My brother and I bounced up and down on the balls of our feet, swinging our heads side to side, as we listened to Sleatter-Kinney play music so hard, so loud, and so damned urgently that we couldn’t stop moving while we sang. This show was at the Showbox in Seattle, in the mid-1990s and I still remember this feeling. I swear the walls were sweating.
My friend Sharon and I sat together, holding hands, singing “Blackbird” with thousands of other people, all of us in unison. We both had tears in our eyes as we sat in that stadium, watch an almost-70-year-old man rock out a song he wrote when he was 26, still playing it after all those years. Every one of us in that crowd sang each word with him.
Late in the evening of a hot day, my friend Dorothy and I stood with thousands on the top of a hill at the Gorge. Brandi Carlisle was singing to us, then singing with us. And then we became the singers, the song, the carriers of the sound. I’ll never stop being amazed how hundreds and hundreds of voices combined become one voice. One, beautiful voice.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Our Kind Kitchen to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.