I didn’t expect to have much to write tonight – it’s been quite a while since I’ve been really inspired to write about a gig, honestly, and I’m not sure that’s exactly what I’m doing here. Maybe this is more just some musings for my own sake – just some ramblings on things I’ve been feeling lately that kind of culminated tonight.

I did two back-to-back shows at the First Ave mainroom and the 7th St Entry yesterday (Soccer Mommy // Mainroom) and today (Macseal // Entry). This was the first time I’ve done that in a while – at least since before the pandemic. They also happened to be two bands that I loved a lot in college, which was both fun and weird to experience because I felt really old and really young at the same time during both shows. Growing up is so fucking strange.

As I was driving home tonight in the first rain of the year, scream-singing to Mitski and Hop Along, I was flooded with nostalgia but also with an overwhelming gratefulness that I’m not in my early twenties anymore. It’s been a weird year for me – equally one of the most challenging and freeing – after my long-term relationship (with whom I was on and off with during college) ended abruptly. I feel like myself for the first time in a long while. My mom tells me I have my sparkle back 😭, but I’ve also been mourning the girl I was, and I carry a lot of empathy for her.

I don’t think we ever stop growing up, and I sure as hell hope I never stop learning. I think about this portion of an editor’s letter from Tavi often:

One way to avoid killing your heart is to decide that you will spend your whole life growing up. I am not saying you should aspire to the maturity level of the characters in Hot Tub Time Machine; I am suggesting we resist a life that looks, in line-graph form, like it goes up and up and up and then it stops, and then it levels out, and then it stays on that flat plane until death. I hope to live a life that goes up and up and up until the end, with the inevitable dip here and there. I hope to continue to learn and change.

Coveting youth also needs to be dealt with. I’m not afraid of being old; I’m afraid of being afraid of being old, which for some reason appears to be an inherent part of being old, because the examples out there of adults who aren’t trying to turn back time are few and far between. But a fear of aging turns every second into your enemy. It means that your worst nightmare is constantly coming true, unless you choose to die, which is a terrible choice to make. 

It’s crazy to me that I’m still thinking about this particular essay over 11 years after the first time I read it. Of course, it was completely nebulous to me at the time that I would even be looking back on that Forever portion of my life, but that’s beside my point.

Sometimes, we get so caught up in the planning for the future that we don’t realize we’ve already passed certain doorways until we’re looking back at those rooms that we were once living in. You make mistakes that feel like the end of the world, only to realize later they were just the beginning of a longer chapter. You meet people who carve themselves into your story, some in ways you expect, others in ways that only become clear years later.

But all this self-reflection is really a roundabout way to come back to the thoughts I was having at the show tonight and just music in general – the reason for this space in the first place. It’s the way a song/album/band/playlist can unearth an entire season of your life, sending you on this sonic time-travel pilgrimage, all because it was a part of your life’s soundtrack at some point. A familiar guitar riff might drop you into a cramped basement show where you danced and sweat and screamed and smiled with your best friends like tonight’s show did for me. And it doesn’t even have to be the same band – I never saw Macseal in a basement with my friends, but they were a part of the soundtrack to that chapter of my story, and something about the music and the energy and all the t-shirts of similar midwest emo bands (spotted tonight included: Oso Oso, Michael Cera Palin, The Front Bottoms, Sunny Day Real Estate, Title Fight, Hot Mulligan, Retirement Party. And that’s just off the top of my head!) combined and hit me like a ton of bricks.

I frequently find that my life has stretched out in ways I never expected; even now, when the dust has settled a bit, music still holds that power that it has for generations of people. This isn’t a new concept—people wouldn’t keep making music or writing about it if it wasn’t. Some songs are portals. They let you slip through time, revisiting younger versions of yourself—not to stay, but to nod in recognition, a whispered, “You made it through, and you’ll keep making it through.”

Anyway – here’s some photos of the show, and thanks for being here 🙂

Carly Cosgrove

Macseal