Over the weekend, I went to a concert. I had a decent seat in the front row of the loge. For the duration of the opening act and much of the main act, there was only one other person in my row – another guy, about my age, and like me, drinking a tall IPA. For parts of the opening act, I contemplated my concert going habits. I tried to consider how important (or unimportant) such activities are for me. Are they a way of life? Would I be willing to go to fewer shows or stop altogether? Would I dial them back should other/better alternatives present themselves?
I go to a fair number of shows – last year, it was close to 30. That wasn’t always the case. For much of my adult life, the responsible family man part of it, I went to far fewer shows – maybe a few per year. I sort of “rediscovered” live music on a spur of the moment date in Doylestown, Pennsylvania in the spring of 2017. While the person I went out with didn’t last much longer than one or two dates, I began going out to see local acts once a week. This was heading into the second “Summer of Matt” – a summer in which I was committing myself to hiking and beach trips and seeing live music on a weekly basis. That was also the summer I took a one-week road trip down to Memphis and North Mississippi to get my fill of blues and BBQ. I finished that trip with a few days of hiking in the Smokey Mountains.
Admittedly, I was not thinking about the summer of 2017 during the opening act. Instead I was thinking about a few other women I dated who shared, or at least seemed to share, my affinity for both music and live music. I was thinking about the importance of shared interests. Hence the wondering about whether or not I’d be willing to dial back the concerts. I remembered one woman who faked liking going to shows, and later complained about being dragged out to them. I remembered two or three other women with whom I seemed to connect over music. We were always playing tunes when we hung out, and at least two of them went to a few shows with me. I suppose they could have been faking it, but at least one of them had the word blues as part of one of her screen names. What I was really contemplating was how the odds almost seem stacked against meeting people with shared interests. The fact is, in the past seven or eight years I can only think of two or three people where our interests in art, music, writing, and travel seemed to line up.
It wasn’t a long period of pondering. The main act, Daniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, came on and I was engrossed in the show… which served as a reminder of where I find joy and what I like to share (provided there’s a mutual interest).