Nostalgia.

For about the past two weeks, I have been getting random intense feelings of nostalgia. Maybe it's the changing seasons or something, but what I know for sure is there are some days I want to go back in time. This all started when I was looking through old documents at my internship and found a tour press release for Motion City Soundtrack and The Format. These two (fantastic) bands toured together in 2006 and three of my best friends and I took a super-fun road trip to Cleveland, OH for the show at the Agora Theater. It was a date featured prominently on the release - March 31, 2006. The fourth time I would see Motion City Soundtrack live in less than a year. (For those curious minds out there, to date I've been to 8 MCS shows. Great times!)
As I was reading this press release and as The Format was serendipitously pumping through the speakers in our office, I could not help but remember my former self, a girl from suburban Ohio, about to graduate Catholic school and head south to a Baptist university with a music business program that no one I knew had even heard of. If you would have told me then I would be interning with the publicity company for these bands who made music I listened to on repeat while driving in my car, I would have laughed. But here I am.
Tonight when we were at Island Def Jam, I had another bout of intense nostalgia. Erik brought up Fall Out Boy and the fact that their strong internet fan base was a tipping point in their success at a major label. I instantly remembered sitting in my den after school and streaming From Under the Cork Tree on purevolume.com. This was in February and that album dropped in late April. I remember hearing "Sugar, We're Going Down" and thinking "WOW." I had been listening to FOB for almost a year and my love for the pop-punk GEM that is Take This to Your Grave led me to become a total fan girl of Pete Wentz and Co. Needless to say their impeding massive success story turned me away from them for a while (it's SO not punk to like mainstream bands), but they always have a place in my heart--and my CD player.

I think it's important for all of us to remember that we are music fans first and formost. The sole reason I got to this place in my life is that I lived for this music, these bands. Recently, the business side of music has made me a little jaded. The hunt for the next big thing, the next way to make a buck off the emotions of song annoys me from time to time. I don't know about you but the second I forget about being "Jessica who blasts pop-punk at top volume everyday" or the moment I don't feel a sense of longing to just be the girl driving around listening to Motion City and singing along from the front row of a show in Cleveland, is the second I leave the industry. I'm doing what I'm doing so that other kids across the country who are like the teen I was can connect to the music that so changed my life.

Luckily, I haven't reached the point of total cynicism just yet and the new MCS single makes me just as happy as when I heard them for the first time :)