron & Wine? Cherry on top.)
A new-to-me New Zealand band, The Beths, opened the show at the Greek, and they were utterly delightful. 2003 me would have loved their catchy melodies and lines like "future heartbreak, future headaches // wide-eyed nights late lying awake // with future cold shakes from future mistakes // future me hates me for, hates me for" and "you can't let go, you can't stop, you can't rewind // love is learned over time // 'til you're an expert in a dying field."
The Beths setlist, 10/9:
1. Future Me Hates Me
2. Knees Deep
3. Out of Sight
4. I Told You That I Was Afraid
5. Jump Rope Gazers
6. Silence is Golden
7. Expert in a Dying Field
After the opener, Death Cab took the stage in black. Me and my new friends all shouting along to The New Year, "No more airplanes or speed trains or freeways, there’d be no distance that could hold us back."
Swayed with the audience to "Your heart is a river that flows through your chest, through every organ // Your brain is the dam and I am the fish who can’t reach the core."
Belted out every word of Transatlanticism, the poco a poco growing intensity of the "I need you so much closer" ostinato, and I was back on a trundle bed alone with him in the sweltering Manhattan August heat, fumbling for what would remain just beyond our grasp, even as the 8500 other people around me in the cool October evening fog of the Berkeley hills were also reliving similar moments in their own lives.
Smiled nostalgically through Passenger Seat, serenade to so many night drives with loved ones.
I made it all the way to A Lack of Color, somehow, before the waterworks hit me. "I’m reaching for the phone to call at 7:03 // and on your machine I slur a plea for you to come home." The entire stadium singing at the top of their lungs, and I am sobbing too hard to keep up with them, my gulping breaths drawing the mask tight along my face. (I will swap it during intermission; I came well-prepared.) But it’s like choir writ large - we’ve all been singing along the entire evening, covering for each other when someone needs to take a breath, is too overcome in the moment.
I stayed firmly planted in my seat for intermission, knowing exactly what was coming next, and 15 minutes later, Ben and friends re-emerged, this time in gleaming white, launching straight into The District Sleeps Alone Tonight. I’d fully expected to sob through this one as well, but instead, I’m floating on the camaraderie from everyone around me, our joyous, heartfelt accompaniment of the band onstage reverberating throughout the amphitheater. 20 years younger me, hands on headphones isolating me in my little safe, private world in public while tears streamed down my face, couldn't even imagine.
Such Great Heights immediately followed, of course, best known and best beloved to the world. "It may seem like a stretch // but it’s thoughts like this that catch my troubled head when you’re away and I am missing you to death," the optimism and love I’d upheld throughout the entire year prior.
Jen Wood appeared as a special guest to sing her original part in Nothing Better, and that was a treat. I would get to compare her rendition to Jenny Lewis’ the following week at the Hollywood Bowl, and I preferred Wood’s bell-like tone on this particular song to Lewis’ more typical twang. "Don’t you feed me lines about some idealistic future." Paired with "I want so badly to believe that there is truth, that love is real," two songs later in Clark Gable, two lines delineating the tension and healing of spring and early summer 2003 for me.
All of it coming full circle to an a cappella round in harmony, everybody on their feet for Brand New Colony. "Everything will change, ooh." Thousands of voices soaring above the amphitheater, above the hills, filtering into the night.
And I got an encore of this a week later at the Hollywood Bowl. This time, Iron & Wine opened, and my tears started flowing at Flightless Bird, American Mouth. Sam Beam singing a cappella is one of the most goddamn beautiful things I have heard in my life.
Of course, earlier in the set, he did also banter with the audience, "You guys ready for some hot licks and electronic love?" So of course I had to text
hyounpark the hilarity :DIron & Wine setlist, 10/17:
1. Thomas County Law
2. On Your Wings
3. Upward Over the Mountain
4. Lovers' Revolution
5. Father Mountain
6. Flightless Bird, American Mouth
7. Call It Dreaming
The setlist for the main acts was exactly the same as the previous concerts, as is to be expected for these nostalgia tours, but it was lovely to have one more chance to immerse myself among these songs I knew so well in the beauty of the Hollywood Hills on a warm fall evening, harmonize along from the audience. Feel at peace with myself and my life and loves and choices, send these thoughts and feelings and reassurances back to my angsty younger self.
The one thing I do feel was a real missed opportunity - they had Sam Beam there. How do you *not* figure out a way for Sam *and* Ben *and* Jenny to do a three-part harmony version of the acoustic version of Such Great Heights in the encore, when you even jokingly introduce it as "Alright, this next song is an Iron & Wine cover." I already knew how I'd harmonize it, how I'd buff up Jenny's part and add in more close harmonies from Sam. Somebody pass me a copy of Finale and Ben Gibbard's email, please :P
(And as I was heading back to the Metro after the concert with the other transit-takers, close to 11 pm on a Tuesday night, I had the most LA moment. Walking down Hollywood Boulevard, gliding past one person filming another person peeing on Ryan Reynolds' star, while a third person was art directing the shot. OH HOLLYWOOD, this is why you wear sunglasses at night, got it.)
But oh, 2003 self. I hope you enjoyed this present. Take heart. Go see more shows. Keep singing. (The choir you'll join that fall will do wonders for your soul.) Continue to fall in love as quickly and fiercely as you always do. Maintain that openness, that willingness to be vulnerable, to take risks. You have so much good coming your way. You were, and are, and will be loved.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-15 15:02 (UTC)did you record the entire show?!
you officially have my heart and lungs, but i need the liver.
(I too have a connection to "Give Up".)
no subject
Date: 2023-12-15 15:08 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-15 15:16 (UTC)YES (right, that's going on in about fifteen minutes, gotta finsh the kitchen)
no subject
Date: 2023-12-15 18:13 (UTC)no subject
no subject
Date: 2023-12-18 07:17 (UTC)