I'm trying to find out if my words have any meaning...

For a so-called writer, I really do feel like words have been failing me a lot lately. I have little spurts where they come back to me – one or two days a month, I'll manage to write more than a few hundred in one sitting – but mostly, these last few months, it's been a struggle. Still, this is something I really want to talk about, so I'm going to give it a shot.

Last Tuesday – the 14th – my cousin Shauna and I made the trek down across the border into Buffalo to see Motion City Soundtrack at the Town Ballroom. Our last, and previously only, MCS show had been exactly six years and one week earlier, at The Opera House in Toronto – I wrote about that show and what it meant to me on my now-defunct Mouse House Blog, but there's a copy of the post here on CSW. The band actually noticed and retweeted said post, which was very exciting at the time! And live music has become a much bigger part of my life since then.

Over the last few years, I think all of my friends have become very aware of how I feel about live music, and of my love affair with a band called flor. I usually refer to flor as my favourite band, but if I'm being honest, they're tied with Motion City Soundtrack. It's just that I discovered them pretty soon after MCS went on their hiatus, so as the band who was actively touring and releasing new music, flor was often more relevant. I wanna be clear: I don't think I could ever, ever choose between the two. I really wouldn't even compare them! Both bands have really enormous places in my heart, and they fill fairly different niches, emotionally. flor, as a band, broke open a lot of new things for me: I've met a lot of amazing friends through them, I've written stories because of them that I never would otherwise have written, I got a tattoo of one of their lyrics, and I've learned to travel just to see them in ways I never would have thought I had the courage for.

But Motion City Soundtrack still predates flor, and that show six years ago was the one that let me discover how much I loved shows. Before that, I had only ever been to stadium concerts, and all for acts that I wasn't especially passionate about, at least at the time. MCS was my first small(-ish) venue show, and while I had company for half of it, I was alone for most of the main set and my entire journey home. Even just a year before that, I would never have believed myself capable of such a thing, but for MCS I wanted to try – and as a result, I learned how healing the best kind of show can be. If I hadn't had that experience, I probably never would have gone to the show where I discovered flor in the first place, let alone done any of the things that followed from there.

Anyway. The point is: I got to see MCS again, and it was incredible. I think it might also have been just as revelatory as it was the first time, if in a totally different way.

This was my first concert since COVID lockdowns had put a halt on the entire live-events industry. It had been almost three years – 989 days, to be specific; yes, I checked. Obviously COVID isn't gone, and we still have to be careful and responsible, but god, had I missed live music. I'm really grateful that we're able to get cautiously back into shows, and I'm grateful that things are under control enough right now that crossing the border didn't pose Shauna and me any real problems. For a few years there I almost never went without knowing when my next show would be, so going so long without was a really big bummer. Bigger than I'd realised it would be, probably.

(Today I have a concert lined up for this weekend and another for September, and I'm excited for both. I also can't wait to find more to look forward to. I may not have a lot of cash to spare at the moment, but I'll do what I can, especially after last week reminded me how worth it the price of admission really is.)

Something I wrote about in awe after my first Motion City Soundtrack show is how it practically seemed to cure my anxiety for a while. I had no trouble asking strangers for directions on the way home, and I rode a sort of non-anxious high for a few days afterward. I know that not all anxious people are lucky enough to feel like this about concerts, but man, I'll take what I can get. It doesn't make sense that a big, sweaty, noisy, closely-packed crowd would make me feel better instead of immeasurably worse. But I don't need it to make sense. It keeps working, so I'm not gonna question it.

By the time I discovered flor, depression had gotten its claws into me alongside all of the anxiety, and I was struggling most of the time to enjoy almost anything, or really experience things properly at all. I spent a lot of time a long way away from my own head. My first few flor shows, however, had a similar effect on said depression to the one that MCS had had on my anxiety: they made me feel human, and like myself again, in a way that nothing else had done in months. flor made me actually want to be alive again. It was still hard work to achieve that feeling on my own, but flor reminded me that I kind of wanted to try.

Over the years I’ve loved flor, I've also come to love the Arkells, and I've seen them several times as well – it's a little different from seeing flor or MCS, because they're local and they're massively popular in Canada, so their shows are WAY bigger. But they're still a source of energy for me that I can't begin to explain. The biggest Arkells show I've been to was at Tim Hortons Field at home in Hamilton, and the attendance was something to the tune of 24 000 fans – a quantity of people that makes me anxious just to think about. And yet that show, too, left me absolutely buzzing. That’s why I’m going to see them again, in the same place, this weekend. There's something about sharing a band you truly love with hundreds (or thousands) of strangers that feels like magic.

I promise there's a reason that I keep talking about other bands in this post about Motion City Soundtrack. It’s all related, in my head; MCS and live music and the other bands I love the most are all part of the same overall discussion, and it’s hard to get into one without getting into the others. (Would it surprise you to learn that I've also received an ADHD diagnosis in the last few years? No wonder every thought comes with so much bonus content.)

Let me try to sum all this rambling up: my first Motion City Soundtrack show was life-altering, because it was the show where I learned how much I fucking loved concerts. It was the show where I discovered that live music could supplant all my brain garbage, if only for a few hours. It was the show that made me into a person who Goes To Shows. So, ultimately, it kicked off the personal journey during which I learned new methods to cope with my messy mental health, jumped out of my well-established comfort zone in several unexpected new ways, met a lot of amazing new people, and made a lot of new art.

