Guster is, hands down, my favorite band. I loved them the second I first heard them, and I haven’t stopped in the fifteen years since. As a result of listening to them constantly for so long and having seen them live a number of times, I have about a million vivid memories that come flashing back to me when I hear a lot of their music. Some of them are really awesome memories – like hearing Parachute, when all I can see in my mind’s eye is the three of them standing on stage at The Bayou in Georgetown on an October night in 1997, my friend Christina standing next to me, and the crowd mesmerized while the dude running the lights (a fellow Catholic student!) put on a hell of a show –  and some of them are totally random and uninteresting – like hearing Architects & Engineers and picturing the barren parking lot at the Wollaston T stop, which I was walking across the first time I heard it. I added new memories this time around, thanks to Pete’s resolution to see more live music this year. J The picture above? Where they were standing at the edge of the stage ten feet from my face (did I forget to mention that we had awesome seats)? Yeah, that’s going to be in my head every time I hear Jesus on the Radio.

I was skeptical when I bought these concert tickets, because the tour was billed a “night of acoustic music and comedy” I was totally on board with the acoustic music, but I was not excited about the comedy. I am NOT a standup comedy fan, although I think that may have made Pete a bit more willing to go to this show with me so I should probably have been happy about it. It turns out that I had nothing to worry about – the opening act was a very green comedian from LA who was okay. Then Jeff Garlin (who you may know from Curb Your Enthusiasm. Or Daddy Day Care.) came out. And he was HILARIOUS. I loved him, I laughed the whole time, and I was happy to see him come back later in the show.

After my fears of hating the opening act were not realized, I was even more psyched when Guster  came out…with a violinist and a cellist, who were ridiculously amazing. The idea was that it’s a very chill, intimate show. They played a set with the strings, then the ladies left and Garlin came back out to emcee the “weird part of the show”, as Ryan called it – requests submitted online prior to the show, requests from the audience, requests from twitter. It was hilarious when someone requested a song off one of their early albums and they couldn’t guarantee that they remembered it. After finally remembering how it started, they promised to play as much of it as they could until they couldn’t anymore. I’m pretty sure I won’t listen to Love For Me again without picturing Adam and Ryan laughing at each other as they tried to play that song. After the “weird” (and also hilarious) part of the show, we traded Garlin for the strings once more, and they played another set that was equally awesome.

I was reading an interesting (and long) article on Slate about how iPods have changed the way we listen to music, and this bit really struck a chord with me:

So, too, […] has music become a common way for people to get through the workday. Your local cafe’s barista may literally depend on Bon Iver’s reedy lugubriousness to palliate a dreary job as you depend on coffee.

This is so true for me! I count on music to get me through a lot – the insane boredom of running on a treadmill, quality checking 125+ year end reviews at work, those last few breathes of a yoga pose when I’m pretty sure I’m about to collapse.

Not discussed in the article, but something that I’ve noticed and thought about a lot lately…I attach music to memories – memories that are vividly triggered upon hearing certain songs or albums, to the point where my mood will change in an instant while I’m listening to them. Sometimes it’s a memory of how I felt when I first heard a song live, sometimes a memory of multiple events that happened while listening to a certain album…but I can always picture it perfectly in my head, and remember exactly how I was feeling and what I was doing at the time.

I can’t remember now what made me pull up Unwritten Law on my iPod last night when I left the gym, but I can’t listen to their self titled album without being brought right back to the desk in my dorm room senior year, writing my thesis and motivating myself with M&Ms. I could draw you a diagram of how the furniture in the room was arranged. I can picture the freshman girls down the hall that were blasting Britney Spears, forcing me to turn up the volume on my own stereo. I remember being scared out of my skin when the volume was so high that I didn’t hear my roommate come in from her class and I suddenly caught movement out of the corner of my eye.

Sometimes I wonder if these memories will fade over time, or if I’ll ever listen to these songs or albums without the memories rushing back. Ask anyone who knows me well and they’ll tell you that I inherited my Dad’s memory. Or lack thereof. I walked out of work today knowing I had to stop and pick up a print at the photo shop next door on my way home. It took me the elevator ride down ten floors and the walk out the door of the building to forget. What’s that? Maybe five minutes? (Luckily the photo shop has a sandwich board on the sidewalk and it reminded me.) But these music memories…they have stuck with me so far. Maybe they are here to stay – after all, I can still feel my old bedroom rug under me and Dad’s old transistor radio (Hee! It looked just like this one!) in my hands every time I hear The Beach Boys’ Do You Wanna Dance?.