2024 was a remarkable year. It was remarkable for a lot of reasons, many of them bad. But in regards to my own life, the ways in which it was remarkable for good reasons easily surpassed any previous year I'd lived.
During 2024, there were four different experiences I had that made me feel, truthfully, like I'd ascended to some higher plane of existence or been transported to a magical realm, where I was in touch with the universe and the essence of what it is to be alive in a way that the events of normal day-to-day life don't even approach. This might sound like a description of some crazy psychedelic drug experience (I can't speak to that personally), but it isn't. It's just that I got to do some really, really amazing things. And I've had other such experiences in my life, but never so many in a single year.
One was the honeymoon Erin and I took to Spain in early March, perhaps a topic for another as yet unwritten post. Another was witnessing a total solar eclipse in person. It goes without saying that a third was becoming a father - really not just the birth experience (although that was the most profound) but also many little moments since that I've shared with Erin and W.
The fourth was the most cathartic and emotionally powerful concert that I've attended in my life, which if you know me you know is really saying something. The concert took place on March 22, 2024, at Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon, and was played by one of my top two (with Okkervil River) favorite bands ever, Typhoon, in celebration of the tenth anniversary of their album White Lighter.
The concert not only marked the tenth anniversary of one of my favorite albums, it also, I realized during it, marked a closing of the door on the most tumultuous ten year period of my life.
The short run of White Lighter tenth anniversary shows that Typhoon did in March of 2024 was actually a bit belated, as the album was released in August 2013. So let's jump back in time to August 2013.
Typhoon had come up on my radar earlier that summer, when I saw them listed among upcoming shows at the Beachland Ballroom and Tavern in Cleveland and thought they sounded interesting. I hadn't yet listened to any of their music. I didn't know that the band's lyrics were largely inspired by lead singer Kyle Morton having nearly died from complications stemming from Lyme disease, and were thus about grappling with mortality and the fragility of the human body in both dark and hopeful ways.
White Lighter was released on Tuesday, August 20, 2013. Three days later, on Friday, August 23, my first wife Cara was admitted to the hospital after it was discovered that she had a blood clot in her calf, and it was subsequently discovered that her lungs were full of blood clots. Early the next week, she was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. Needless to say, my whole world was turned upside down.
A couple weeks after the initial hospitalization, I listened to Typhoon for the first time. I had no idea what I was getting into. No idea how relatable the music would be. No idea that the music of Typhoon would become one of the most important things that would help carry me through the next few years of my life, first living with a spouse who had what was almost certainly terminal cancer, and then living as a young widowed person and struggling through physical and mental health problems of my own.
It's funny that the album with which I would form a stronger emotional connection than any other in my life was released within days of the event that would lead to it having that emotional resonance. If I'd listened to White Lighter on its release date, I'd have liked it a lot, but it would likely have just been one of many albums that I liked a lot. A week later, everything had changed.
And because White Lighter is the single most emotionally meaningful album to me, and I already knew very well that anniversary concerts of favorite albums could rank among the best things I'd ever experienced, when I saw that there would be tenth anniversary shows I knew there was no way I could miss out on attending.
I took a long weekend and flew to Portland the day before the concert. My whole visit was great. Non-concert highlights included several really fantastic meals, a visit to Powell's, the world's largest bookstore, and a round of disc golf at Pier Park, a very highly rated course that quickly became my favorite that I've played.
A very exciting birdie!
I also did a huge amount of walking. It's well known that "getting your steps in" is good for one's physical health. It's becoming more well known, but is still underrated, how beneficial long walks can be for mental health and emotional state. Between the honeymoon in Spain and the Portland trip, I'm pretty sure March 2024 is the month in which I've walked the most in my whole life, with several different days of over 20,000 steps each. Is it a coincidence that this happened during what was easily one of the best months of my life?
A lot of the walking I did was in the lush, sprawling expanse of Forest Park, one of the nation's largest urban forest areas. Being able to spend time in nature that's readily accessible from a city is a great thing, something I love about my home of Cleveland Heights, and Forest Park is probably the best such place that I've encountered in my travels.
It's a pretty magical place, but the magic of walking through those lush woods didn't compare to the magic that took place in Revolution Hall on the night of March 22.
This was, in fact, the second time I'd seen Typhoon play a show in Revolution Hall. The second time, in fact, that I'd seen Typhoon play a tenth anniversary show in Revolution Hall - the prior, on November 5, 2017, was for the tenth anniversary of their record label.
Both shows came at very momentous times in my life. Just as my introduction to Typhoon, and first time seeing them live, had also come at a very momentous time in my life. All for very different reasons.
I got to the venue early to make sure I could get a good spot near the stage. There were two openers - the second, the Fourth Wall, I had seen open for Typhoon once before, in 2018, and it was great to see them again. Anyway, between waiting for the show to start and waiting in between acts, I had plenty of time to think about the band I was there to see and how their music had woven itself into those ten years of my life going back to White Lighter's release.
