Music can make you feel young again, but it can also remind you how old you’re getting. The other day, an old college roommate of mine sent a link to a music festival she’s going to this summer. She’s an English professor now, so part of her job is teaching study abroad classes in London. “Let’s Rock – The Retro Festival” is playing across the U.K. while she is there, so she bought tickets. She thought I’d get a kick out of seeing the lineup. “Look how old they all are,” she said. “I haven’t aged that much, have I? (Don’t answer that.)”
I clicked the link and favorite bands from our college years popped up. Above the band names were artistically staged photos of middle-aged men dressed in leather jackets and receding hairlines. I studied them closely. Thirty-five years ago, I would have been taping photos of them, ripped from Rolling Stone magazine, on my dorm room wall. Now they looked like someone I might bump into at the bakery section at Fry’s, a loaf of fresh sourdough in their hands, waiting for a turn at the bread-slicing machine.
I took a dive down Google memory lane and searched a couple of the bands and found photos from the years I was listening to them. I had forgotten how young they were back then, sporting the floppy, permed hairstyles and shoulder pads of 1987. I wondered if they ever imagined they would be headlining a nostalgia tour, playing their hits all these years later.
It’s easy to get stuck in a decade of music that means the most to you. I have an 80’s playlist on my phone that I’ll listen to while doing work around the house. Certain songs feel like flipping through a diary of my younger days — I can almost see the people I was with or what I was doing when that song was popular.
A few weeks ago, I had the chance to go to a concert in Phoenix with my 20-year-old niece and see her favorite band. She had played their music for me as we drove around Prescott last summer. I’ll admit I was only half-listening at the time, as she hooked her phone into the car’s Bluetooth and scrolled through an endless playlist.
I was trying to be the cool aunt and enjoy what she was sharing. After a few more car rides with her, some of those songs got stuck in my head and ended up on a new Spotify list on my phone.
And somehow, this led to me sitting with her in the front row balcony of a Phoenix theatre, surrounded by 5,000 people under the age of 30, listening to a band I’d never heard of before last summer. I think I was the oldest person in the room that night, although the security guard was nice and told me I wasn’t.
It felt odd to be wearing a face mask to a rock concert, but I wasn’t ready to be in such a big crowd without one. Still, most of it felt familiar, like the shows I’d gone to when I was her age. A few people were drunk, a vague whiff of pot was in the air, and everyone around me was wearing a concert t-shirt.
As we waited for the show to start, she filled me in on the backstories of the band and their songs and told me about the time she was in the front row of their show, before they got big, and got to touch the lead singer’s hand. It was fun to see how excited she was to be able to see them again and to share what they meant to her.
When the band started playing, it didn’t matter if it was my music or hers. And when I hear those songs from now on, it’s this night that I’m going to remember.