Forever Young: Music and Loss
“If you feel pain, you’re alive. If you feel other people’s pain, you’re a human being.” — Leo Tolstoy
My wife Jan and I were driving from Chicago to Nashville recently, a trip that has become its own kind of ritual, an annual immersion into music. In Nashville, we knew we’d find the familiar — indie rock at the Basement East and bluegrass at the Station Inn. The venues, the sounds — even the anticipation — all felt like home.
This time, we took a new route. Interstate 57, cutting through flat Illinois farmland, past the edges of the Shawnee National Forest and the low, rolling hills of Kentucky. At some point, dinner became a question. The easy answer was fast food by the highway. It was late, we were tired. But Jan saw a sign for Paducah, Kentucky.
“What about Paducah?” she asked, scrolling through her mobile phone. “Looks like there’s more than fast food there.”
Years ago, I might have said, “Not now. Another time.” But I am 61. I know better now. We have fewer trips ahead of us than behind us. Saying “not now” might mean never.
We took the exit. Quiet streets, the trees arching overhead, the kind of stillness you can’t find in the city. We found a restaurant in what had once been a Coca-Cola plant, the old brick walls holding onto whispers of a life before this one. After dinner, we wandered into a brewery, where Elvis Presley gazed down from a portrait on the wall. His presence felt fitting, a prelude to the weekend of music waiting for us in Nashville.
Sometimes, when you decide to stop, you find joy.
A spontaneous visit on a road trip is easier to do when it’s just you and your wife on the road at age 61, untethered from commitments except for financial obligations. Indeed, there’s plenty to enjoy about being 61. You’re likely still working, still earning, and still strong enough to explore. If you chose to have children, they are grown now, and the chaos of parenting is behind you. But 61 is also the age of AARP membership offers and unwelcome emails about burial insurance. It’s the age of contradictions, where you can still be jostled in a crowd of sweaty music fans at the Basement East, yet somehow qualify as a senior citizen. I’m still figuring how to reconcile those two things.
By the time you are in your 60s, you have likely experienced loss, too. One by one, the faces you know wink out like lights on a dimmer switch — my dad, Jan’s parents, my sister, my best friend. You don’t feel the darkness all at once; it creeps in like fog, reshaping the edges of everything you thought was solid. You see time differently — not as a line but as a dwindling.
Sometimes this loss doesn’t bring wisdom. It brings fear. Worries you can’t name spiraling into each other on nights when you can’t sleep. What if something random happens? A health crisis, a financial disaster. Even when you know better, you think it anyway.
I’d like to say that church, prayer, and scripture offer the answers. And sometimes they do. But for me, the real comfort comes from music.
At concerts, I unburden myself. The energy between the performer and the audience, that current running back and forth — it makes you feel alive. Music strips away the weight of worry. It reminds you that life continues, that it is still happening. At home, I turn to my vinyl collection, pulling records almost at random: Goths by the Mountain Goats, Olivia Kaplan’s Tonight Turns to Nothing. The sound lifts me out of myself. A song like Olivia Kaplan’s “Spill,” in which which Kaplan’s voice floats delicately above the sparse guitar, then melds seamlessly with the swelling instrumentation, taps me on the shoulder, pulls me back, says, “Live.”
Music is how I rebel against aging. Music is how I find joy amid loss. Music reminds me that life is still here, waiting. And I am here, too.
1 Crate Digging
On a cold Chicago winter day, I step into 606 Records in Pilsen. The air outside is sharp and unforgiving, but inside the store, it is warm and quiet. I’ve come here to sift through vinyl and lose myself in the rows of records holding other people’s stories. A record store is always personal, a reflection of its owner’s taste, and, with used vinyl, a mirror of the lives nearby. These are albums someone once loved and let go of for reasons we’ll never know.
Drew, the owner, greets me with a quiet hello and a small smile. He is soft-spoken and easygoing, but there is an intensity to him, too, the kind that comes with deep knowledge. He curates 606 Records with a taste for the lesser-known: jazz, electronica, and world music. He is a DJ, a dad, and a touchstone for Chicago’s indie artists. Some of them work here, behind the counter. Drew is always playing something I’ve never heard before. He is like an algorithm but better. Human. Thoughtful. Empathetic.
