play the one we know.

The ten years of music that mean a great deal to me and I feel really define my life so far fit into a slightly shifted “decade,” the 10 year period of 2007-2017. So late aughts, early “teen-aughts”? I don’t really know what to call that but you get the idea.

In 2007 I graduated from Rutgers University and moved to Jersey City and got a job in Manhattan at MTV. I was a New Jersey Success Story, as Jimmy Eat World would say but they came around way earlier than 2007 and I’m sorry I brought them up.

Nevermind! A quick internet search told me that the Jimmy Eat World song I was referencing, “Big Casino,” came out in 2007 and I was right on target. Nice.

My first big music festival was All Points West at Liberty State Park in Jersey City. I rode the light rail with my college roommate and we each chugged a 4 pack of Flying Dog Raging Bitch Belgian style IPA. My last memory of that day is getting off the light rail and walking into the park at the very beginning of the festival.

But the next day I was told that it was very muddy, in fact my legs were still covered in mud when I woke up in the morning, my head pounding and my throat dry in my tiny, non-air conditioned room. We each lost one Old Navy flip flop in the “pit” during Gogol Bordello’s performance of “Start Wearing Purple.” Looking back, I have a quick flash memory of screaming along with the line, “Oh the boy’s a slag! The best you ever had!” as the Arctic Monkeys performed “Fluorescent Adolescent.”

The following year I vowed to keep it together for All Points West and try to really enjoy the experience. It seems like a random choice looking back, but I was super pumped about Jack Johnson and Ben Harper. Jack Johnson, mostly. I had a boss at my first job that I really looked up to and he was really into Jack Johnson (and Nora Jones but that’s a whole other thing) and I picked it up from him probably because I wanted him to think I was cool and also think that being cool made me good at my job. I had high hopes.

I only ever wanted to hear Jack Johnson sing “Banana Pancakes.” That is hands-down the best one. I think that song is probably older than 2007, but 2007 is when I became aware of it so it falls into this decade for me. But I love banana pancakes and sleeping in and pretending it’s the weekend. In fact I love pretending it all the time and can’t be stopped.

Beach House opened for Grizzly Bear on the Williamsburg waterfront in August 2009 and it was one of the greatest days of my life. We waited in a slow moving line around the block for hours and laughed at all the hipsters and PILES of fixed-gear bikes on every pole and fence post in sight. Williamsburg still had a bit of an edge in 2009 but it’s cliche as hell to look back and comment on how much it’s changed so I’m not going to do that.

The show was at capacity and my friends and I almost didn’t get in, but one of the aforementioned hipsters found a weak part of the fence and made a small hole and those of us who were opportunists and also lucky to be in the right place at the right time squeezed in. At the time this free show was THE place to be. At least it felt that way. Everyone I knew and liked best that I worked with was there. And everyone that was there that I didn’t know was someone I wanted to know. Everyone was cool and cute and young and the Brooklyn Blast flowed like beautiful amber-colored waterfalls into plastic cups.

Grizzly Bear played their hit at the time, “Two Weeks,” as their last song and the sun was setting and Jay-Z and Beyoncé were there, like we could SEE them, and it was the kind of day I’d always dreamed of as a child. Out with my friends, in the big city, listening to music, the perfect life.

My perfect life continued at another show on the waterfront featuring Chromeo. A Chromeo show is THE most fun and the most fun I have ever had dancing. I’m a terrible dancer but the style of dancing we fell into back then was very easy. Relaxed, casual, bordering on silly. If I got really pumped up and wanted to get more physical I’d just add more turns and hopping. I never felt self conscious about dancing at concerts. It just felt like a very comfortable space.

This particular Chromeo show is memorable mostly because it rained. It rained a lot. Rain is a common theme for festivals and outdoor concerts in the Northeast. Our weather is not great. During this show it was full-on pouring. Luckily we could bring umbrellas inside and I huddled underneath my bright blue Coach umbrella with purple polka dots. I was also wearing a blue skirt with white polka dots and the matchy-matchiness of it all was incredibly thrilling.

In the days leading up to this concert my poor friend ended up with pink eye when she had to do some work at a summer camp. So we started to refer to the Chromeo concert as the “Conjunctivitis Awareness Benefit.”

