Life Between 0 and 1

Seeing your favorite band or live music in general is an exciting experience. Even bands that aren’t that good somehow manage to pull off a live show because the energy of an audience is contagious. Obviously if I’m paying money, I’m going to see established bands that don’t suck and are worth my time and risk of permanent ear damage (yes, I wear ear protection….. now). The most recent concert I was at with my daughter clocked in at an average of 120 decibels over a 3 hour period which is significantly in the hearing damage and/or hearing loss category without some form of protection. Even with ear protection, at points during the three bands we saw, I could hear the familiar crackling of sound in my ears telling me “yeah, it’s too damn loud and this is causing you more damage” adding to my already annoying tinnitus in both ears.

In the last few years, here’s a list of the bands I’ve seen live with my daughter (in order). I’ve bolded the band that I thought took the show:

• Bad Wolves / Nothing More / Five Finger Death Punch / Breaking Benjamin
• New Year’s Day / In This Moment / Halestorm
• Three Days Grace / Disturbed
• Code Orange / Killswitch Engage / Slipknot
• Code Orange / Chevelle / Korn

If you have time, check out one of the songs I recorded from the Korn concert I recently attended.

Going to see your favorite bands live is one of the best ways of supporting them in this new age of streaming music. Ask yourself when the last time you purchased any music on tangible media such as CD or vinyl, which used to be the primary way artists made a living. Now getting a CD or vinyl record is a novelty to most and weird to others. I personally have over 300 CD’s in my music collection, but admittedly have been listening to music on CD since the late 80’s so have had a long time to procure that amount of music. I have not actually purchased physical music for probably 8 or 10 years at this point as I’ve been streaming my music. I primarily use Spotify, but have recently started using Tidal. Anyway, the cost of the streaming subscription and plays of your artists songs is supposed to send incremental royalties back to the artists. Who knows if that actually happens.

Being able to spend time with my daughter doing something that we both enjoy doing, listening to alternative metal, nu metal, whatever you want to call it metal; is all that really matters. The cost to go is negligible compared to the shared experience we are now able to talk about every time we hear one of the songs that were played live. This was most evident after we attended the Disturbed concert only a few months before the COVID-19 shutdown and took away live concerts for almost 2 years. When we were finally able to go see a concert again, we both couldn’t wait to get there and feel the music as much as we were hearing the music. There is no substitute for a live concert.