Vol. 4: No Music, No Life
Bruce Springsteen, T. Swift, and the magic of crowds
When I saw Bruce Springsteen in Brooklyn in April, there were some guys behind us talking about a friend they had invited to come along. The friend wasn’t sure if he should go because he only knew a few Springsteen songs.
“Doesn’t matter,” the guys said. “When you see him you’ll just get it.”
The friend didn’t end up going. But he should have, because there’s something magical about watching an artist like Springsteen perform to a crowd. It’s not just about the music, but the energy of the performer – and the ecstasy of the audience.
“Imagine being Bruce Springsteen in this stadium right now,” my friend Ali said, gesturing around the 19,000-seat Barclays Center as we waited for the show to start. “He could do literally anything and people will collectively lose their shit.”
Case in point: Bruce struck a pose with his Telecaster. And we collectively lost our shit. Bruce made some dumb dad joke. And we collectively lost our shit. Bruce tore open his shirt to reveal his weirdly jacked, 73-year-old chest. And we gaped… and then collectively lost our shit. Our shit could not be located for three full hours.
Ali’s friend texted her after the show: “Have you ascended?”
We had definitely ascended.
That’s what I was thinking about when, the next month, I had a chance to photograph Taylor Swift and her fans in Atlanta. Thousands of Swifties in glitter and beaded jewelry, assembled in an hours-long line for a chance to see their hero.
It was my first time working a major concert, and it was a cool experience to have access to photograph a pop star. But I was only allowed to shoot the first three songs of her highly choreographed set before I was quickly ushered away. The pictures were only as authentic as the promoters allowed them to be. What felt more real was the fans, who came unfiltered and excited.
To be honest, I probably wouldn’t be able to tell a Swift song from a Cyrus song. But the energy and anticipation of the crowd was infectious. Music has the magic ability to briefly bond you with everyone in the room.
When the lights dimmed I couldn’t help but feel a kinship with the mass of screaming, glittered-up girls around me. The opening bars of “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince” blared from the speakers, and an immense platform emerged from the center of the stage. It rose higher and higher as we caught our first glance of T. Swift herself, twinkling like Dorothy’s ruby slippers in the spotlight.
Taylor had ascended, and, as the song washed over us, so did we.
What I’m Reading
I’m now on book six of the Wheel of Time series, The Lord of Chaos, but my attention is starting to flag. Will I ever finish? Find out in the next edition…
What has kept my attention is Can’t Hurt Me, a memoir by former Navy SEAL David Goggins. Goggins overcame a childhood of poverty and abuse to become an elite servicemember and ultrarunner. Goggins’ alpha-bro personality may turn off some people, but his physical and mental feats, buoyed by an impenetrable will, are inspiring (and also sometimes incredibly stupid). I’m listening to the audiobook, which is narrated by Goggins’ ghost writer and interspersed with podcast-style conversation between the two. I like hearing some of the behind-the-scenes stories as well as the decisions behind what made it into the book and what didn’t.
I’ve also started How to Hide an Empire, which almost feels like a personal history given all the references to places I’m connected to: the Philippines, Guam, military bases. I have this book in paperback, but I think I should switch to audiobook because I find myself doing most of my “reading” in the car.
While thinking about what to write for this newsletter I revisited one of my favorite essays, a meditation on Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road by Nick Hornby. It ends with this banger of a line: “When it comes down to it, I suppose that I, too, believe that life is momentous and sad but not destructive of all hope, and maybe that makes me a self-dramatizing depressive, or maybe it makes me a happy idiot, but either way ‘Thunder Road’ knows how I feel and who I am, and that, in the end, is one of the consolations of art.”
Shoot me your reading recs!
New York City
To close, here are some of the photos I took walking around New York. Hope to visit again soon ❤️
always a joy to read your writing and to get a glimpse into how you see the world.