Hey ur coming to the Conjunctivitis Awareness Benefit on Saturday, right?

Yeah, I’ll meet you at the Bedford L stop.

Maybe that was mean but I’m pretty sure it was funny.

Chromeo came out with their mannequin leg wearing keyboards and their voice distortion thingy and made everyone feel better with songs like “Tenderoni” and “Mama’s Boy.” They could have eradicated pink eye with the full on funk they were bringing. It was beautiful.

That same summer we took the N train to the end of the line to see Matt and Kim at Coney Island. Coney Island is not my favorite place. It’s dirty and it smells and it’s hot and there’s no way I’m going in the ocean if I don’t have a shower and a change of clothes so the ocean just waves at me, mocking.

Every time I go to Coney Island it’s the hottest day of my life and this day was no exception. We were hot, and we were mad about it. Matt and Kim were doing a free show, and just like everything else free in NYC there were way too many people for it to even be enjoyable. We couldn’t get to where the beer was. Folks that were far from community-minded kept putting other socially disobedient citizens up on their shoulders and blocking our view. At one point I reached into my purse, dug out some pennies, and started surreptitiously throwing them at the backs of people’s heads that were sitting on other people’s shoulders.

This thankfully made them dismount, and I was brought to (happy) tears by Kim’s (always) incredible drumming during “Lessons Learned” and the intense earnestness, for lack of a better word, of Matt’s voice during “Lightspeed.”

Matt and Kim define an entire mindset of mine during that time, which was: “move fast and smile and have fun and Brooklyn stuff and just keep going.” That’s the simplest way to describe it. I love those guys.

Speaking of mindsets the band and music that really most defined me during this time was and always will be Best Coast. Bethany Cosentino had a way of seeing inside my brain and turning my thoughts into songs. Their music is so simple but also filled with such intense longing and sadness. At the time I often felt intense longing and sadness and I told everyone “If you want to see inside my head listen to Best Coast.” This was a cry for help. But also a suggestion to listen to incredible music.

All through the years, from “In My Room” in 2009 to the California Nights album in 2015, I followed them closely and felt every song with a tightness right in my chest. A good tightness, most of the time. I tried to play it for every guy I liked and they most certainly thought, “Damn this girl listens to whiny music.” But guys are idiots.

My love for beachy tunes extended to many different bands. One even has “Beach” in their name and that would be Beach House. They opened for Grizzly Bear on that fateful Williamsburg day, and later on for Vampire Weekend at Radio City Music Hall, but they went on to be one of my most favorite bands of all time.

They put on a beautiful show a few years ago at Kings Theater in Brooklyn, but the one I remember most vividly is their set at Governor’s Ball in 2013. It was a dark and stormy night, POURING, soaking rain. Their set was delayed and then they went on. We were so excited! The wind and rain were swirling around and the music was so loud it was like I was inside of it and I was with one of my best pals who also really loved Beach House and it was a perfect moment of full-on euphoria. The whole thing reached a fever pitch as they launched into “The Hours” and I felt it in my very soul. If I remember correctly they didn’t make it through the whole song because it started to thunder and lightning so then science said we had to go home. Not sure if I remember correctly though.

It always, ALWAYS rains at Governor’s Ball. If it’s not raining, it’s not Governor’s Ball. If you are required to wear Hunter boots and there’s a whole field of mud trying its hardest to suck those boots off your feet as you balance a 20oz Bud Light can in one hand and try to take selfies and pictures of the “art installations” with your phone in the other, you’re at Governor’s Ball. I still really enjoy attending this festival despite the rain, and I have gone every year since its inception. But I don’t think I’m alone when I say that bad weather is a real vibe killer, my dudes.

Lollapalooza is another fantastic festival that in my memory is slightly marred by boot-sucking mud and other natural disasters. In 2010 I went to Lollapalooza with two friends and we stayed at a third friend’s Chicago apartment. It was my first time going on a trip with friends as an adult and I was 25 and I truly felt like the world was my oyster, with hot sauce. We drank free samples of liquor at a Chicago grocery store called Jewel-Osco and bought some of said liquor and snuck it into the festival somehow. I’m not really sure how but we were too young and poor to buy real drinks, even at 25. We got really drunk and danced to dance music I don’t remember anything about. I separated from the group for a moment to go watch Gaslight Anthem perform and rocked out to "I'da Called You Woody, Joe" all by myself. I was introduced to The Black Keys and stood blissfully rapt as they played “Everlasting Light.” That song still breaks my heart in just the right way.