I even took the time to read my previous blog entries about Typhoon. I felt grateful to my past self for having written all those entries. It was a good reminder of why I write. It was a good reminder of what all I had been through to get to the remarkable place I had reached.
One of those entries was called Wait for the light to come back on. I wrote it after that previous Revolution Hall show in 2017. The title comes from the lyrics of "Artificial Light," the opening track of White Lighter and a song that had often moved me to tears when I saw it performed live.
On that November 2017 visit to Portland, I was still reeling and emotionally devastated from what had happened the month before - an out of nowhere (to me) breakup that was the most traumatic thing I had ever experienced.
Which, considering I had previously been widowed at the age of 31, is obviously saying something.
Taking a very long walk around Portland and then seeing an amazing Typhoon concert had provided a major respite from the pain I was experiencing. I think it was really the beginning of my healing process, although that process took a long time.
In 2024, once again, the combination of a long walk around Portland and an amazing Typhoon concert had a profound effect on me.
I realized something as I stood there in the crowded concert hall and thought about all my past experiences with Typhoon and the words I had written. All those concerts and the things that had been going on in my life when they happened. September 2013. March 2014. September 2014. November 2017. January 2018. June 2018. April 2022.
What I realized was that, ever since August 2013 - the release month of the album whose tenth anniversary this show was celebrating - I'd carried with me an inescapable feeling that the life I had was not the life I was supposed to have. There was just something wrong about it.
Turning 30 and then a couple months later learning that your wife has stage IV lung cancer will do that to you, I guess.
But I also realized that there had been one short-lived period of time within those ten years when that feeling had gone away. When it had felt like everything had fallen into place and my life made sense again.
It was an illusory feeling. Now that I have a child of my own, I can see even more clearly how absolutely insane it was that my (also widowed) girlfriend of April through October 2017 had pushed me into a stepfather role for her four-year-old daughter within a month of us meeting in person. But I didn't realize that at the time.
I can see clearly now something that I was aware of at the time but then, I think, didn't want to admit was true after it ended. Those months in the summer of 2017 actually had been the happiest time in my life. (Had been! But that's no longer true.) It didn't seem right when I had been happily married to someone with whom I shared nine years of my life to say that the happiest time in my life was instead a short-lived relationship with someone else, but honestly, it was true, and it was because being a parent (for all intents and purposes, albeit not in a formal or legal sense) was the most magical thing I had ever experienced. And thus, suddenly having that parental role and that relationship with that child stripped away from me was the worst trauma I'd had to endure.
I realized something else. When I thought back on my life, there was a clear line of demarcation, almost as if I had lived two different lives. There was the period of my life that felt immediate and familiar and real. And there was the time before that, a time that almost felt like a past life.
That line of demarcation was August 2013. The month in which White Lighter was released. The month in which everything in my life changed.
When I think back on the events of August 2013, there's an immediacy to them, as if they didn't happen all that long ago, even though it's now been over 12 years. And that's also true of all the important events that have happened between then and now.
But go back a little farther in time, and I find that events of even, say, July 2013 feel like they happened in a different lifetime. It's an uncanny feeling, although it's one that makes sense when you consider what happened.
So this concert celebrating the tenth anniversary of an album by one of my favorite bands was also much more than that.
The first time that I saw Typhoon live, it was amazing to witness the 11 members of the band all cram onto the tiny stage of the Beachland Tavern. I'd never seen anything like it.
In the years since, various members of the band had had to move on to various other responsibilities in life. The size of the band had shrunken considerably. The most recent time I'd seen them, April 24, 2022 - the day after my second date with Erin, and a significant date for other reasons - a version of the band about half the size of the original had taken the stage at El Club in Detroit.
They'd played a great show, but it couldn't quite compare to what had once been.
On March 22, 2024, the full Typhoon lineup whose music had taken hold of my soul ten years previously once more took the stage at Revolution Hall. I had always thought, when I saw them, that the band seemed like a family. And this was like the best kind of family reunion. It felt like things were once more the way they were supposed to be. It felt euphoric.
And the music hadn't even started.
It's hard to put into words what I felt when the oh so familiar opening notes of "Artificial Light" filled the room, and what I continued to feel for the rest of Typhoon's set that night. But I'll try. As I remember it, a powerful physical sensation washed over my body and I somehow felt both intensely excited and remarkably calm, and at peace, and most of all just blissful.
I joined in with much of the rest of the crowd in heartily singing along to many of the words. That sort of communal experience with a concert crowd that is so passionate and so there for the music is a wonderful thing whenever it happens. Here it was extra wonderful, both because of what the music meant to me, and also because the feeling I had of the band being like a family somehow extended to the entire audience. It felt like, in that room for that one night, we were all one big family.
Many of the words that I sang most enthusiastically were words I had quoted in one of those old blog posts: Typhoon lyrics that make me think of Cara, posted a week after my first wife's death, a post that marked my transformation away from being someone who never shared his innermost feelings with, well, just about anyone. The emotions I experienced seeing those songs performed live at this tenth anniversary celebration, singing along, and thinking about everything those words meant to me and everything that had happened over those ten years, well... it was just a transcendent experience in the unique way that live music can transcend normal human experience, but even more transcendent than any other live music experience I've had before or since.
