WHEN LIVE-MUSIC PROMOTERS started suspending tours in March 2020 due to Covid, a part of me began to die.
As the concert-less months continued, my music-loving friends turned into ghosts, sunshine on summer days reminded me of outdoor festivals of yesteryear, and listening to new music felt hollow.
Then came live-streamed shows. At first, being able to catch a rare H.E.R. jam session with Chloe x Halle an hour before an equally rare Questlove DJ set was kind of awesome—and
all I had to do was switch browser tabs.
But after six months of streaming shows, virtual concerts faded into the endless screen-time void of Zoom work meetings and Google Hangouts. Music, once a refuge from the chaos of life, became a reminder of what I was missing: human connection.
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No matter how loudly I belted out sing-alongs alone in my apartment, I couldn’t recapture the feeling of doing the same with thousands of people IRL. Research bears this out.
“Music has clear access to the ‘reward’ or pleasure centers of the brain. We are also very rewarded by social connection, so live music creates a double whammy of pleasurable experiences,” says Jessica Grahn, Ph.D., who heads the Music and Neuroscience Lab at Western University’s Brain and Mind Institute.
This makes sense to me: Streaming shows can only ever be a virtual–reality experience. But why had recorded music also sounded so flat to me during the pandemic?
“We see greater brain synchrony for live music than recorded music, which is paralleled by feelings of social connection and engagement,” Grahn says.
That was it. It wasn’t only connection I was missing but a shared experience. Charles Darwin once theorized that humans communicated through musical sounds before they did through speech. I didn’t just need to go to a live concert. I needed to commune.
And I wasn’t alone.
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Look to the legions of Bad Bunny fans who, after helping the rapper become the most streamed artist on Spotify in 2020 and 2021, made his El Último Tour del Mundo 2022 the fastest-selling tour on Ticketmaster since 2018. Look to Coachella, which sold out multi-day passes back in January in a matter of hours. There’s a hunger to bear witness.
So when New York joined other states in lifting vaccine and mask mandates for indoor events this spring, I made sure I found a way to get to the Tyler, the Creator show at Madison Square Garden a few weeks after.
Minutes after Tyler’s show began, a bespectacled college kid and I went from strangers to momentary best friends, our arms draped over each other, reciting lyrics about Tyler’s threesomes with a triceratops. And as I belted out “don’t leave” from the song “Earfquake” with tens of thousands of other people I had never met, I didn’t just know live music was back; I knew I had been reborn.
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Find a show. Call a friend. Or don’t—because you’ll discover at least one (or maybe thousands) reconnecting just like you.
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