When I was 26 my new girlfriend told me about a music festival we absolutely HAD to attend. She’d been the previous summer and assured me it was the best opportunity to see tons of local bands for cheap before they got famous.
Held on an island big enough for three separate stages but small enough to feel like a village, the festival had its finger on the pulse of the exploding Toronto-area music scene of the early 2000s, while still hanging on to its hippie roots. I scanned the lineup and saw everything from Broken Social Scene to slam poetry to a workshop on making your own vegan diapers.
Having the utmost respect for my new girlfriend’s musical tastes, I gladly went along and loved every minute of it. Every band blew my mind – I wrote about one of them in week 558 – and many bands we saw there have appeared on this list over the years. We went back summer after summer, and as I got older and less cool the band names became more and more unfamiliar. I just Googled the lineup for this year and I recognize a total of zero of the scheduled performers. I hope the vegan diaper tent is still going strong.
Ultimately, the festival was the perfect thing at the perfect time for me. It provided a bridge into adulthood; it helped me feel connected to something vital and young as I took on first jobs, got a first house, bought a first suit.
In our seventh summer together, rather than go to the festival my girlfriend and I got married.
We went back a few years later, but it was mostly for the sake of nostalgia. It carried the same feeling of familiarity and estrangement that comes when you wander the halls of your old high school. I missed it, but the excitement of that first summer would be impossible to reproduce.
I can’t remember which year’s lineup included Newfoundland’s Hey Rosetta! (Exclamation mark theirs, not mine). But it must have been somewhere in the middle of our six-summer run. This song, released around that time, really encapsulates the complicated feeling of moving imperceptibly from one stage of life to another.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The slow, purposeful piano really does come across with the calm solemnity of a psalm.
2. In the second half, the lonely pianist is joined by a few other instruments (this was, after all, a seven-piece band) but only briefly, before they respectfully step out of the spotlight.
3. The lyrics are mournful but reassuring, reminding us that although we may head towards something new and unknown, eventually “your eyes will adjust” and “the fear that you feel will set you free.”
Recommended listening activity:
Making a playlist featuring one song released in each year you’ve been alive.