The last like, eight years of my life have been this weird mix of really good things happening, but with this undercurrent of everything being terrible. My family (brother, sister, parents, etc) are all estranged from each other in various capacities, and I've just felt kind of.. untethered because of that, and rethinking a lot of my past.

The National got me through a lot. A bad election, family dysfunction, seeing my kids grow up, a pandemic and the emergence from it.

Quiet Light, Where is Her Head, Dark Side of the Gym, Once Upon a Poolside, Your Mind is Not Your Friend, Not in Kansas, Send for Me, Light Years... it goes on and on.

All of these really helped, because it was nice knowing that even in loneliness I wasn't really alone. Just over the hill from me, by the beach, someone else was also up at 5AM, watching the sky turn from black to grey. Like a baby.

ANYHOW

At the LA show, second night, for various reasons I got to go to a pre-show and after-show thing. I haven't really met Matt before (even though we've crossed paths, and have a few mutual friends), but I saw him with Carin and decided to say hi. And say "thank you."

Thank you for being frank about things, for writing them down, for putting them into words and music. Thanks for sticking with it, for being honest, for pushing through and surviving, because it helped me do the same.

Then we talked about our mutual friends, our kids graduating middle school, and he was lovely and kind (as are the other guys). But it felt good to just say thank you. I think too often we treat art as this abstract thing, or a thing that we enjoy. But art is a refraction of the artist through our own lens, and in some cases the work for an artist to exercise those demons is near fatal or too much to bear for them, as good as it is for us.

It was nice to be able to tell the artist: thanks for letting everything out, so I could take it in, and through that keep going. On with the show.