The Cavetown Concert Made Me Cry

Matt and my older kid both seem to lack the music appreciation gene, so when my younger kid, around the ages of 12-13, started to get really into music, omg I was thrilled. Finally, someone to listen to music with! Someone to make mixtapes for! 

Someone to go to concerts with!!!

Cavetown and Ricky Montgomery are a couple of the kid's OG loves, at the forefront of that first wave of music that she discovered for herself. I love these guys, too, in a complicated mix of nostalgia for that awesome little tween I used to have and genuine appreciation for how genuinely good they both are. Cavetown, especially, is always going to be, for me, the experience of driving to and from ballet daily with my newly-minted teenager, listening to those earnest teen folk-pop anthems on endless repeat. 

I was VERY excited, then, for the teenager and I to join the rest of Central Indiana's emo teens at our first Cavetown/Ricky Montgomery concert. Imagine: mother/daughter bonding to the dulcet crooning of Ricky Montgomery! 

This is an accurate depiction of my level of happiness for the entire evening:

Fun fact: this is the photo I now text the kids whenever I want to enthusiastically agree with something they've written. They both have steadfastly refused to give me any positive reinforcement in any manner for this, even though it is objectively awesome.

In the interests of Family Bonding, we dragged a couple of less-enthusiastic companions with us, but then immediately ditched them when they weren't willing to stand up front with us for two hours before the concert started. Vibe killers, the both of them!

I'm pretty sure I had an out-of-body experience when Ricky Montgomery came onstage, I was so happy and excited. Like, my god. I fell in love with his music during the pandemic lockdown, when I thought that we were all going to die. But we didn't die, and now here I am, at an outdoor concert with the people I love the most, listening to this music that I listened to back when I thought I might never go to another concert again.

I tried taking some videos of my favorite songs, like I saw all the other cool kids doing. But, um, nobody told me that you're not supposed to be loudly singing along when you take your videos, ahem. So please join me in my own combined horror/amusement at the following clip, in which you can clearly hear me both sobbing with happiness and loudly singing off-key to my favorite Ricky Montgomery song:

Bless. My. Heart.

Here are some of my other favorite Ricky Montgomery songs:

 

Most of them are from his pre-pandemic album that I played on repeat all during lockdown. Lockdown Julie would have loved to know this day was coming!

Check out this gross guy, though:

That's a photo of him in between sets, as we're all just standing there, putting his foot directly in front of the teenager's body, then leaning his ass back into her. The teenager immediately got my attention, because GROSS, but we weren't giving up our standing spots for nothing, so I nudged my foot in right beside hers, then, like Indiana Jones switching a golden idol for a bag of sand, I sidled into her exact spot while she took mine.

I waited a beat so that I could experience that, indeed, this absolute nasty asshole of a man was, indeed, pushing his nasty ass against me, and then I said VERY loudly, "Can you stop pressing your butt against me!?!?" 

The nasty asshole jumped away like he'd been slapped when he realized at this moment that he was assaulting not a teenaged girl, but a shouty late-40s woman, and everyone turned to look at us, including his female concert companion, and I gave him SO much stink-eye while he lied about "saving someone a spot," and he left us both well alone after that.

Seriously, though, imagine a world in which a teen girl could go to a public place and not be assaulted in some way by a gross man. If she can't avoid it at a Cavetown concert, of all places, then where in the world IS she safe?

 Fortunately, no other incidents occurred, and eventually, there came Cavetown!

When it comes to Cavetown, my emotions are deep. I literally love him the way that I love my kids' friends. He's easily young enough to be one of my own kids, and I've been listening to him with my own kid since before his voice changed. To me, Cavetown's songs feel like it felt to have that young teen--witnessing a new social maturity, a new and uncomfortable level of self-awareness, those first signs of the anxiety and depression that it feels like all teenagers these days suffer through, the accompanying respect and acceptance of a diversity of people that these same kids are also graced with--how can it have been so few years ago, because it seems so far away?

But look at us now.

Here's "Juliet," with just a little off-key singing on my part:

And here's where Ricky Montgomery came back out and I lost my mind with happiness again:

I really love that they're all just wearing their comfy clothes to perform in:

They're already working hard--I *want* them to be comfortable!

Also, apparently that song was a popular moment to make into a Tiktok! Here's another I found:

Here's where I realized that I was going to cry during this set, too, because all these kids here, and in particular my own kid, have worked so hard and been so brave and look where they get to be tonight:

Thank goodness for concerts. Thank goodness for Cavetown. Thank goodness for a beautiful summer night, and a crowd of young people screaming the lyrics to the song that was your kid's favorite when she was thirteen.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, confrontations with gross men, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!