#54: Go on 15 dates w/ Robert

Date #12

We're having quite the summer of concerts over here.  One a month.  May was Gogol Bordello, and in July it just so happened that one of Robert's favorite bands, who have been broken up for like, over a decade (in the meantime, the singer was in one of my favorite bands, the (international) noise conspiracy), The Refused, are playing in Metro Detroit...on Robert's birthday!! (Made shopping for his birthday gift real easy.)

This month, it was Nada Surf!!



We started the date eating dinner at Red Rocks, a new restaurant in downtown Ypsilanti (the city we live in).    It's a barbecue place, similar to the infamous Slow's in Detroit.  I had baked mac'n'cheese (with some bbq sauce) and sides of sweet potato fries and cherry apple slaw.  Oh man, I was so stuffed, and I barely made a dent in my mac'n'cheese.  It got four thumbs up from us.

Later, we went to Ann Arbor for the concert.  Let me tell you a bit of my backstory with Nada Surf...  So, they were originally a "one hit wonder" in the mid-90s for their song, "Popular".  A few years later, they put out another album, and my brother heard they were coming to Detroit.  I remember him picking me up from high school one afternoon, having just gone and bought Nada Surf's first album, and driving around with the music blasting.  My brother and I used to do that a lot those days, drive around, sometimes aimlessly, listening to music together.  Soon after that we went to see them in concert.  It was a really weird show, it was at like 6pm, and they played by themselves...there was no more than 20 people at the show.  Super weird.  A few months later we saw them again, they were opening for a little emo/indie pop group called the Impossibles.  My brother and I stood up front and Matt, the singer, kept smiling at us because we were the only ones who were singing along.  The third time I saw them was years later as a 19-year-old.  I went by myself, and felt like a grown up, felt like I was happy with the person I had grown up to be.  And felt super old when I had to sit down through most of the show because my back hurt.  There's all sorts of other emotional stories related to Nada Surf and my life, but that would get super long winded, so lets just say they were woven into some of the emotional connections I had/have with my brother, friends, exes, and Robert.  They feel like an important band to me.

It had been seven years since I had seen Nada Surf in concert.  Seven. Years.  They'd put out four more albums since I last saw them.  Crazy.  So Robert and I jumped on the chance to see them when they came to Ann Arbor.  It was Robert's first time seeing them.  I completely re-fell in love with them, if that is possible.  It was one of the best concerts I have been to in a long time.  Robert was even a bit surprised by how great they were.  They really sounded better live, which is rare.

I can't wait til they come back!