Live Music in a Beautiful Place

Here we are just before the concert begins.

Katie and Angela and Daniel and I.  We are at The Ladies Literary Club in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  I know that sounds like a made up place, a location that would provide a key turning point scene in a movie like The Royal Tenenbaums (if they lived in Grand Rapids) but that does not diminish the wonder of the impending situation.  It only adds to it.

We are here to hear David Bazan and the Passenger String Quartet and this evening is the culmination of many David Bazan concerts that Daniel and I have attended together.  These concert experiences are always extravagant gestures of fraternal affirmation for us.  One or the other drives a great distance, stays only a minimal time and it all pivots on the concert appearance of our shared prophetic idol, David Bazan.  We have attended these shows in Cleveland, Akron and Grand Rapids before this night and our sister Angela has joined us once before, but this year my other sister Katie has also joined us and we look happy (except Daniel, but he looks funny at least), but we have no idea how utterly transformative this concert will be.  Particular chords and the resonance of David's voice, and the exquisite playing will evoke such profound feelings that they will (in retrospect) feel like entire universes of memory that existed for an aeon of strong emotion. 

Also, later everything about these other universes that we inhabited for this one long wonderful night will recur in our memories and dreams as if they have provided new categories for associations, projections and ideals.  Beautiful music may be the apex of human experience, but beautiful music played in a perfect space?  That's transcendence.


And that's why it's one of my #50thingsofvalue.