Week 24: Listen Up Tour, Toronto

As I approach the halfway point of this year-long blogging project, I've been drawing comparisons with the project I completed last year. In 2012 I took a photo every day, and it kick-started a passion for photography that had been lurking under the surface since I was very young. Freezing and capturing a moment is about as close to magic as I think I can get. Nowadays I almost never leave the house without some sort of camera.

This desire to capture moments is nearly universal, and it's become so easy to do that it is virtually second-nature to most of us. We record things, people, places and sounds that we love. To share, to remember, or just to document our lives. And seeing one of your favourite artists, to whose songs you have a strong emotional connection, in a concert you have waited for for months, certainly merits being documented. Nobody wants to forget that moment - and most of us want to be able to relive it.

I get this. I totally do.

I understand that a good show, a good song, can carry people, holding them up well after the band stops playing and they file out into the night. Giving them something to reach for, to hang on to when the rest of the world is spinning.

I understand the need to document these moments, to grab them out of the air, paste them into your scrapbook and close the cover before they escape. To have something to return to, a portal back into that feeling, that day, that song.

(warning - I'm about to sound like your dad)

But it's a sad day for music when the recording, the capturing of the moment, takes precedence over the moment itself. When a person who is fortunate enough to stand three feet in front of their hero, chooses to experience the moment via a three-inch screen instead.

I suppose, as I was jostled and squashed and pushed into any vaguely person-sized gap that happened to open, that being behind a taller-than-me person who decided to film every single song was pure bad luck. If I had lucked into an uninterrupted view, or at least one not obscured by a video camera at least 70% of the time, I would not be complaining.

Despite my struggles, I can't bring myself to condemn those who want to film and photograph a show like this. Although their choice might impact my experience, isn't that the point of participating in the ritual of live music? A sea of individual people, breathing and moving and singing and heart-beating together - no longer individuals, but one being. Each slight movement triggering the next, each exhale the next inhale, each camera flash the blinking eye of this giant creature of passion and sweat and love.

Because I didn't take any pictures or record any pictures, I'll have to capture the memory of this fantastic show with my words.


Here they are:

Heat and people and closeness and energy and hearts beating and Harry Potter and new friends and less-new friends and giggles and tears and harmonies and Disney and passion and dancing and jumping and new songs and less-new songs and jokes and pictures and feelings and teenage dreams and having a home and not being alone. Oh, and so much love.

And sweat. A lot of sweat.



Goodnight, bloglings