My Darkest Days...Not mine, theirs.

What does my music immersion have to do with green living, gardening, healthy eating, cooking...not a dadgum thing except that while doing these things lately I am burying myself under layers of deep music.  I say deep because I don't like loud music unless I am at a concert or alone in the house where I can't bother anyone else with my moodiness which tends to come in waves and accompanies the need for "my" music.  Loud, live music is an escape for me, thus the concert addiction. Deep music, anything that moves me, be it instrumental Celtic, classical in what I consider to be somber tones, or heavy metal with a great singer, usually a gruff, deep-voiced, male, crooning away seeps right to my core.

I'm not a shopper who finds release in "retail therapy", I love to watch movies but can barely sit still through one and movie theaters are torture for me unless I'm watching an epic film (or a hilarious one) that catches me up and stays with me for a lifetime.  I can tolerate hobbies only for so long and have only a few that give me creative release.  With very little time for family days out, a husband whom I only see while he is sleeping any more these days, and drowning myself in cooking for my family and my blog, I have found that I need concerts in my life to ease an almost ongoing restlessness.  I'll run to one of our local venues hours, sometimes minutes before a concert is to begin, on the off-chance that I'll get in and "get away" for the evening.  Others are planned months in advance.  There is nothing for me right now that equals live music with the exception of just plain silly times with my boys, of which there are many. 

Even jaunts in the woods among nature, the ultimate escape for me, have been few and far between the last year and a half.  It's simply not safe in these mountains to take your family out into the woods when the weather is being fickle and you don't know what will come next.  It can change so quickly in our area, especially with the rains we've had this winter and last summer being nearly non stop which makes for slippery, dangerous trails and flash floods.  Last winter was bitterly cold, too cold for venturing out much.  I am missing it terribly, lessons by the river with my boys, drives in and through the mountains, and can't wait for spring.  In the meantime I feel as if I'm waiting and waiting and waiting for life to begin and things to settle down for our family and for the weather to mellow.  It's gone on for months and months...

I haven't even been able to find peace in yoga and meditation for the past few weeks, can't seem to tolerate my usual soothing forms of music and have been specifically avoiding those three things which usually calm me tremendously.  So on go the headphones.  Away I go. 

It was during one such phase, around a year ago, (Hmm...I wonder if the season/holidays ending has anything to do with it?  I just realized that yesterday was a year to the day.  How odd.  Some kind of Seasonal Affective Disorder???) that I was coming home from grocery shopping with my boys one early evening and remembered that the band Hinder was playing nearby that night.  I did some quick calculations and decided that by the time I made it home, unloaded the groceries, reapplied my lipstick (hee hee), drove back into town to drop the boys off with my husband and drove the hour it would take to reach the concert venue, I would just make it...if they still had tickets.  They did.  I made it. 

The big deal of the night, however, was not the headlining band, not one of my favorites to begin with, but after learning that there were four bands playing that night, I settled in to a spot front and center of the standing room only performance center prepared to wait through whatever crappy bands would open for Hinder. 

Crappy bands, my butt!  Here come these boys bursting out onto stage, all of them young enough to be my children, well almost, and I was blown away, simply by the quality of the lead singer's voice.  A few songs into their performance when they did a cover of Duran Duran's Come Undone I 'bout peed my pants.  It was pretty darn amazing to hear live. I like loud music, love rock bands, but only if the band members are actually singing, as in carrying an actual tune and staying on key with minimal bits of senseless, angry screaming. Needless to say, when I was a teenager in the 80s, I wasn't a fan of metal with the exception of my all time favorite band, Def Leppard, who weren't really heavy metal to begin with. It's the music, the guitar riffs, the drums, and ultimately the voice for me.  Well, this boy, Matt Walst of My Darkest Days, can sing and I was sold.  I could have gone home at that point, with two more bands yet to play, feeling as if I hadn't missed a thing.

While some of their songs get awfully teeny bopper and others are outright trashy, I am happy to see that these boys have really come along in the last year since their first album was released.  I have been waiting for them to finish their last tour and the production of their newest album to see if they would be swinging back down south again.  They are.  And what a doozy of a concert it will be.  My tickets (birthday present from Hubby) are already purchased and not only will I get to see those boys perform again but they are touring with Nickelback, Seether, and Bush.  It will be a night to remember and an escape I am seriously looking forward to.  I never counted on having the opportunity to hear the other three bands, though two have been favorites of mine for quite some time, and have only recently realized, through the help of a friend, that Bush is Gavin Rossdale, Gavin Rossdale is Bush, don't know how I missed that one, so am pleasantly surprised to be able to see him live, as well.  What voices these men have!  Spine quivering...