Music to Live To

If you're reading this blog, odds are you're a music fan. Either that or you were hoping that this was Carl Weathers' blog. Sorry about that.

Personally, I consider myself something more than a music fan. To me, music is one of the most important things in my life. I wish I could make music better than I can -- and for proof of the fact that I can't, ask anyone who ever heard me play guitar -- but setting that aside, music is pretty much the one constant in my life. I spend most of my free money on it, spend most of my free time on it, and look forward to it more than just about anything else. It's a part of who I am.

I feel this way about so many artists, so many albums, so many songs. Yet there are a few artists, albums and songs that transcend the rest, and rise to a different level. I can't really describe how or why, but there is a class of music that, more than any other, makes me happy to be alive. This class is very small. I've mentioned the idea of a "pantheon" of favorite bands before. I'm not sure that every band in that "pantheon" would even fall into this very small class.

I mention this because I saw a concert tonight that made me happy to be alive. Glen Hansard, lead singer of the Frames, did a solo(ish) show tonight at Pianos in NYC. (That's a picture of Glen up there. It's not mine, because I forgot my camera as usual. It's from a solo gig he did in 2004.) I can't even describe how good it was. I think the only words are, as I mentioned, that it made me happy to be alive.

I've been to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of concerts, and the number of times I've walked away from a concert feeling like this is in the single digits. The others includes the two Teenage Fanclub shows at the Bowery last summer, Wilco at Irving Plaza in early 1997, the Afghan Whigs at the 9:30 Club in 1996, Ryan Adams at Irving Plaza a few weeks after 9-11, the Frames pretty much every time I've seen them, and several Guided by Voices shows I was too drunk to remember the dates of. There may be a couple more that I'm blanking on right now, but that's pretty much it.

Anyway, the point I wanted to make, really, is that I now owe another amazing evening to Glen Hansard. Whether he knows it or not, he's made my life just a little bit better tonight, and for that I am in his debt.