I went to a rock show this past Tuesday night, traveling back in time in a way that was wild. On the one hand it was a reunion with the girl I was before I was anyone who got paid to know music and musicians. Someone whose arms were waving in the air, full of wonder, hoping the singer, or guitar player, or bassist, or drummer would see me out in the audience and think, Yeah, I want to know her. The girl before she became a player in the business and who, in so many ways, sustained some untended psychic/emotional wounds in the process. Who then withdrew from the field of play and decided she didn’t need any of that anymore. Fuck future tra-la-la magic and unicorns and soaring choruses and gut-punching bass lines, sultry guitar chords, slithery lyrics. Boom, boom, boom. Off I went. Had enough.

But Tuesday night I saw a glimpse of that early girl as the lights went down (my absolute favorite moment ever for the possibilities of what will happen next) and I began to viscerally remember. The girl who, at 12, stood in this very building—The Forum in Inglewood, where my grandparents lived—her friend standing next to her while Elton John rocketed onstage and she was stunned into mind-numbing amazement. Too moved to move—at least for the first song. A girl whose father had driven her and her friend to the show and was out in the parking lot, sitting in his 1967 black Mustang sipping from a thermos of martinis. That girl, who thought everything was possible and music could make it so, she’s who I looked for Tuesday night.

I did see her there. I saw of lot of her(s) there and tried very very hard not to default to side-eyeing cynicism. To be patient and see innocence and hope without tainting it with any “just waits.” Because really, why? It’s only a defense, the “just wait till it all goes wrong.” I know this now in the later part of life. In the middle part, I didn’t. I walked into my career in the biz on a belief of music as transportation on the way to somewhere great. But I left those middle years with a full set of armor painted in the colors of supreme attitude and indifference. I mean, it was only so I’d fit in but somewhere along the way I forgot that didn’t need to be me. That still the girl was inside, I’d just forgotten about her. On purpose, mind you, given the emotion could be exhausting. She would remind me that music transports and I most certainly gave into it on many occasions but yet, mostly I shared that only with myself. Then I left the scene and in lieu of any parting gift or gold watch, I took the armored vehicle. Drove off the curb, crossed town, and never used the rearview.

So there I was, two decades later, in a seat behind the soundboard feeling a bit like a vampire. I wanted to siphon some of the energy. See how much I could pocket and carry away. But yet, imagine my surprise when I realized that all manner of humans: mothers&daughters, fathers&sons, family groupings, other-abled folx, and the requisite hipsters old and young were filling in the spaces around me. Måneskin melts the pot. And when the lights dropped and the band rose, the mood of pure anticipation and actual thumping excitement was not an age, ability, or sex, it was just pure fun. I did in the early moments miss the intimacy of being down in the crowd. The sweat and churn of it. Yet still, slowly turning turning turning toward myself again, I let the wonder in. I watched. I noticed. There was an absolute lay-it-on-the-stage passion that I could wrap myself in no matter where I was even if my feet weren’t being stepped on and without my body drenched in sweat as I levitated toward the sexy sloppiness onstage. The dropped notes, broken sticks, ragged vocals didn’t seem to matter to anyone. The band appeared to be having an actual good time with each other, with their music, with the crowd.

This is perhaps the reason their music and their general selves have cracked open an inner door in me. One that I wholeheartedly stepped through because I see joy there. Vic, the bassist, appears to smile. All. the. time. Even when she’s rock-pouting, marching, sliding on her knees, there’s play there. Thomas, who apparently has never ever met a guitar solo he didn’t adore, and I’ve been a girl who has actively disliked guitar solos (but did I? Or was that part of what I wasn’t supposed to like?), keeps zero secrets around how much he enjoys playing them. Ethan, drumming, drumming, smiling, waving, drumming, flipping his hair around. Damiano, vamping, kneeling, singing, giving a huge amount away to the crowd and his band. All of them doing it in heels (literally). This unabashed turning out of themselves confused me on first listen. Embarrassed me slightly in how much I was smitten by the rock catalog of my soul that they channeled, the one that dials all the way back to high school, then rolls forward and stopped in 1993. The place that holds naughtiness, sexiness, melodic love songs, clever and cheesy lyrics. I mean, some are in Italian, so I have no idea where they fall.

When the music stopped after a couple of hours, I found I was smiling and still standing. Had been for the duration. I checked myself for any creeping attitude and I noticed a passing whiff of “Back-in-the-day, I would have been going to the afterparty” ache (see below b/c there’s always an after-something), then I stepped out with the other thousands of people, walked through the parking lot where my dad’s Mustang wasn’t, thanked him silently for being such a cool guy who listened attentively to my emotional descriptions of why Led Zeppelin made me cry, supported the music I wanted to buy and play for him, and introduced me to his own love of jazz. I felt him there and I felt the young girl who climbed in the car after Elton John with her ears ringing and her head spinning, dreaming of all the songs Bernie Taupin might write that she’d learn the words to. And I walked back to the hotel one way as she drove alongside and off into the future.

I never want to be that person who says “I’m too old for that” (witness the skydiving 103-year-old lady) yet truly what I hope is that I’m never too old to understand that young girl again. To make a clearing where my wounds, scars, fresh dreams, old nightmares can throw up their hands, jump up and down, and fall in love with the possibilities of where music might take me. Work in progress, that.

(Below Instagram photos from the party I mentioned above. #maneskinofficial