I promise that not every post is going to be about music. I will absolutely talk about other things on this blog in the future.
But not yet. Because this one is a direct followup to the last one.
After the previous post with the list of musical artists that Past Steven (2021 Edition) wanted to see, my good and dear friend Jenny pointed out that the entire list was roughly 80% female artists and 20% bands, with no solo male artists. I replied back with a very long list of male artists that I’ve seen in the last few years.
A very large portion of that list was made up of established artists, many from the 1980s. I’ve gone out of my way to see the likes of:
Gary Numan – Most folks know him from Cars, but he’s been making new music for decades and it’s awesome. Samples: Intruder, My Name Is Ruin
Alice Cooper – His live shows are over the top and amazing, just like his music.
Tom Jones – This Welsh crooner has been doing his thing for decades, but did you know he did a collaboration with The Cardigans of Burning Down The House?
Andy Bell – Yes, he’s half of Erasure, but he also has some pretty great solo stuff.
The list goes on and on for the legacy artists from past decades, but I have to admit that Jenny made a good point- the style of music I gravitate toward in newer artists is usually done by female vocalists. There are definitely exceptions, though, so here’s a list of five newer artists I’ve seen and enjoyed since I moved up to the DMV.
Jake Wesley Rogers – Rogers recently opened for Cyndi Lauper on part of her North American tour, but I saw him headline his own show at Union Stage, which holds about 250 people. He’s got a very dramatic style in the same mode as icons like Elton John and Lady Gaga.
Spencer Sutherland – Sutherland opened for Big Time Rush a few years ago, but I also saw him headline his own show at Union Stage. That place books some really great musicians.
Declan McKenna – McKenna is a British singer who first gained recognition for winning the Glastonbury Festival’s “emerging talent” competition with a protest song about the Fifa World Cup, and he makes bops that often have social commentary.
JP Saxe – Saxe is our first Canadian on this list, and his most well known song is a duet with Julia Michaels, but he’s got a few of his own albums out in the world.
Dermot Kennedy – Kennedy is Irish, and he started busking as a teenager, and was even asked to open for Glen Hansard at one point.
And that’s a wrap on five newer artists who have played shows here over the last few years. Because I am indecisive, here are two bonus artists to check out:
Marc Broussard – Broussard sings Bayou soul, which is a sort of funky Southern rock/blues type of music.
Daði Freyr – Finally, say hello to the most well known Icelandic singer who is not named Björk or Laufey. I first became aware of him when I was first learning about Eurovision while living in Germany.
I was looking back at one of the last posts I did in 2021, in which I talked about going to concerts and how the pandemic lock-down had shuttered so many that I had wanted to see. At the time of the post, January of 2021, Covid vaccines were only just starting to be distributed and concert venues had only just barely started to spin back up. In the post, I said,
I went to 28 ticketed shows in 2019. In 2020, I went to seven.
When I wrote the post, I was still five months away from the first new concerts after Covid, but I really went for it.
And when I say I really went for it, I mean I kind of… over-corrected from the lack of music in a massive way.
28 shows in 2019. Seven in 2020. In 2021, as things began to reopen and wake up, and concert venues checked vaccination status before you could go inside, I managed 43 shows.
After that, I really went off the rails. 177 shows in 2022. 179 in 2023. 158 in 2024. This year I’ve been trying to slow it down and be a little more selective, so I’m on track to only see about 125 shows this year.
:cough:
I realize now that in the four and a half year gap between regular posts and now, I probably could have talked a little bit about the music. I’m not a concert reviewer, and I have no desire to be one. There’s still a lot to say, though.
In the 2021 post, I talked about a not-really-very-short-list of artists that I had not managed to see, but really really wanted to. Now seems like as good a time as any to do a quick status check on that musical to-do list.