Today, Drew tells me about a shipment of Afro-Brazilian music he just got in. We talk about the music that shaped us. Motown and house for him, Al Green and George Benson for me. He pulls a few records to sample behind the counter. I end up buying a Kool & the Gang album and one from Bill Evans.
As Drew rings up my purchase, I mutter, “Bill Evans was a tortured genius.”
Drew smiles. “Everyone says that about Bill Evans. Those exact words.”
We look at the album cover together. Evans, in glasses and slicked-back hair, looks out at us with a distant, unreachable gaze. He could be an accountant, a teacher, anyone. And yet, he wasn’t. He was a man who changed jazz, who lived and died in a haze of heroin and cocaine. Why? We speculate. To fit in with the jazz crowd. To quiet something restless inside. To feel closer to the music, to whatever force drove him.
We don’t know. We’ll never know.
But there, standing in a record store on a winter day, Drew and I share the moment anyway, examining the face of a man we’ll never meet on an album that connects us. Drew and I barely know each other, but that doesn’t matter. We know what we need to know. We know the language of vinyl.
From Al Green to Jim Morrison
Places like 606 Records sustain my love of vinyl, a relationship built over decades, layered with time, memory, and the weight of everything I’ve carried along the way.
For as long as I can remember, music has been intertwined with my life, threaded through vinyl records. I was 10 years old when I first heard Al Green’s voice, sweet and soulful, spinning on my collection of 45s. Our family moved often when I was a child; each relocation was a small fracture, and each new place was unfamiliar. Al Green became a friend in those moments, his voice a salve for the dislocation, the constant sense of leaving.
In junior high and high school, vinyl became more than a comfort. It became a map of my musical journey. My early records were steeped in funk and soul — War, Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind, and Fire, the Isley Brothers, and the Superfly soundtrack.
And then, jazz. George Benson, his guitar, his voice, reshaped the contours of what I thought music could be. At one point, nearly every record I owned bore his name. I grew up as he ascended into international fame with Breezin’ and Weekend in L.A. As his music matured, so did I.
Vinyl didn’t just teach me about music. It opened my eyes to the world. I remember pulling Quincy Jones’s Smackwater Jack from its sleeve, opening the gatefold to see him standing there, proud and bold in a dashiki robe. I didn’t know what it meant, not then. But it stayed with me. I learned. That image became a window into Black pride and heritage in the early 1970s, a piece of history I didn’t realize I was holding in my hands.
Vinyl wasn’t just music. It was identity, exploration, and a way of making sense of my world.
After I graduated from high school, specifically the summer between high school and college, music became something else.
This was the summer between one life and another, the gap you don’t recognize until it is behind you. I was in Germany with a friend, and in Paris for a week. A week that felt stretched, unbound. On a whim, we visited Père Lachaise, and found Jim Morrison’s grave on the tenth anniversary of his death.
The grave was crowded. Europeans, Americans, strangers who somehow felt familiar. They came with beads, flowing shirts, and graffiti for the gravestones. Jim had been gone a decade, but there he was. His presence hung in the air, unshakable, his spirit presiding over a transient congregation.
I had liked the Doors before. They were a curiosity, a soundtrack to movies like Apocalypse Now, Morrison’s voice weaving through the surreal. But that day, with nothing pulling me in another direction, I stood at the grave and felt something shift. Music became not something to hear, but something to hold.
College was lonely and disjointed. Family unraveling at home, money running out to pay for college, me unmoored on campus. Frightened and unhinged, I clung to Jim Morrison like a lifebuoy, to Jim’s favorite poet, Rimbaud, to the idea that their alienation could lend me a map. The Lizard King, whose self-destructive path led to his death at age 27, helped me stay alive. I wrote poems. I filled journals. I turned the music over and over, trying to find the thread.
