i was wandering around the internet the other day and noticed Mr. Enigk was playing a big stack of shows. follow the tour schedule and look for the seattle date… there’s none! alas! nothing to do but drive to portland and have an adventure i suppose. i brought my bff tessa along for the adventuring. she found us a place to stay, even! sweet! all is well!

on the way we stopped in shiny, happy olympia for food. after wandering around downtown for an hour and buying a top-down world map for tessa’s 4th grade class from my ex-future girlfriend at some bookstore, we settled upon some local mexican fare. i had a tostada with cactus pieces. i had to, since it was an adventure. cactus pieces are green. they don’t taste like much. but pickles do. but they don’t really belong on tostadas. but finding food in the first place was a welcome relief.

after circling a couple times, getting semi-lost once or twice and finding the correct location at random, we arrived at dante’s just in time to miss the first act. i don’t even know the guy’s name at this point. sorry guy.

dante’s is pretty nice, except for all the smoke. i forgot that we were in a state that allowed smoking in bars. gross. but it seems like a decent place. somewhere between el corazon and neumos, if you need a reference.

Damien Jurado
after the first few notes, i knew this was going to be a special evening. despite some excessive buzzing in Damien’s guitar feed, i was right. Mr. Jurado seems like your older brother up there as he sings his melancholy songs. i know he’s warning me of some future mistake i’m about to make but my heart just says “i know Damien, you’re right, but i’ve gotta make these mistakes myself. maybe we can sing these songs again, together, in a couple years.” it’s really great. i didn’t get to tell him that my housemate has a moped waiting around for him somewhere, though.

Jeremy Enigk
i’ve been listening to Jeremy Enigk sing since one fateful night in the early nineties when i turned on some local channel and watched bombshelter videos (or maybe not that show, now that i look up the playlists, but you should know about it anyways). in among all my favorite grungy punk videos was this video for a band called Sunny Day Real Estate. my whole life changed in the several minutes of this video. i pretty much stopped believing punk was my sole savior at that point and welcomed in emo and indie. i went and bought “Diary” (with the free poster) from fallout records and haven’t stopped loving it since.

but this isn’t about Sunny Day Real Estate or even The Fire Theft, a.k.a. Sunny Day Real Estate Vol. II. this is about Jeremy. i’ll be honest and say i don’t know too many Jeremy Enigk songs. but i wanted to hear more of them. he mentioned that this was the last show that he’d be playing SDRE/Fire Theft songs at. i thought that appropriate, as much as i loved singing along with in circles (i’m surprised i haven’t seen anyone with a “i dream to heal your wounds but i bleed myself” tattoo. maybe i need that one.) and heaven and some others. i want to hear more songs like canons, which is god damn amazing. particularly with drums and a band backing it up.

Mr. Enigk is looking a bit like Phil Collins these days. but still the kids go crazy because there is nothing like him anywhere. sometimes you have no idea what he’s talking about, but you know it must be some amazing story because he sings it like it’s life-changing. like tonight is your epiphany. like this is the moment you’ve been waiting years for. or at the very least, like tonight is the night that you’ve driven several hundred miles at a very slow pace and stopped in olympia on the way and brought a friend who had no idea and had adventures and then closed your eyes late at night happier than you’ve been since winter set in.