Love of Live Music and Concerts: How Music Became My Everything

A personal letter about a lifelong love of live music, concerts, and the artists and experiences that shaped my soul.

Originally wrote July 20, 2012

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My love of live music and concerts goes back further than I can remember — and if I’m being precise about where it started, it started with my dad. His love of beach music was completely contagious, and learning to shag before I hit my teenage years is something I still consider one of my great early accomplishments. Then came helping pick the intermission songs for the Charleston Royals games — Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Clarence Carter, all of it on albums and cassette tapes. I knew how cool that was at the time. It is somehow even cooler now. My love of live music and concerts was being built before I even had the words for it.

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How My Love of Live Music Grew From Backroads to Big Stages

My sister Michele took my musical education to the next level, introducing me to the kind of grassroots live music experiences that leave permanent marks. I’m talking about shows in the middle of muddy fields — “blueberry farms” in Red Top — where I first saw Widespread Panic, Drivin N Cryin, and a then-unknown group called Hootie and the Blowfish among many others. These were the kinds of concerts that shaped not just my taste but my whole understanding of what live music could be.

I’ll come clean about one thing: the seven-hour Grateful Dead driving trips did not entirely work for me. I genuinely cannot endure a jam that runs longer than fifteen minutes, and I’ve made peace with that limitation. My love of live music and concerts runs deep — it just runs in a slightly more edited direction where the Dead are concerned.

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The Eclectic Taste Behind My Love of Live Music

One of the things I love most about my relationship with music is that it has never stayed in one lane. Kanye, Phish, and Tim McGraw in a single sitting — that is a perfectly normal Tuesday for me. My iTunes library has twenty playlists organized purely by genre and mood, which tells you everything you need to know. Eclectic music taste has been linked to creativity, openness, and emotional intelligence — I’m claiming all three and standing by it.

But nothing in a playlist or a library comes close to the experience of seeing music live. My love of live music and concerts is built on a foundation of shows that have genuinely changed me:

The very first Lollapalooza tour. Phish live, anywhere, any venue. Janet Jackson front row — an experience I still think about regularly. Dave Matthews Band. Jimmy Buffett. WIDESPREAD PANIC — in all caps, always, because that is what they deserve. The Rolling Stones. John Mayer. Barenaked Ladies. And at the very top of the list, Warren Haynes and Gov’t Mule — who represent everything I believe live music should be.

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Home Team: The Community Built Around a Love of Live Music

One of the most beautiful things my love of live music and concerts has given me is community — and nowhere is that more perfectly embodied than in the concept of Home Team. The premise is simple and completely brilliant: when you travel to follow a band — in most cases Widespread Panic — you start recognizing the same faces at show after show, city after city. Those people become your Home Team. No matter where you are in the country, there is a community of familiar souls there if you need them.

It is one of the most genuine forms of connection I have ever experienced, and it exists entirely because of a shared love of live music. Research on music and social bonding from Oxford confirms what every concert-goer already knows intuitively: live music creates social bonds faster and more deeply than almost any other shared experience. Home Team is living proof.

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Why My Love of Live Music and Concerts Is a Way of Life

Music is not a hobby for me — it is genuinely everything. It puts me in the best possible mood, makes me dance whether I plan to or not, and fills my soul in a way that nothing else quite manages. It is why I wake up with music playing, spend an embarrassing amount of money acquiring it, sing karaoke with complete confidence despite a complete absence of actual singing ability, DJ at virtually every social event I attend, and organize my calendar at least partially around upcoming shows.

My love of live music and concerts is not something that happened to me — it is something that was carefully, lovingly, accidentally built over a lifetime of great shows, great people, and great moments that music made possible.

Here’s to the next show. Now where’s my mule.

Written while listening to Drive-By Truckers, “Daddy’s Cup” — as it should be, Angel

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Learn more about Angel Holmes and everything she’s passionate about at sipindipity.com/angel-holmes.