Although so many of those lyrics had meant so much to me going back to 2013 and through the ensuing years, there was one set that now took on a greatly heightened significance. From "Young Fathers":
Now I'm as old as you were when you had me
Should I be afraid? Should I start a family?
In 2015, I explained, "The above is not really so much related to Cara, but sticks out to me because I am in fact now as old (31 years) as my mother was when she had me."
It was a weird feeling at the time, thinking about how at the age my mother was when she became a parent, I instead became widowed.
Kyle Morton, speaking between songs at the anniversary concert, provided additional context to these lines. When he was at the age his parents were when he was born, he thought he was going to die. He wrote those words thinking that he would never get to be a parent himself.
He introduced album closer "Post Script," an absolutely heartbreaking song, by saying that he had written the song for Danielle, his wife; it envisions her life after his death. It had been ten years since that song was released into the world. Ten years since I had listened to it and the rest of the songs on White Lighter over and over while pondering my suddenly uncertain future.
I've talked to both Kyle and Danielle (frontwoman of now defunct band Wild Ones) multiple times at previous shows, by the way, and they're both just absolutely lovely people.
So here we were, ten years later. Kyle had not died. He was very much still alive, and as he explained in what was news to me, he and Danielle had been able to start a family. They had a baby girl!
During the show, it had already been very much on my mind that the crazy journey my life had taken over those ten years had all led up to me meeting Erin and now to Erin, back home in Cleveland, being pregnant with our child. At the revelation that Kyle and Danielle's journey had also led to them having a child - ten years after I had listened to those words, "Should I be afraid? Should I start a family?" and had wondered whether I, too, would ever have that experience - I felt this sense of... I guess I might call it cosmic connection. Sometimes it just feels like everything is as it's meant to be. This was one of those times.
All along, what I had really wanted in life was to meet someone with whom I would like to start a family, and then start a family with that person. Now it was happening.
After the astonishingly beautiful performance of "Post Script," a song that sticks out in my memories of the first ever Typhoon concert I attended when those 11 musicians crammed themselves onto the tiny Beachland Tavern stage in September 2013, the band left the stage to thunderous applause. They returned to play an encore featuring several songs from their other albums and culminating in a rousing performance of "Reed Rd.," a fan favorite live song that never made it to an album (until it was included as a bonus track on the White Lighter 10th anniversary release) but that I fondly remember closing out the show at my second Typhoon concert. That show had been in March 2014, so almost exactly ten years in the past.
What a ten years it had been.
I walked out of the concert almost in a daze. It had been just so powerful, so beautiful, so overwhelming an experience. It was truly one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
Although since W's birth, the list of experiences similarly or even more amazing has rapidly expanded!
I had spent ten years carrying a vague feeling that my life, in some fundamental way, was not the life I was supposed to have. And now, now I no longer felt that way. I now felt that yes, things are right with my life, this is where my life is supposed to be. I was already starting to feel this (when you've spent so long carrying that feeling of things not being right, it's not easy to shake, even when things do start to really go right), but I think that night in Revolution Hall (importantly, I think, coming on the heels of an amazing honeymoon with Erin in Spain) is when that feeling really solidified itself in my mind.
Because life has been so busy and it's taken me so long to get around to finishing writing this post, I now have the benefit of being able to look back over the two years since that night and see that yes, that's really true. I feel so much gratitude.
Looking back, it seems even more remarkable now. I truly believe that that night in that concert hall induced a permanent and beneficial change in my brain. Not just in the way that the formation of any long term memory permanently alters some neural pathways, but a much more profound and fundamental change in the function of my mind.
Music, man. It really is something.
The day after the show, I did a lot more walking around Portland, including a stop at a record store where Typhoon's music was being played over the speakers. I was not surprised at the affirmative answer when I asked the guy at checkout whether he'd been at the previous night's show. That night, I caught a red-eye flight home with a brief layover in Chicago.
But then my flight from Chicago to Cleveland was cancelled.
While in the airport in Chicago, I joined a video call with Erin and our realtor as they viewed a house. We were still in the midst of a lengthy house search. It would be almost a month later when we finally found our home. We closed on it, incidentally, on the two year anniversary of our first date.
It turned out that the best way for me to get home from Chicago was to take a flight to the Akron-Canton airport, an hour's drive from home. Erin drove there to pick me up (the original plan would have had me taking a train from the Cleveland airport to our side of town). It's always a crazy journey for us!
I was extra happy to see Erin when I walked out the doors of the airport. On the way home, we stopped at a GBH (great blue heron) rookery that Erin had spotted from the highway on a previous drive we'd taken. A love of GBHs has been a significant feature of our relationship from early on. We parked, got out of our car, and looked at all those majestic birds tending to their nests.
I stood there with my wife and thought of the nesting that we would be doing in the near future.
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