On a warm July day in 2019, I attended one of the very best concerts I’ve ever been to. I actually wasn’t very familiar with the band, Spanish Love Songs, at the time, although they’re now one of my favorites. They put on a tremendous set, to be sure, but ultimately the music wasn’t what made that night so memorable.
What stuck with me the most about that night were the friends.
Of the probably 100 people crammed into a Philadelphia batting cage that night to see SLS play, I knew close to 20 of them. Everywhere I looked was a friend, somebody I knew and cared about. Over the years we drove back and forth across the Northeast to see these bands we loved so much, running in to each other over and over, bonding over our shared fanaticism, and those brief connections bloomed into true friendship. And in many ways all those connections culminated that night as we hugged, screamed beloved lyrics in each other’s faces, and truly felt like a part of something bigger than any of us were alone.
(We all sweat a lot too, but you take the good, you take the bad, y’know?)
That night sums up why I love live music so much. Don’t get me wrong, music in-and-of-itself is one of my absolute favorite things in the world — I’d need a whole ‘nother newsletter to really dive down into these bands and what they mean to me — but for me, a concert is as much about the people there as it is the music itself. It’s about walking into a room and knowing that everybody is there because they love this band. It’s about the connections made, from the random guy who grabbed my arm in a Less Than Jake moshpit and swung me around like a wrecking ball to the girl who’s introduced me to dozens of new like-minded friends. In many ways, my social calendar revolves around concerts.
So, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic is a huge blow. I’m far from the greatest victim — the musicians themselves, along with their techs, crew, merch people, and the staff of the various venues across the country are all hurting pretty bad right now, and if you have the means to help, you should — but the temporary demise of live music is the largest nail the Coronavirus has driven into the coffin that is my social life.
That’s where the livestreams come in.
If you have even the slightest connection to any musician on social media, you’ve probably seen mention of at least one of them. With no way to make money or connect with their fans, many musicians have turned to livestreams as a way to put on concerts we can watch from the comfort of our locked down homes.
Like all concerts — and all music, really — each one is completely different, and each one provides a fascinating look into the lives behind the music. I’ve watched Cheekface’s sardonic singer geek out over weezer as he transformed his typically-flat vocals into some powerhouse belting, covering the Blue Album from front to back. I’ve watched three of Bad Moves’ four members attempt to play their songs solo (each is sequestered in a separate part of town), despite being a band who leans heavily on harmonies. I saw Spanish Love Songs themselves grapple with their bleak, bleak songs being such an appropriate soundtrack to this bleak, bleak time — I think their livestream might have been as helpful to their own sanity as it to their fans’.
Perhaps my favorite of these livestreams belongs to Rodrigo Palma (@theageofbronze), the bassist of my favorite band, Saves the Day. Every morning at 11AM EST Palma streams around an hour of gentle, beautiful guitar singalongs while his toddler daughter plays in the background. It’s charming, it’s absolutely adorable, it shows off some unexpected skills from Palma, and it’s lead to my favorite moment of any livestream I’ve watched so far, when Palma’s daughter got a hold of the phone he was streaming from and tossed it around the room for a few minutes while he continued to play on in the background. It was essentially “Attacked by a toddler ASMR” and I loved every second of it.
Unsurprisingly, these livestreams satisfy my musical need that’s usually met by concerts, but they’ve also helped reconnect me to that community I spent so much of this newsletter talking about. Livestreams, of course, have comments, and in these comments I have repeatedly seen the names of my friends pop up, one after the other, over and over. We may all be stuck in our homes, but we’re still watching our favorite bands together, and that brings me so much joy. Watching that Spanish Love Songs livestream as all my friends sounded off in the comments really did feel like reliving that magical night last July, only in my bedroom rather than in a sweaty mass of bodies in the middle of Everybody Hits (RIP). It’s not quite as good, but in times like these, it’s exactly what I needed.
CHECK OUT: I doubt I could recommend any specific band or livestream here that would satisfy all my readers, but the next one I plan to check out is Thursday’s Geoff Rickly, streaming on the antimatterxxv Instagram at 3PM EST, Thursday 3/26/2020.
But we all have a community we miss even if we’re not a part of this specific music scene, and we probably all have some way we could connect with them via livestreaming, or Facetime, or something similar. All my friends from my Crossfit gym had a happy hour over Zoom last night, for example, and it was really nice to see them again. We’re physically isolated right now, but that doesn’t mean we have to be socially isolated as well.