Vinyl became a mirror, a way to understand myself. The Doors. Pink Floyd. Led Zeppelin. The Rolling Stones. I wasn’t just listening; I was trying them on. Roger Waters wrote about walls, isolation, hanging on in quiet desperation. Led Zeppelin invited me to transcend my circumstances by exploring misty mountains and embrace the ache of looking for a fleeting happiness that existed somewhere west. Whatever caused these gods on earth to write and sing of these things, I did not know. But realized I wasn’t alone. Feeling alien wasn’t a failure; it was a truth.
You’re Only Human
More than 40 years have passed. What do vinyl records mean to me now? They are artifacts, yes, something to hold and collect, like books. A streaming service offers infinite access, but it’s not yours. It’s rented, subject to rules you didn’t write. When Neil Young pulls his music from Spotify, it disappears. But not if you own the albums.
I own lots of Neil Young albums. Even the bad ones. I own both the British and U.S. versions of the Beatles catalog. It matters to me, this small distinction, the history told from two sides of the ocean. I don’t just own Led Zeppelin’s Presence. I have the deluxe edition, complete with an extra disc of outtakes, so I can hear how the songs evolved, how they stumbled before they stood.
When Taylor Swift released Midnights with four different covers, I bought them all. The standard edition: Taylor holding a lighter, the flame flickering in dim light. Jade green: retro décor, a 1970s Wurlitzer in the background. Blood moon: Taylor on a vintage phone, the wood paneling behind her casting its own kind of shadow. Mahogany: a close-up, her face brooding, framed by dark, rich tones. Turn them over, and the backs form quarter sections of a clock. Was it necessary to purchase all four? No. Did it bring joy? Yes.
Album covers matter. They are invitations, worlds to step into. The Doors, peering at you through the window of Morrison Hotel, invite you to share in their particular kind of cool, one that lives only in the mythology of Jim Morrison. Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here offers questions instead of answers: two men, one of them on fire, shaking hands on a studio lot. Why? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you stop to wonder. Streaming doesn’t do that.
However, vinyl records are more than objects to collect. They connect me to my humanity.
When I was 21, music was survival. I had no space to think about what it was doing to me or for me. At 61, I have that space. Listening to music on vinyl doesn’t carve my identity the way it used to, but it chisels away the weight of the everyday. It lets me find something underneath, something essential.
Loss has taught me that joy is a choice. And choosing joy takes work. Staying connected to my humanity is part of that work. To be human is to feel pain, grief, and sorrow. Sometimes music brings those feelings to the surface, with it wonder, beauty, and joy. Even the melancholy moments matter. They remind me that I am still here, still feeling. If there is room for grief, there is room for joy. Albums like Finom’s Not God do that for me. They make the work of choosing joy possible.
Released in 2024, Not God considers what it means to feel, to be human, to be broken open by something as small and sudden as a cardinal in the dead of winter. Songwriter Macie Stewart called it a moment, a rupture. A cardinal above the frozen water. A red flash against the white. “The sign I’m given,” she sings. I think I understand what she means.
I hear the song, and it brings me to hikes by rivers and through woods with Jan. To owls calling in the dusk. To a lone tree standing in a field. To the stillness that asks nothing of you except to recognize it. At 21, I would not have noticed the tree. I would not have heard the owls. Nature then was something distant, a backdrop, a passage in a book. Now, it is something else entirely. The cardinal reminds me to go outside. It reminds me of what I miss when I don’t.
The songs on Not God do not settle. They expose, press, pull. “Cyclops.”“Dirt.” “Naked.” “Hungry.” Each one holds its own contradictions — strength and frailty, longing and resistance. They refuse simplicity. They ask you to feel the messy parts, the raw edges. And I do. I listen and feel as though the songs were written for me.
When I was younger, music was about discovering who I was. Jim Morrison’s voice was like a ghost breathing into my ear. It felt profound then — to connect with someone who wasn’t there. That his words could make my own world feel less alien.
Music now feels like a way to connect with the person I am now. I am relieved to know that even though I am older and farther away from those moments of younger self-realization, I can still lose myself in a song.
Music is about confrontation, too: a mirror reflecting the fact of aging, of loss, of the narrowing of days. It is impossible to avoid this confrontation when I become immersed (as I do often) in Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, especially one of the album’s many signature songs, “Time.”
