N.E.R.F.

a decade under the influence.

jenna2step:

On only an hour or two’s notice yesterday, a friend of mine and I decided to drive up to Portland to indulge our youth and see Taking Back Sunday play. During the car ride, between catching up on recent life and singing along to Tell All Your Friends I was reminiscing about the way that music can move and grow with you over years and years. Junior high is the first time I can remember hearing those songs—I used to borrow my friend Drew’s first generation ipod for gym class and listen to them while begrudgingly laboring my way through the timed mile run. And for whatever minimal life experience I had at the time—mostly just a series of angsty pre-teen crushes—those songs and those words became something I could pour myself into. Something witty and heartbreaking. Something I could scrawl all over the cover of my binder and post in passive-aggressive bulletins on myspace (don’t act like you didn’t do that too).

Adam Lazzara was twenty one when Tell All Your Friends came out, and I was eleven, and therein lies the power of art—that any single person can write something that an entire generation or even one other person can relate to in their own respective way. It doesn’t matter who the band is or what they sound like, how maybe you feel like you outgrew them somewhere along the line—it’s just about how art can transcend space and time and age and human experience and how you can make it something all your own even when it’s born of something entirely personal and vulnerable. That’s something I believe in, firmly, and with much conviction. I think when it comes down to it, that’s why I’m here and that’s why being vulnerable with my words and my heart and the things that creep between my bones night after night is one of the most important things I’ve done or will do in my entire life.

After the show, Adam came out of the venue and played a small and really intimate acoustic set to a handful of quiet and wide-eyed people for about two and a half hours. Just a small semi-circle in a parking lot in downtown Portland, the crowd thinning out as the night went on. In between Tom Petty covers and easy conversation, verses half-sung by the crowd and half-strummed, the guitar was passed between people, strangers playing their songs for one another and repeating refrains back when they’d been sang long enough for us to learn them. He told us the stories of his ex-girlfriends from Miami and New York and the songs he’d written about them and talked about poetry and art and why “Divine Intervention” was important to him, broke down “Great Romances Of The 20th Century” line-by-line, laughing at how he didn’t know why he felt lead to share those things with us. 

I feel really lucky to live in a world where sometimes time slows down for a few seconds and all of the sudden you’re standing beside some stranger who wrote some songs you learned all the words to by heart a handful of years ago and he’s smiling at you softly from over his guitar and goddamn, how did we even get here.

There are some moments in this life that are entirely extraordinary.
I hope that I don’t ever forget those. Don’t let me ever forget.