In 2010 the Lollapalooza headliners were Phoenix, Arcade Fire, and The Strokes. At least these were MY headliners. I believe Lady Gaga was also playing that year and I watched her from really far away because I had to run to get to one of the other bands I really wanted to see. We were huge, HUGE Phoenix fans at the time and it blew our minds to see them play all of the songs from Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, an album that we all listened to in its entirety every single day, more than once. I’m being honest when I say that our heads truly exploded when they played “1901” and “Lisztomania.” I still can’t quite put my finger on what it was about Phoenix that we were so enchanted by but they were truly magical.

I had never listened to Arcade Fire until Lollapalooza 2010 and it was a very important discovery for me. Like most white girl indie rock lovers that were in their 20s at that point in time, Arcade Fire truly spoke to me. I once read a music review that described their concerts as “bombastic” and I never forgot how perfectly that defined the feeling they gave me. Their debut album Funeral came out in 2004, and sadly I didn’t discover it until 2010, but I quickly made up for lost time by listening to it on repeat for the next 5 years, I kid you not. Hearing the first few piano notes of “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels),” the first song on that album, and knowing that the rest of the album will be following that first song and getting so pumped about it, THAT TAKES ME TO A PLACE. Funeral will always be my favorite album, but I also always really love songs that spotlight Regine Chassagne, like “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” from The Suburbs (her performance of this on SNL is EVERYTHING, look it up), and “Electric Blue” from Everything Now.

The Strokes were already established as the gold standard of indie rock by 2010, they came out with their first album almost a decade before that, in 2001. But their music never got old. It never GETS old. The Strokes define an entire generation of a certain type of northeastern person. People who were in their teens and 20s living and working and partying around New York City in the first 20 years of this century. Their music evokes such a sense of that place and time that it sometimes hurts to think about it. That’s ridiculous and dramatic but it’s just so potent. You hear the first part of “I’ll Try Anything Once,” when they say “Ten decisions shape your life,” and it’s like, MY GOD, The Strokes really “get it.” They “get” ME. And that means everything.

“Play the one we know!” was our favorite silly drunken chant at concerts and music festivals. One fist holding a tower of 4 little wine cups, the other fist pumping in the air. Not a “Jersey” fist pump...but not NOT a “Jersey” fist pump. We told ourselves we were being ironic, making fun of people who wanted bands to shut up and play the hits. But deep inside we really did want them to play the one we know. No one wants to admit it but everyone knows music is more fun when you’ve heard it before and if you already like it. We put in the time before the shows to get to know the artists. We listened at home, on the subway, at work. We made the boys we hooked up with play all of their records during the hour it took us to get drunk enough to hook up with them so we could sharpen our music knowledge during every moment we had.

Beyond just the music, the musical KNOWLEDGE was everything. The whole joke is that a certain type of music lover longs to say, “I knew them before they were famous,” “I adored their music years before they won a Grammy,” “I used to smoke cigarettes with them outside that dive bar.” It’s a whole thing. You know it is. And for a long time WE were those people. We knew all of the music, we went to all of the shows, and sometimes they were ALWAYS playing the ones we knew because we knew ALL of the songs.

By 2017, most of us had grown up. Gotten married, had kids, moved to Long Island. And so it goes, the circle of life or whatever you want to call it. Now the Gen-Z kids are out there in music land, finding their own bands and building their own culture and inflicting their own versions of musical-knowledge competitions onto each other. Because that’s what friends do. And I wish them well, for it is the greatest time of their little musical lives and I hope they love every second.

Last September, I went with some of my former MTV co-workers/music-loving friends to the Finger Lakes. We had plans to go to wine tastings and other adult things, and we created a shared Spotify playlist to listen to during the drive.

The first song on “The Gang Does the Finger Lakes” playlist was “Litszomania,” obviously.