A lot of times our friends and family with kids like to ask us what we DO with our time, you know, since we don’t have kids (although I would make a strong argument for our three feline babies}. Maybe one day our time will be dominated by changing diapers and pushing strollers and cleaning up baby puke, but until that day comes, we are enjoying being marrieds doing things we always loved doing, and discovering new things we love doing together.
One of those things is checking out new bands, something we never really did as much as we wanted back in the SF days. For one, we both worked late. And of course there was always the issue of even getting tickets to any show — even artists you thought were obscure — because they always were sold out in the first 15 minutes of going on sale. One of the downsides of living in a city like SF: everyone knows their music, and everyone knows their Craigslist (for scalping tickets, that is).
Long story short, we made up for lost time this year and saw a lot of concerts. Some were old favorites, but others were bands we newly discovered (thanks, Spotify) and some were bands that sounded interesting (thanks, BYT). Sometimes we found ourselves the oldest couple in the middle of a sea of 18 yr old pupil-dilated ravers (Nero), or screaming high schoolers (Two Door Cinema Club). We went to Shadrock Music Fest one freezing weekend and saw Yo La Tengo and Dum Dum Girls (our second time, the first was with Widowspeak), Saw Joy Forbidable in a small church (Ritzy has seriously crazy energy), drove to Richmond one weekend just to see M83 (totally worth it), and rushed to Baltimore after a weekend of camping in Virginia Beach to see Phantogram (awesomeness) and Ki:Theory (again, awesome). In between, we saw Bon Iver (great), Best Coast (fun) and the Portlandia tour (love the show, but the tour itself was kind of overrated). We also saw the amazing art installation by Doug Aitken – SONG1 at the Hirshhorn. Technically not a band, but still a concert as they had live music and singing.
The best was when we were at the Nero concert, surrounded by neon/fur-wearing kids with glow sticks, arms laden with friendship bracelets, and out-of-their-minds high on molly. Sly overheard some kids say, “look at that old-school couple up there (that would be us–me in my mom jeans and sensible shoes). They must be really f’ed up because they are just standing there listening to the music.” In case you ever see our photos on some kid’s tumblr site or as part of a meme, its because some youngsters wanted to take photos with us — the ‘old-school’ ravers just there listening to music — because we were relics from another time. I love being old.
It’s been a fun year of discovering music together. I’m glad I married someone who has (or maybe just tolerates) my weirdly specific taste in music.
PS–if you have Spotify, I created a playlist of the aforementioned concerts/music that you can listen to here. Technology these days.
