A week ago Friday, I got in the car to drive to my daughter’s in Pennsylvania with a strange feeling of trepidation, like waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like something was bound to happen to derail the weekend’s plan—to attend my first, in-person live music event in over two years.

It has happened before. Like so many people, we had a bunch of shows lined up for 2020, and all, of course, went by the wayside, some cancelled outright and others keeping us dangling, with reschedule after reschedule. 

Over the last two years, my family has been very cautious. Unwilling to jeopardize our own health or the health of others, we have avoided crowds, busy times at the grocery store, and generally followed the Covid-19 guidance. But once we received our boosters, we agreed that the time had come to learn to live with the virus. You can’t avoid risk entirely; risk is a part of life, and unfortunately, so are viruses.

Now, with life returning to near normalcy, with bands announcing tours practically every day, and being fully vaxxed and boosted, I knew the time had come. So I began to watch social media for the right show in the right place.

As I’ve explained elsewhere, I’m new to this live music stuff: my first live, in-person concert ever was in November 2018. After that, my daughter, Kristin, and I caught a lot of shows in 2019—In Flames opening for Within Temptation (3 times), Iron Maiden, Evanescence, Papa Roach with Asking Alexandria and Bad Wolves, and the Impact Music Festival in Bangor, Maine, where we caught KillswitchEngage, Five Finger Death Punch, and Godsmack among others. Sabaton’s Worcester show was my first “solo flight”. It was a crazy fantastic year, and I put a lot of miles on my car as I ran up and down I-95. My last show of the year was In Flames, when their headline tour returned them to the States in December. After that, we made a lot of plans for 2020.

And then of course, nothing.

Music is addictive, I’ve come to find out, and live music especially so. That first moment when the guitars shred your chest and every atom in your body reverberates—nothing else is like it. The first time I experienced it, it was a rush like no other. I never felt so alive, and every show since that first one has felt the same.

But it’s not just the music, or seeing a favorite band live. Something else happens in that time when you’re standing packed together on the floor with hundreds of other people all there for the same purpose. It’s a unity of spirit, a connection, like we are all part of a clan or a tribe. The vocalist cries “Jump!” and we all start jumping. Watching the crowd-surfers leaves me breathless; after all, what is crowd-surfing if not a demonstration of trust—trust that all those strangers won’t drop you (at least not intentionally)? And the moshers’ crazy, primeval spiral dance—surely it taps into some ancient ritual of community.

Those first notes explode with feeling—connection, art, life itself—and as I stand there, shoulder to shoulder with other fans, I understand my connection to the world, to people. We are all there for something we all love, to participate in artistic creation. Every show is new and vital. This is the thing about art (and yes, rock and metal music are arts)—without an audience, an artist is incomplete. And without art, we are incomplete.

This was the problem in 2020. I felt disconnected, free-floating, lost in a new reality, with nothing to ground me. Yes, recorded music was helpful. But there is simply nothing else like being there to jolt you back to life.

I’ve been following Kingdom Collapse since they popped up on my Instagram in 2021, when I first listened to their songs “Uprise” and “Unbreakable”. These songs resonated deeply, coming as they did upon the heels of a tumultuous presidential election and the pandemic.

When Kingdom Collapse initially announced that they would be an opener for From Ashes To New (FATN) on their Still Panicking Tour, the dates were all in the West and Midwest. But later, Reading PA showed up on the list. I stared at the post, and thought, I need to do this. I usually go to shows with my daughter, and Reading is in her neck of the woods.

Kristin was game to come along, so we bought tickets and waited. Finally, on that Friday, as planned, I hopped in my car for that 6+ hour drive. (She wasn’t home when I arrived—pause for shameless family promotion—she was photographing Shinedown’s concert in Hershey; see her Shinedown photos here).

Saturday started gray, with frost in the forecast, despite being mid-April. We did some antiquing in Adamstown, Pennsylvania (said to be the Antiques Capital of the USA) in the afternoon, and here the shift back to a normal world was evident. I’d been down here in March (when we discovered this area and vowed to come back) and people were masking against the last grip of the pandemic. But today, no masks. It was as though the pandemic never happened.

After busting our budgets, we drove the 16 miles to Reading. On the way into town, we scoped out the line at the Reverb—no one in sight—and thought we had time to grab a little fast food first.

Twenty minutes later, we headed back to the Reverb, with rain starting to spit. Even though we were 45 minutes ahead of the doors opening, a long line had appeared. We saw lots of FATN shirts, along with several shiny new Shinedown shirts. We hugged the side of the building to avoid getting doused–every so often water poured off the narrow roof ledge above as though someone had turned on a faucet.

The Reverb staff were very organized—paper tickets go here, electronic there—through a little anteroom, and we were inside. The Reverb is a large room with a round bar in the back center and stage opposite. At this moment, a misty cloud hung about the stage area suggesting smoke machines had been tested.

We were too late to get right up front, so we hung back to one side, to avoid any moshing that might start. The Reverb is small enough that wherever we stood, we’d have a good view. Another group of Kingdom Collapse fans was gathered near the bar.

Kristin and I were chatting and observing the scene when I happened to look in the direction that Kristin was looking, to see Jonathan Norris, the Kingdom Collapse vocalist, striding toward me, smiling, and asking if he was pronouncing my name right. And he was, perfectly. We had a great talk for about ten minutes; Jon mentioned the band is working on an album, and the challenge was the volume, the number of songs needed. “It’s about quality, not quantity,” he said. “Every song has to have the quality we want.” A few minutes later, Elijah Santucci, the band’s drummer, came over and introduced himself and chatted with us awhile. He caught up with us again at the end of the night.

Kingdom Collapse was the right band to break my pandemic live-music fast. An independent band, they have, through their own hard work over the last two years—during the pandemic, no less—arrived at an amazing place. Their songs “Uprise” and “Unbreakable” have spent weeks on the Sirius XM Octane Biguns Countdown, and their latest release, “Save Me From Myself”, appears destined for the same fantastic fate. The band did not let the upside-down world of the pandemic blow away their dreams. Instead, Kingdom Collapse has given us songs that tell us we are not alone, not disconnected, that we are in this together, and together we can get through anything.

Kingdom Collapse’s set was powerful despite this being the last show of the tour. They delivered that burst of vital energy I needed. And the energy level never dropped through the rest of the night. I went to the Reverb to support Kingdom Collapse but came away discovering a couple of new (to me) bands. I was already familiar with headliners FATN and Fire from the Gods. Both were early favorites in my new musical life, FATN’s “My Name” and Fire From the Gods’ “Right Now” having had a lot of play on SiriusXM’s Octane. In the coming weeks, I will be checking out the music of Above Snakes (from Boston) who opened the night, and Blind Channel (from Finland).

Toward the end of FATN’s set, we headed outside, to get a head start on departing the parking lot. The night was quiet—no clues to the excitement inside the building. The air was heavy with a cold dampness that suggested snow, and a few cars were dusted with frost. The cold front had arrived. Time to go home.

But time too, to plan ahead for the next concert—Metal Tour of the Year, in May, to see In Flames—and what I hope will again be my new normal: another year full of live music. Can’t wait. Stay tuned.