From the “I had a chance to see them, but circumstances kept me away from the show and I’m still mad about it” file:
• Betty Who – She played downtown Orlando and I was otherwise engaged. • Ciel Gloss – She did a show in New York when I was there in December of 2019 and I couldn’t make it work. • Imagine Dragons – I actually had tickets to this show, and was unable to go at the last minute. • Mindy Gledhill – She played a Northern Virginia venue really close to here. I wasn’t here yet. Timing is everything. • Kesha – This is another tour that was canceled by the pandemic. • Janelle Monae – Another Orlando show that I am KICKING myself for not catching.
I’ve now seen ALL of them. Twice each for Kesha and Janelle Monae. I would still love to see Mindy Gledhill again.
From the “I deeply respect their artistry and I really really really wanna see them live despite all the hype!” file:
• Taylor Swift – Does Taylor Swift really need commentary from me? • Mavis Staples – This woman is a badass and she’s toured vaguely near me a few times and I really should have just made the drive. • P!nk – Pink is one of those shows that I really just should have ponied up the money to see when she played Orlando. • Lorde – I wonder if she’ll ever tour outside of New Zealand again. Damn, I hope so. • Carly Rae Jepsen – I actually saw her once, and the show was so good that I would absolutely see her again. If your opinion of her is based solely on “Call Me Maybe,” you should check out some of the other stuff on her five albums.
I’ve seen every single one of these now, and twice for Lorde. Three times for Carly Rae, because she’s a party.
For Taylor Swift, I took the train up to Philadelphia because that was the closest the Eras tour came to DC. Totally and completely worth it. The entire Amtrak train was full of Swifties, and it emptied out hilariously when we reached 30th Street Station.
From the “I learned about this artist after their last tour concluded and then a pandemic happened and now I want to see them live so badly it probably looks like I have to pee” file:
• Meg Myers – I was introduced to this artist by another friend, right after her tour in support of “Take Me To The Disco” ended. If I had a time machine… • Grendel – This band has been around for 20+ years already, but I was unaware of them until just recently, and I love what I’m hearing. • Marit Larsen – I’m not sure if Marit Larsen ever tours in North America- she’s from Norway and has mostly stuck around Europe and the Nordic countries. Maybe once it’s safe to fly long distances again. • Kelsea Ballerini – She’s a much newer artist with one song that got plastered all over the radio, but I’ve listened to more of her stuff and she’d be a blast to see live. • Ladyhawke – She’s another New Zealander, and I have no idea if she tours the US. • Jackie Venson – I first saw Jackie Venson on Austin City Limits, and she kicks ass.
This list is the first one from the original post that still contains artists I haven’t seen live – the three of them who are based outside of the US: Marit Larsen, Grendel, and Ladyhawke.
From the others-
Jackie Venson was one of my 2021 shows, and the first artist I ever saw at Songbyrd Music Cafe in DC. Jackie came back to DC last month, but it was the same night as Gary Numan and that’s a hard choice.
I saw Meg Myers in DC, and her vocals are amazing but it was just her and a synth. I think she would have been better with a backing band.
Kelsea Ballerini was also a 2021 show and that show was, hilariously, the first of three times I accidentally saw the Jonas Brothers. Yes, I said accidentally. I have never deliberately set out to see the Jonas Brothers, but they keep bringing incredible opening artists who I really want to see, and, well, that’s how you wind up at a Jonas Brothers show without really intending to.
I think I really ought to make a new list of artists that I want to see but haven’t yet. In some cases, it’s really easy- No Doubt is doing a few shows at the Vegas Sphere in the new year, for example, and I’m gonna try to make it out there to see them because I never did in the 90s.
I had more to say about all of this, but I just spent thirty minutes trying to re-learn how to use WordPress block formatting after my four and a half year gap, and I’ve lost my original point in a haze of irritation at how non-intuitive the WordPress editor is. :flail:
I guess I’ll leave you with this, a band that I only just learned about yesterday, but I’ve already bought a ticket to their Spring tour because they’re kitschy and fun and amazing and I love them already. Here’s some Steam Powered Giraffe.
What’s the next concert you’re looking forward to seeing?