In this way, music influences me differently than when I was younger. Music helps me live with the reality of aging by coming to terms with mortality and responding to the personal loss accompanying growing older.
Facing Mortality with David Bowie
Rebellion against aging is not always loud. Sometimes, it is a quiet nod, a decision to keep going, to keep creating even when mortality crouches alongside you. David Bowie showed me this. He showed me more than once.
In 2014, my life was shifting. Jan had just lost her mother and began writing her first novel. I was starting my own business and, improbably, juggling that with a new role: playing a character at an outdoor Renaissance Faire on summer weekends. At the same time, I had to adjust to a new health routine. Cholesterol pills, every day, for the rest of my life. When the doctor told me, I asked, “Why?” She reminded me of my family history, of my father’s heart attacks. “You could survive one,” she said, “but what then? Disability? A diminished life?”
Driving to the pharmacy to pick up that first bottle of pills felt like a concession as if I had already stepped closer to something I didn’t want to face. Then came Christmas Eve. My family and I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art for the David Bowie Is exhibit. It was a retrospective, but it was more than that. It was a celebration, a map of how Bowie turned everything — past, present, culture, his own life — into art.
I spent hours in that exhibit, and when I left, I knew what I needed to do. I had to create, to document, to make meaning of what was happening to me. A few months later, when pre-cancerous polyps were removed from my colon, I did the same. I folded that experience into the character I played at the Renaissance Faire, into the stories I was telling. Bowie had taught me to make something out of everything.
In 2016, Bowie taught me again. He released Blackstar on his 69th birthday. It was bold and sprawling, filled with images of mortality and the strange beauty of endings. “Something happened on the day he died,” he sang. “Spirit rose a metre then stepped aside.” He was already speaking from a place most of us avoid. He had invited death into the room, handed it a microphone, and turned it into art.
Days later, Bowie was gone. As it turned out, the album wasn’t just an exploration of mortality — it was his goodbye. Every song, every lyric, even the artwork, had been part of his parting gift. I went back to Blackstar, listening to it again with this knowledge, and my interpretation of it shifted. Lazarus wasn’t just a song; it was a reckoning. “Look up here, man, I’m in danger,” he sang. “I’ve got nothing left to lose.”
Even the album sleeve carried meaning. When held to the light, it revealed a starfield, a hidden image waiting to be discovered. Bowie had thought of everything.
Tony Visconti, his producer, later said, “His death was not different from his life — a work of art.” He was right. Bowie had faced death as he had faced everything else, with grace and creativity. He had chosen not to fight the inevitable but to make something beautiful out of it.
What Bowie gave me with Blackstar was not just an album but a lesson. Aging and dying will happen to all of us. We don’t get to choose that. But we can choose how to face it. Bowie showed me that even in the final chapter, there can be vibrancy. There can be dignity. There can be grace.
And so, I keep creating. Bowie would understand.
Nick Cave: Touched by a Wild God
My father died of cancer in 2020. He was 87. My sister Cathy followed in early 2023, a heart attack that stopped her at 69. A few months later, it was Steve, my best friend since junior high. A heart attack again. He was only 59. Loss arrived in intervals, like waves breaking with deliberate cruelty, spaced just far enough apart for me to catch my breath before the next one hit.
My father, Cathy, Steve — they shaped different parts of who I am. My father taught me independence, gave me music. Cathy introduced me to vinyl records and everything they carried: the sound, the weight, the covers, the earthy smell of worn covers. Steve taught me what friendship could be after years of solitude. Each loss hurt in its own way, whether I saw it coming (my father) or didn’t (Steve, Cathy). Each one left something behind for me to hold on to.
There is no blueprint for loss. Nick Cave understands this. He has lost two sons, tragically. On Wild God, released in 2024, he tries to map loss’s contours. His songs grasp at the contradictions — grief that burns and grief that numbs, pain that isolates and pain that connects. “I said we should not hurt one another / Still we hurt one another,” he sings in “Cinnamon Horses.” Loss dismantles you, and then it hands you the pieces. It does not tell you how to put them back together.