Then the world shut down for a couple of years, and like everyone else, I found myself on a bizarre and unpredictable psychological roller coaster, and I kind of forgot what concerts even felt like.

I don't know how many other people feel like this, or if it's mostly just a function of my own uniquely weird brain, but sometimes when I go too long without a given feeling, I kind of stop being able to recall it properly. I know, intellectually, that concerts made me feel alive and human and myself in a way that very few other things do. But I couldn't really recollect at an emotional level what that felt like, until last week. I'd reread my own old blog posts or journal entries about shows, or look back over the photos I’d taken, just trying to pull that emotion closer to the surface. But I generally just had to shrug my shoulders and say, okay. I'll take your word for it, past Courtney.

So Motion City Soundtrack being my first show back, after 989 days without live music, kind of brought things around full circle in a way that rather tickles my narrative-loving writer brain. All that time, and here I was again, a little shaky with anticipation as the venue filled up. Starting to buzz a bit with the energy in the room – all these strangers, decked out in their MCS merch, beaming to be back. Giggling to myself as the one-armed guy behind me in the crowd laughed himself to tears over Neil Rubenstein’s joke about one-armed hot people. Feeling the drums and the bassline reverberate in my chest through All Get Out’s opening set. Having to holler into Shauna's ear at point-blank range because everything was so loud, but I still just couldn't stop smiling.

And then Motion City Soundtrack came out on stage, and everyone just exploded. This was why we were here. They started out with ‘Attractive Today,’ the first track from their album Commit This to Memory, whose 15th 16th 17th(?) anniversary the tour is celebrating. In the second verse, frontman Justin Courtney Pierre sang: “Say it's true – say you like me…” and opened his arms to the audience, and at the tops of our lungs, a thousand of us sang back: “I like you!”

And I got my Pinnochio moment. I remembered, again, what it is to be a real human being.

The stage backdrop for this tour is a play on a couple lines in the MCS song ‘L.G. FUAD’: “I’m a mess, I’m a wreck/I am perfect…” The more I think about those words, the more they seem to fit the way I’ve been feeling lately. I am a mess, if I’m honest with you – my mental health is a bit all over the place. Motivation is low, my sense of time is utterly lost, and I feel like I spend most of the day at least somewhat spaced out. Still, things aren’t as bad as they have been, and a lot of the time – if I actually stop to think about it – I’m proud of myself for not being in much worse shape, all things considered. The world is just so weird and scary right now, and life hasn’t been cutting me or my loved ones a whole lot of breaks, and by rights I really ought to be inconsolable. I don’t think anyone could blame me if I just laid down and gave up entirely. But I haven’t yet become an unresponsive puddle of a person, and I figure that’s something. I may not be literally perfect, but I’m holding up a lot better than I ever knew I could, and I’m impressed with myself for that.

There’s one paragraph I wrote in that post from six years ago that rings just as true today, and that I really want to come back to:

Motion City Soundtrack gave me ways to articulate all the stupid things in my head, all the ways I feel scared or hopeful or alone or not-alone or broken or whole or hurt or happy or in love. They resonated in my heart and evoked emotions in ways that I, as a writer, only dream of being able to do. They gave me all the words I needed for my anxiety when I couldn’t find words of my own. And then, for one evening, they cured it.

MCS still does this for me. They still give me words for all kinds of emotions, especially a lot of complicated and difficult-to-express ways of feeling sad or anxious or lonely, which are things I’ve felt a lot in the last few years. They also give me words for joys and loves and hopes, though. They give me words for silly things, too, like when I’m laughing with my family over yet another one of those stupid conversations where all five of us are semi-intentionally mishearing each other (not least because three of us have some audio processing issues), and I find myself singing lines from ‘Where I Belong’: “I try to mediate between this constant tug-o-war machine/But wind up in a never-ending game of telephone…” As a writer, I spend a lot of time figuring out how to express my feelings, how to put my thoughts into my own words. But it’s comforting, still, to find the right words as penned by someone else. It gives you something to turn to when you’re too tired to get it right yourself, and it reminds you that you’re not alone in this. Someone else knows these feelings, too, and not only that, but they’ve found their words and chosen to share them with you.

I’m really grateful to MCS for a lot of reasons, but maybe most of all for what that first show in 2016 did for me. My life has taken a very different path since then than it would have otherwise. Now I’m also really grateful that they were my first show back after such a long break, and not just because the symmetry is a bit poetic. I’m grateful for the reminder of what a good concert can do for me. I’m grateful for the atmosphere in the venue that night, hundreds of people just really excited to see a band they love, excited to sing together. I’m grateful for the chance to remember exactly why I fell so in love with MCS in the first place. I’m grateful for the warmth and humanity and sheer resounding sense of reality that filled my chest and overflowed from me all night long.

I’m a real person. I live here, inside this skin, even if I forget that sometimes. I’m a living, breathing, human being, capable of noisy-bouncing-boundless-rowdy-thunderous-glowing joy. I need to remember that. Motion City Soundtrack helps.

There was one other call-and-response during this show that really sticks out in my memory, during the second song of the set. It starts with the chorus, Pierre singing, “Tell me that you’re alright,” and looking to the crowd for an answer. “Yeah, everything is alright,” we sang back, as loud as we possibly could. “Oh, please tell me that you’re alright,” he asked again, and again we answered: “Yeah, everything is alright!” Because no matter what else was happening outside of that room, for a moment, we were, and it was.