The last time that I saw my dear friend Ra, she was in town for a poetry event in which she was a featured artist and speaker. She asked why I hadn’t written in my blog for a while, and I expressed tiny, empty words about how my inertia was blocking me. I talked about how I’d wanted to come back and write more a bunch of times, but that I could never quite get myself past the blank white page.
Ra was cheerfully optimistic, and seemed certain that I would start writing again. I’ve thought about that conversation often, and time got away from me again.
That was one year, three months, and seventeen days ago.
Oof.
Each year in November, the blogging community where I first met Ra gathers to do thirty days of posts in November – an event called Nablopomo, national blog posting month. The name is a play on Nanowrimo, the national novel writing month, but for blogging by a community that has dubbed themselves cheer peppers. They even jokingly call Nablopomo “nanopoblano.” It’s a whole thing.
I haven’t taken part in a while, but one of the cheer peppers, Dinah, tagged me to ask if I was participating this year and it got me thinking again that this month might be a good kick in the pants to get started again. Not every post needs to be an epic tome, as long as I’m writing something.
I came back to see where I left things off on my last post, and it was a general update that started with an apology about how long it had been since the PREVIOUS last post.
That was four years, six months, and fifteen days ago.
Oof.
In the last four and a half years, I haven’t changed very much – I’m living in the same building, albeit in a different apartment. My employment with Mr Company has shifted a bit because our scrappy little start-up was purchased by a much larger company, but at its core, the job is essentially the same as before. I’ve made more friends in this town, and I still spend most of my free time going to shows because Music Is Life.
While I love music with a ferocity that is difficult to verbalize, I’ve long maintained that opera bores me to tears. I’ve always found that to be a little silly, given how much I love Broadway style musicals, but it is true all the same. That being said, I hadn’t actually been to an opera in a very long time. There are quite a few things that I’ve re-tried in the last few years to see if I still felt the same way about them- some of my nopes were sustained, but one or two surprised me. With that in mind, I thought that maybe I should give the opera another try.
That’s how last week, on the Thursday before Halloween, I wound up at the Washington National Opera’s production of Aida. While I was sitting in the balcony watching the production, I had a lot of time to think about this.
For one thing, I thought Verdi’s score was incredible. But then I already knew I love the symphony and classical music in general. For another, I thought it was damned impressive that they could get roughly eighty people on stage at once (I counted) all singing more or less about the same thing.
But I was still bored. It’s the pacing, you see. I don’t really enjoy a seven minute aria to explore what amounts to roughly three lines of dialogue. And I really don’t love fully operatic singing. So: the verdict is upheld, I still don’t dig opera.
Out of curiosity, I checked to see the last time I attended one. It was thirty years, seven months, and twenty-seven days ago.
Oof.
I really need to do better about the passage of time.
Today is Pepper Day! While Nano Poblano is only in November, Pepper Day is the 22nd day of every month, so it's extra Peppery! Post something today. A blog, a photo, a poem- anything at all! Tag it PepperDay! Enjoy, and Happy Peppering!
I didn’t intend to take a two-month break between the last post and this one, I just didn’t have anything I really felt like writing about. It’s not for lack of content though- I was fairly busy through March and April.
First of all, there was so much movie and tv action. Shows I love like The Flash came back, Marvel’s Falcon and the Snowman started up, and we got movies like Godzilla vs Kong, the four-hour Snyder cut of Justice League, Raya and he Last Dragon, and Coming 2 America. All in all, it’s been a good few months to be stuck without a lot to do. Speaking of which…
I attended a bunch of virtual lectures.Profs & Pints is an organization that gets professorial types to lecture about various topics in bars, hence the name. Most lectures are 60-90 minutes and conclude with a question and answer period. Since lockdown began, they’ve moved online, which allows you to watch interesting lectures about fascinating topics from home. There was a really neat one about Krampus back in December. I’ve attended lectures about Persephone, about social media, about sexual deviancy, about introductory Irish, about the history of pinball, and more. Each lecture is $12, with forever-replay. That link again: https://www.profsandpints.com/online-talks, and there’s one tonight about the 1814 Burning of Washington, which promises to be super neat.