On Wild God, he shows how loss sharpens the edges of beauty, makes the ordinary unbearable in its tenderness. “On the shore of the lake an old man sat / And watched a woman bathing.” The light. The moment. He saves it because he has learned that it will not stay. In “Joy!,” the album’s heart, Cave refuses to surrender. “We’ve all had too much sorrow,” he declares. “Now is the time for joy.” It is not a denial of grief but a response to it, a deliberate and defiant choice. A paradox, he calls it. He is right. Joy in the face of loss is chosen joy.
I can find joy when I consider those I have lost. I think of Cathy. I think of her record collection, like her copy of the Rolling Stones album Through the Past Darkly, with their sneering faces, the way it lured me into music.
I think of her hippie vibe and red pants like what Janis Joplin wore on Cathy’s copy of Pearl, the last album Janis Joplin recorded. Cathy was the oldest; I was the youngest. We lived at opposite ends of the family, but when we sat by the piano one night and sang “Me and Bobby McGee,” we closed the distance.
I think of Steve. His love of Bruce Springsteen, the blues concerts we attended together. I see him now in the mosh pit at a concert by industrial thrash band Ministry, tumbling in a borrowed green coat, the chaos swirling around him. He would laugh at the memory, too.
And I think of my dad most of all. The little things: the way he taught me to lift soap from hotel carts, to walk into a convention we didn’t belong at and pretend we owned the place. The way he played gospel songs on his trumpet. When Jan and I saw him for the last time, at home living his last days, he sat at the piano and played, just for a few minutes. His hands still knew the keys.
When it was time to go, he hugged me. “To hell with you,” he said, his eyes bright. I laughed because I understood. He wasn’t ready for me to grieve him yet. He wasn’t ready to leave.
Now, I hear his voice in my head, and I laugh again. The last thing he gave me was joy.
Footsteps in the Dark
If vinyl keeps me tethered to myself, it also connects me to others. This is what happens in places like 606 Records. The day I buy the Bill Evans album from Drew, a tall, stout man walks in and begins to sort through records, slowly, deliberately.
Drew greets him with a hug, and the man turns to me, introducing himself as Sean. Consultant. Designer. DJ. A regular here, a friend of Drew’s. He begins to tell me about a recent trip to India, unprompted, his words falling easily into the space between us. He describes Maha Shivaratri, the funeral pyres burning in Varanasi along the Ganges. He scrolls through photos on his phone, faces and moments that he savors. He tells me about the people he met in the slums of Mumbai, their resilience, their spirit.
“David, I just need to see the world,” he says. “I have this friend who calls me sometimes and says, ‘It’s time to go.’ So, we go.”
I have many others like Drew in my life. Olive at Shuga Records speaks with energy and passion, our conversations darting from Frank Zappa’s tangled, complicated legacy to the spectacle of the O.J. Simpson trial to the aching lyricism of Faye Webster. She keeps me connected — to music, to culture, but more importantly, to people. There is Steve at Record Wonderland, who once patiently explained why records pressed in different countries sound different. From one record store to the next, they are constants.
These moments of connection happen without warning. They cannot be planned. When they come, you have to recognize them, let them stretch out, let yourself linger instead of moving on to the next errand, the next obligation.
I was at a record store in Chicago recently, flipping through albums, when two employees, both in their twenties, put on Black Moses by Isaac Hayes. The sound of it filled the store, lush and dramatic, the kind of album that demands to be heard in full.
I told them I first learned about Isaac Hayes watching the 1972 Academy Awards with my sister Cathy. That night, he performed Shaft live, fully embodying the Black Moses persona — the dark sunglasses, the thick chains, the bare chest glistening under the stage lights. The performance was as much about presence as it was about the music. I told them how, for me, that moment was an introduction, a doorway into Black music.
“You can look it up on YouTube,” I said. “Just keep in mind, 1972 production values might take some getting used to.”
One of them pulled it up on a laptop, the other watching over his shoulder. They were mesmerized.
“Wow,” one of them said. “You saw this on TV?”
They looked at me as if I had been there for the signing of the Declaration of Independence. As if I had walked out of the past, bringing this moment with me.
