DEATH CAB

For about a week after a good concert, I feel weepy. I slug around the house, collapsing into all the seats, sighing a lot. I don’t even try to hold my head up. I feel a weird mix of sad and exhausted and nostalgic. 

I’ve been this way always. I remember the morning after a concert in grade 8 where I woke up feeling like I’d been dumped. The band I’d gone to see had this song called “It’s Over,” and I laid on my bed and listened to it and cried. It’s so excessive. 

Music takes a lot of energy to listen to or something? I’m working on a theory about how musicians are actually a weird kind of con people who have discovered a way to suck the life force out of the audience while they’re playing for them – that’s why they play their most emotional stuff and try to make you scream or cry or laugh or whatever. They want to elicit your most raw and powerful reaction; it comes out of you and they keep it. They bottle it up and drink it, and that’s how they stay so young-looking and why Emily Haines can travel around doing what she does and staying up late and hopping all over the place like she’s 16 instead of 42, while I have to spend a week recuperating from just sitting in a seat in front of her for two hours. 

It’s got a hole or two, but it’s a pretty solid theory. 

Seriously though, I saw Death Cab for Cutie Monday night and I have still not recovered. They played almost all of my favorite songs (it would’ve had to have been a much longer show for them to play all of my favorite songs), including a lot of their older ones, mostly from Plans and Transatlanticism. I appreciated that. They’ve got to be so sick of them by now, but those CDs have never gotten old for me.

But, also, I’m so glad I waited until this point in their career to see them live, because Kintsugi is such a solid album and I loved every song they played off of there. And they did “Cath” and “I Will Possess Your Heart” from Narrow Stairs. Not much from Codes and Keys. It was like they consulted with my subconscious when they were making the set list. 

(Thanks, guys. Next time, though, I will need to hear “Marching Bands of Manhattan.”)

The only thing I hated about it was that it ended. And there was no encore. They finished with “Transatlanticism” and everyone in the audience went crazy and then it was done. 

AUGH. 

Oh, and then Metric came out, and what followed was the most laser-driven concert I've ever been to. They got me in the eyes one too many times and I woke the next morning with red, swollen eyelids (not from crying). I had to wear sunglasses inside the house for the next two days. I did not know this was a thing that could happen).

Oh ALSO (sorry). The opener was a band called Leisure Cruise who was dang good. I wasn’t expecting them, and they started before the time on the tickets, which meant that I missed their first song or two, but I really enjoyed them. The girl had a killer voice and an equally killer jacket made of tinsel. 

Cue dramatic sighing and head lolling. What a night.