Combat Boots and Dive Bars

First Love...Concerts

I've always been asked what is it that I love about concerts and I can't come up with a single reason but a never-ending list of reasons. It's the way when your favorite song is being sung to you when you're at a live show, or the way it creates goosebumps and send shivers down your spin. It is the refreshing first sip of your beer or soda, and you can't help but smile — you forget life's little nuances.

It's the way you happen to randomly meet people to later become friends and you catch up from time to time over that shared love of your favorite artists. Concerts are what give me butterflies and gives me this empowered feeling that anything is possible.

This really all began when I randomly bumped into a band that I fell in love with on a random public access channel — if you were a city kid, you learned so much from that channel without parental supervision. This was Interpol's "Slow Hands" video — something about it just changed in me, like an epiphany of "where has this been all my life???" The way it began with intense guitar riffs that'll catch your attention within seconds. It had the advantage of handsome faces and a beautiful intensity. It was a song that I downloaded through Limewire and listened to it until I started breaking down the meaning of the lyrics, and what Paul Banks was trying to say.

After that, I was addicted — by chance, scoring a unpaid but awesome gig as an extra in a video for another indie psychedelic rock, Secret Machines, in a part of Brooklyn that I didn't even know existed. I never regretted cutting class or else I would've been stuck in a history lecture. The Warsaw was the massive, intimidating beauty that I call now another second home. We got paid in pizza and great times, where I got to bond with other extras about what bands they were listening to and who they were seeing that — they introduced to other amazing bands that I ended up seeing live after that.

My first concert was at the now extinct Webster Hall — an indie band named Elefant during the post-punk revival era in the ever evolving New York City, who crooned about lost love and drunken adventures in Lower East Side streets. Updating my MySpace handle to whatever bands's songs I identified the most with that week was a skill that I quickly and impressively acquired. Walking along Bowery, it's beautifully nostalgic to remember once up-and-coming dance clubs that I used to sneak into which are now a mere memory and probably a clothing store or a condo.

Seeing the crowd's faces light up as the band/artist takes the stage is one of the many things that make going to concerts addictive — it's the lighting and the camaraderie that's established while you're singing along to that song. As Dave Grohl once said, “That’s one of the great things about music. You can sing a song to 85,000 people and they’ll sing it back for 85,000 different reasons." It's one of the many quotes that has resonated so deeply because you can listen to the same song at different points in your life and it can cause nostalgia or goose bump-inducing happiness.

The feeling of excitement when you arrive at the venue has never left — it's like seeing a crush who gives you butterflies and you can't wait till the next time you see them.

I'd say one of the best feelings in the world is when they play your favorite song live and you get to sing to heart's content as if you didn't have a care in the world — that's the exact moment you're in the present.