The difference in our ages became, instead of a gap, a connection. They asked what it was like to learn about music before the internet, before streaming, before everything was available with a search bar and a click. I told them about the albums my mother owned — Black Moses among them, on 8-track tape, I think. We talked about family, about how the music we love is often shaped by the people around us before we’re old enough to make choices of our own.
It happens often, these chance encounters, in record stores but also in places where you wouldn’t expect them. Not long ago, I was at a clothing store, browsing the sale rack, humming the Isley Brothers’ “Footsteps in the Dark.” I had listened to it earlier that morning, spinning Go for Your Guns, one of the albums my sister Karen introduced me to in the 1970s. A young man wearing an employee badge approached me. “May I tell you something?” he asked. “My dad loved that song when I was growing up. He played it all the time.”
We exchanged a smile. Nothing else needed to be said. We understood.
I know I may never see Sean at 606 Records again, or that young man at the clothing store. Just as Jan and I might never pass through Paducah again. These moments are fleeting. I understand that now. The days of forming lifelong friendships, the kind that will stretch over decades, feel far behind me. Those lifetime connections are thinning. The people I’ve shared decades with are disappearing, one by one. The rest of us are holding on to what remains.
And this will do. The gift of someone’s company, or a place, even for a moment — that will do.
2 Nights in White Satin
A cold, wet night in March. The kind of night where the streets shine with rain and the city feels smaller, drawn inward. We are at the Metro Chicago. Jan and I, along with some friends, here to watch Neptune’s Core, Smut, and Friko. Friko is celebrating the launch of their new album, Where We’ve Been, Where We Go from Here.
We’ve been doing this a lot lately — concert after concert, each one its own world. Angel Olsen, intimate and haunting. Lowertown, all raw honesty and punk edges. Smooth Rogers, spinning jazz into something psychedelic. The list stretches ahead of us: Arlo Parks, Caroline Rose, Chastity Belt, the Rolling Stones. The names alone feel like a promise.
It has been years since we’ve been to the Metro. The building has that kind of presence, a history you can feel before you step inside. It’s a relic of the 1920s, beaux-arts in design but stripped down by time and use. People call it a cross between an opera house and a dive bar. The ceilings soar, the details catch your eye, but the grit makes it feel real.
Jan chooses the balcony with our friends. I choose the floor. Standing-room only, packed shoulder to shoulder with strangers. The room is wide, not deep. The stage feels impossibly close, the performers just a breath away. The energy of the crowd starts to build, not loud yet, but buzzing. Anticipation rising.
I think about where I was earlier that day. Sitting on the sofa in Downers Grove, taking a phone call from my financial planner. He had wanted to catch up on retirement planning. The answer came easily, though I didn’t say it aloud. Fuck that. Not yet. Not now. I am here. I am alive.
Swifties and Alchemy
Tonight, I am ready for joy. Joy does not arrive unannounced, the way loss does. You have to look for it, make space for it, open yourself to it. At a concert, joy doesn’t always take the form you expect. Sometimes it’s a spark, a wave of energy moving through the room. Not joy exactly, but life. That galvanizing pulse that leaves you more awake than you were before. And from that energy, joy can emerge. Not immediately, not always in the moment, but through some quiet alchemy I don’t fully understand, a transformation of sound into something larger.
An audience becomes its own being, alive with motion. A sea with tides that rise and fall, shifting and unpredictable. The performer steps into that sea, pulls something from the depths, and offers it back — a fragment of sound, a piece of themselves, or at least the version of themselves they’ve chosen to show us. Father John Misty as the sinewy prophet. Matthew Paige of DeeOhGee as the guitar god bending chords into gritty, impossible shapes. Robert Plant dropping songs like diamonds. Each one a character, a voice, a presence.
And in the audience, we share something too. At a Taylor Swift concert during her Eras tour, Jan and I were surrounded by Swifties. The sting from losing my dad, sister Cathy, and Steve was still raw. The Swifties treated the wounds with their friendship bracelets, smiles, and trust. When I, a stranger, asked for the occasional photo, they did not hesitate. They shared stories, exchanged glances of recognition, as if they had known each other forever, as if Jan and I had always been there, too. The experience was not just about the music, not just about Taylor Swift. It was about something else — about belonging, about understanding, about joy made tangible in a stadium that should have been too large to hold something so intimate.