I went through a bunch of dentistry. I don’t think anyone cares about the details. Let’s just say that the whole process was stressful and expensive, but that’s dentistry for you.
I flew again! Specifically, I went down to South Florida for just a few days. Flying was different now, but also reassuringly the same as always. Delta has been blocking off their middle seats, which made for a less crowded flight, but my return was on Jetblue and that plane didn’t have middle seats. The Florida visit gave me a chance to see my mom and my siblings, and I spent some time with my best friend. There was even a hockey game (Panthers beat the Redwings handily.) The trip was also supposed to be timed for the unveiling of my dad’s headstone, but those plans didn’t pan out so I’m going back for a lightning-fast weekend toward the end of May. There was even the briefest of visits to the beach, which is now required since I don’t live in Florida anymore:
I visited the Silverball Museum. On the Florida trip, I ticked another box off on my long-standing list of places I wanted to check out. The Silverball Museum is a pinball and vintage game museum in Delray Beach, Florida, but this museum takes the form of a playable arcade. All the machines are set to free play, and admission to the museum allows you to play anything you like. They have all kinds of amazing vintage pinball games from the 1950s to the present. They also have game cabinets with MAME setups that include all kinds of early 1980s arcade games. I played much pinball, some skeeball, and enough Joust to prove that I remembered how.
I ran a 5k. DC Fitness did the “HerStory 5K” on March 20th, and I ran it. It was a virtual 5k so everyone ran their own path and then submitted the results later; I was something like 144th. And by “ran a 5k,” what I really mean is that I ran>fastwalked>ran>gasped>wheezed>ran some more>gasp-wheeze-grunt>fastwalked>ran a bit… and so on. My endurance has suffered from being inside for most of the last year. I want to enjoy running, but honestly, I don’t enjoy it at all.
I finally saw the Cherry Blossoms in peak bloom. I’ve been trying to see the cherry blossoms in peak bloom for years. Either I’ve missed them by a few weeks, or I’ve been unable to travel to them like in 2020. I even missed the cherry blossoms in Tokyo by just a few weeks. After years of just missing them, I finally managed to see these things in person. All it took was living less than three miles from the Tidal Basin.
I got the Covid-19 vaccine. My state has been trucking along, and as of this writing, 40% of the adult population of Virginia has had at least one dose of vaccine. I was given the one-and-done Janssen vaccine on a Saturday, and I spent the following two days recovering. About twelve hours after the shot, I had chills and body aches like crazy. The next day I was burrito-wrapped in a blanket on and off for the entire day, just super tired and cold. I slept a lot. Each successive day after that I was much better than the previous day, and by midweek everything was completely normal again. I never measured a fever of more than about one degree over my normal temperature, but I was still sweating like crazy while I slept. The weirdest side effect was a problem with escalation changes- I didn’t go out much during the few days post-vaccine, but I did take the elevator down to the lobby to pick up food at one point, and going down my head felt like it was going to explode. All the side effects are behind me now, and now I’m just waiting for my inevitable superpowers to form. [/obligatory vaccine/X-Men joke.]
I amused myself with Photoshop. I bought some corn starch so I could try a new recipe, and the brand name of the corn starch suggested a joke that made me giggle. I Photoshopped it into reality so that I could share the laugh with everyone else. (You can see what it looked like originally over here on Amazon.)
I celebrated Rex Manning Day. It’s every year on April 8th, and you mustn’t dwell. National Egg Cream Day was also March 15th, if you’re tracking that sort of thing.
I am absolutely certain that I missed something else from the last two months, but this seems like a good place to pause.
Today is Pepper Day! While Nano Poblano is only in November, Pepper Day is the 22nd day of every month, so it's extra Peppery! Post something today. A blog, a photo, a poem- anything at all! Tag it PepperDay! Enjoy, and Happy Peppering!
