• I wonder if bands can ever really be aware of the kind of psychological effects their music creates in you.
• The Cap’n Jazz reunion show was last weekend. Plague Bringer was off-kilter but decent, and Gauge reminded me how far we have to go before my scene hits the highs of the 90’s. But C’J… Man. Three feet away from Tim Kinsella. He grabbed my hair. He fell on me. He did awkward little dances. I got his setlist. I remembered all the words. The whole thing was utterly surreal.
• But it was the audience who were the true power behind the show. There was sweat, blood, screaming. Every lyric was being thrown back in the band’s face by 200 voices in unison. This wasn’t a gig. This was mass hysteria, group catharsis, a torrent of pent-up energy fifteen years in the making.
• Does Tim Kinsella realize how much that show meant to me? Does Mike Kinsella know the joy the moment I found out that American Football was only the tip of the family tree? Does Victor Villarreal know the way that I sat in front of my laptop listening to the first disc of Analphabetapolothology on repeat for five hours? These bands caused a chemical shift in my music taste and ethos, and now… Now I’m me. Music from fifteen years ago, that two years ago made a kid hundreds of miles from his home into a new person. Wild.
• The other is Johnny Foreigner, now officially my favorite band. I didn’t notice until I started dreaming about it, but their music has made me fall in love with a city I’ve never been to.
• JoFo, especially in their first album, take most of their inspiration from their hometown of Birmingham, England, a sister city to my own hometown of Chicago. And somehow, probably through constant goddamn repetition of their music, I’m obsessed with the city.
• I imagine Alexi writing the lyrics to Sometimes in the Bulling while walking by the Selfridges building. I imagine streamers from an apartment like in The End and Everything After, and it’s beautiful. I imagine the friends leaving, and onset of terrible loneliness, and then the three of them the only ones left in their city, and it’s Yr All Just Jealous, and I try not to let it get on top of me but god I know that fucking feeling so well, too well, and it eats at your heart.
• And now I’m into their city’s football club, and now I really like Balti food when I can find it, and I plan little fake vacations to Bham, and imagine going to the clubs they write about and meet the people they sing about. And it’s all really lame and embarrassing and mebbe a little weird, but I don’t care.
• I guess the best way to put it is this: Music is magic. And like the best kinds of magic, I don’t know how it works, but it does. Thankfully.
• The Big Show is Sunday. Fourteen bands from my scene in one day. I can’t fucking wait.