Even in the highest seats, far from the stage, the energy reached us. A feeling stretched across 60,000 people, threaded through their hands, their voices, their collective memory. A kind of love, fleeting but real, the kind I sometimes find in my record stores conversations. A brief exchange, a conversation with a stranger who somehow already knows you because they know the music that matters to you.
The feeling does not last, necessarily. But in that moment, it is everything.
I attend stadium shows when there is no other alternative. I prefer to stand close to the stage at a typical concert. There, the energy feels more direct and immediate, as though the music is pulling you forward. When you’re close, you feel it more. Tay Roebuck, lead singer for Smut, knows how to create a mood in a small space, whether she’s still and grounded or overwhelmed to the point of falling to her knees.
The stage is her canvas, and the band and the audience are her collaborators. Or Meghan Remy of U.S. Girls, who once reached down mid-song and touched the collar of my denim jacket. It was a small gesture, a moment of connection, fleeting but real. A moment that will never happen again, at least not in the same way. But I’ll carry it with me.
Being close to the stage has its costs, too. Jan and I have been slammed by enthusiastic fans, emerging from concerts bruised, grimy, and sore. Some nights we get banged around more than others. On December 31, 1989, at the Riviera Theater in Chicago, Steve joined us to see Ministry with Jello Biafra. The music was loud, angry, and relentless. The crowd answered with its own aggression. A mosh pit erupted, bodies ricocheting like bullets. By the end of the night, Jan and I were bruised, and our friend Robin had a broken ankle. She laughed anyway, through the pain.
We knew what we were walking into that night, though we underestimated the force of it. The mosh pit was brutal, yes, but it was also something else. A reminder of how music can move people — literally, physically. A reminder of what it means to feel alive.
That is why I go. To feel the energy, the connection, the risk. To find those moments, fleeting but unforgettable. To be reminded, again and again, that I am here.
Offstage Magic
There are moments when the magic of a performance spills beyond the stage. Recently, at Lincoln Hall, we watched Olivia Kaplan open for Billie Marten. From the moment she appeared, something shifted. Her voice was warm and aching, her lyrics raw and unguarded. Each note, each phrase seemed to reach inside me, pulling at something tender. By the end of her set, I was almost in tears.
During the break, I rushed to the merchandise booth. Only one copy of her album, Tonight Turns to Nothing, was on display. The booth was unattended, but I couldn’t take the chance that it was the only one left. I took it — held it, really — like something fragile and rare. After Billie Marten’s set, I went back. Olivia Kaplan was there now, standing behind the booth, selling albums and T-shirts. She looked up, saw the album in my hands, and smiled. “Glad you returned with my album,” she said. I laughed, tried to form a coherent sentence, failed, and instead babbled something about her guitar playing. She listened anyway, patient and kind.
These moments, offstage, reveal something else about the artist. Something unguarded. Like Olivia Osby of Lowertown telling me, just before her fiery performance at Schuba’s, that she loved insects and still got nervous before a show.
Or Sam Wagster of Mute Duo explaining, without pretense, that his pedal steel guitar solos resembles the violin because he was a violin player before he took up pedal steel guitar.
Or Father John Misty, stepping quietly into the lobby of the Auditorium Theatre, surrounded by fans who waited with their phones, their cameras, their words.
When I met him, I said simply, “Hi, I’m David, and I love your music.” He looked at me and smiled. “Hi, I’m Josh,” he said, soft and shy. He shook my hand. It was the smallest of gestures, but it stayed with me. These moments do. They remind you that behind the performance, the persona, there is a person. Just a person.
Neptune’s Core: Energy and Love
That March night at the Metro, four young women step onto the stage. Casual, unassuming. Neptune’s Core. The first band of the night.
