I listened from a parking lot

I have followed this band since a basement in 2011. I own everything they put out including the one they dont like anymore. And I have seen them exactly twice in fourteen years, because they play thursdays in cities I am not in and I am in cities they do not play.

Thats the whole thing. Its not that I wont go. Its that the geometry never works. Every couple months I get the tour announcement and I scroll it and none of it is anywhere near me or anywhere near me on a night Im off, and then I close it. Fourteen years of closing it.

So when they put up a link that said five bucks, hear it live tonight, I did not think about it for even a second. I bought it in a truck stop lot outside Little Rock at like 8:40 with my feet up on the dash. And I want to be clear that the reason I bought it was not that I thought it would be some amazing audio experience, because I assumed it would be somebody's phone. It was not somebodys phone. It was the actual mix with the room in it and you could hear people yelling and somebody dropped a bottle during the quiet one and everybody laughed.

The part that got me was between songs. He said something dumb about the drive in, and forty people laughed, and I laughed, alone, in a parking lot in Arkansas, and it did not feel like watching something. It felt like being late and standing near the back. I have watched a hundred concert videos and not one of them ever did that. I think its because it was actually happening right then. That turns out to matter way more than I would have guessed.

I have bought one for every show they have done since. I dont buy every night on the run, I pick the ones that look good. And I will say the thing that I imagine they want me to say, which is that I have now given that band more money in eight months than in the previous decade, and it is not close, and none of it was a hardship. Five dollars is nothing. Five dollars fourteen times is somebody's tires.