As part of my annual goodreads.com reading challenges, I just finished “Postscript,” Cecilia Ahern’s followup to “PS, I Love You.” “PS, I Love You” was a story about a woman named Holly who starts receiving helpful letters from her recently-deceased husband. The letters send her on a journey where she rediscovers herself, finds a new path forward out of her grief, and so forth. It became a movie with Hilary Swank and Gerard Butler. The sequel picks up about seven years later, with Holly in a new relationship. When she retells the story of the letters from the first novel on a podcast, she gets pulled into helping a group of terminal patients who want to do the same thing, leaving messages behind after they die.
Ahern writes about grief with such insight that I was positive that she was writing from personal experience. As it turns out, she’s just a really gifted writer of fiction and a keen observer of humans being humans. In her own words, “when I wrote PS, I Love You, I was 21 and a lot of people asked if you hadn’t experienced grief. How can you write about it? But I do think that grief is made up of so many emotions that we do experience from the moment we’re born. We know what it’s like to feel loss, to feel alone, to feel uncertain, to lose a sense of ourselves and our identity. Grief is all of those things.”
Yesterday was twenty-five years to the day since the death of someone I loved with all my heart. I don’t talk about her as often now as I used to, but the people who have known me the longest know all about that part of my life because I wouldn’t shut up about it. Truth be told, I thought I had mentioned this countless times already on my blog, but I searched my own words tonight and I don’t see a single post talking about it.
For the three or four of you who don’t know the story, she died suddenly on February 21st, 1996. It was tragic and unfair and it really fucked me up for a long time. In the years that have passed since then, I’ve made an uneasy peace with some aspects of her passing. Twenty-five years is a long time to ponder things. I believe now that she didn’t love me as much as I loved her, but that’s not important. I know what she meant to me, and how that has shaped my life in the years since.
Which brings me back to Postscript, and the part of the novel that pushed me into writing about it here:
There is so much about me that Gerry wouldn’t recognize. I am older than Gerry ever was, I know things that he never knew, that he will never know. And it’s the little things that stop me in my tracks. He never lived to hear the word “hangry.” Every time I hear the word I think of him, he would have loved it when his belly was full and hated it when it was empty. The invention of things he would appreciate. New phones. New technologies. New political leaders, new wars. Cronuts. New Star Wars movies.
“Postscript,” Cecelia Ahern
…and this is a true thing. She would barely recognize the person I am now, despite my mostly-never-changing face. I’m more than twice as old now as I was when she died. Pre-1996 Steven was much more of a live-action Muppet than present-day Steven. I’m quieter now than I used to be, less boisterous. Her death was a catalyst for the path my life took afterward.
I’m certain that my friends have noticed in the years since that I take a truly insane number of photographs. I take pictures at family gatherings, parties, special events, and even just regular day-to-day things. (Seriously, let me show you my astonishing collection of photos of the avocado toast I’ve eaten over the years.) I’ve taken tens of thousands of photos in the last decade or so, and part of that is because of her. There are no photographs of her and me together. I have only one photograph of her, just one. It’s off to the right there. I realized years later that I needed more photographs of all the people in my life because you never know when you won’t have another chance to take their picture.
Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I had been able to save her. The question, “what if I’d been there that day,” is a slow-burning poison, because it’s not something that can be changed. And if it could be changed, it would unravel the fabric of the person I’ve become in the years since. Less than two years after her funeral, I made a decision to enroll at the University of Central Florida to finish my degree. In the years since then, I’ve owned a home. I’ve traveled extensively. I’ve had more than a few failed relationships. I’ve come to know my own heart more precisely than younger me did. I’m not certain that any of that would have been in my path if she was still alive. It’s a dark trade-off to consider, but it’s another true thing.
Whenever I write about her, I feel self-indulgent and mawkish, and it’s NEVER what I was trying to say. My words are never equal to the burden of my heart. I will probably delete this post after a day or so.
Here’s to you, Vanessa. You changed my world when you were alive, but you changed it even more when you died.
Would a younger you recognize the person you are today?
Whimsy. Tacos. The DMV. 