Neptune’s Core consists of two sets of sisters, as I learned later: Kaitlin and Jackie Cywinski, Sofie and Hannah Richter. All mid-teens. The music starts, and it tears through the room. Indie punk, psychedelia, prog rock — all of it raw, electric, alive. Sofie Richter at the mic, her voice moving from defiance to vulnerability to something tougher, something all her own. She doesn’t just sing; she commands, her body twisting, collapsing under red light. Jackie cuts through with her riffs, sharp and exact. Hannah’s basslines ripple underneath, steady and deep. Kaitlin keeps it all together, her drumming crisp, relentless. It is a symphony, but not the polished kind. It is raw, messy, full of angst and passion.
They are rebelling against something — I don’t know what. Rejection, grief, the weight of growing up. It doesn’t matter. I feel it anyway, the connection. I am rebelling too, against the quiet insistence of growing older. Around me, teenagers crash into each other, pogoing in a chaos that feels oddly orchestrated. One of them slams into me.
“Are you OK?” she asks. I nod. Hell yes, I am.
Another taps me on the shoulder, her body still moving to the music. “I love that photo you just took of the band!” she yells. How she even noticed the image on my phone’s tiny screen, I’ll never know. How she knew exactly what to say to make me happy, she’ll never know either.
This isn’t the last time we’ll see Neptune’s Core. A few months later, at Subterranean in Wicker Park, the room will be packed and sweltering. Sofie will push herself to the edge of the stage, nearly falling into the crowd, who are dancing, jumping, colliding with each other.
The chaos will be palpable, but so will something else. Something quieter. A kind of love that fills the space, even as it threatens to pull it apart.
Hot Fun in the Summertime
A few months after the Neptune’s Core concert, I am reminded of the power of live music to move you, even when you are still. Maybe especially when you are still. I am standing at the edge of an outdoor stage watching Finom play songs from Not God. The warm evening air hums with the sound of guitars and voices. My love of vinyl and live concerts intersect here, under the lights at Midsommarfest, a neighborhood festival in Andersonville. Clark Street has been transformed — music on every corner, the streets alive with dancing, food, the kind of joy that feels uniquely Chicago.
Earlier, Jan and I wandered through the merchant booths, the side stages, the shops. At a record store, I saw Kaitlin Cywinski of Neptune’s Core. She was working there, unassuming. I complimented her drumming, and we took a selfie. It felt like serendipity, a fleeting connection in a day full of music. In a few days, Jan and I will see Neptune’s Core again, that Subterranean gig, with Sima Cunningham of Finom opening. But tonight belongs to Finom.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen them. Over Memorial Day weekend, we had danced in the streets of Pilsen, caught southern rock at the Hideout, and seen Finom play Not God at Shuga Record Store. That Shuga set was more intimate. Tonight, the stage is bigger. The sound is bigger. Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart lean into their guitars, joined by bassist V.V. Lightbody and drummer Spencer Tweedy. They are flawless, the kind of tightness that comes not from precision but from instinct. They play with power, songs like “Haircut” and “Cyclops” driving the crowd into motion. At one point, they cover the B-52’s “Give Me Back My Man,” electrifying it with their harmonies and riffs.
Then they play “Cardinal.” It is slower, moodier, a song that lingers. When they sing, “No I don’t feel it / Yeah I don’t mean it,” something stirs. Not a memory exactly, but the shadow of one, something just out of reach. Sima’s guitar cuts through the air, her body moving with the music, back and forth, a mirror to the pull inside me.
I don’t know why I am emotional. I don’t need to know. There are parts of ourselves we aren’t meant to understand, corners of the soul that remain undiscovered. What matters is that I feel it. That music still reaches me like this. It means I am still in touch with something essential, something unguarded.
Music brings me joy, but not the simple kind. It is tangled, layered with pain, memory, and energy. The chaos of teenagers slamming into me at a Neptune’s Core show. The quiet sting of tears at a Finom concert. Music reminds me of what it is to be alive, what it is to say yes to the fleeting, unexpected moments that ask you to step off the path of the ordinary.
Stopping in Paducah wasn’t just a detour. It was a choice to pause, explore, and to be present in the moment. Music does the same. It calls me to feel, to connect — with myself, with the people around me, and with the fragile beauty of the past, present, and future.
In those moments, I find joy. Not the joy of distraction or escape, but something deeper. A joy that reminds me what it is to be human. To be here, now. To live.
