Experiences with Art: Individual vs. Collective

I. A Note on Individualism:

Sometimes, I feel like I could spend an entire week alone and enjoy it. I’ve always been someone who needs to be alone at least part of the day to decompress. And with so many things being catered to individual experience, or at least marketed that way, it can be easy to do so. You don’t need friends to recommend you a new album, you can just launch Spotify and let it tell you what you want to listen to. It knows what you’ve listened before, knows how old you are and where you live, probably knows a whole lot of other data about you that it’s picked up from other websites along the way, and has a pretty good idea of what you will since it knows what you already do like. Say what you want about the dystopian nature of data collection on the internet – you must admit, sometimes, the algorithms are pretty spot on. And sometimes, one of the best ways to enjoy something is to do it alone. You can give it your 100% focus and attention, dive into it in a way that you might not be able to if someone else was enjoying alongside you.

And enjoy I do. Some days, it’s as though the only thing I do is listen to music. But the music is there whether I have other things to do or not. It’s there on my walk to and from class, on my trips idly wandering through the grocery story, in the comfort of my room when winding down after a long day, on my hour-and-a-half-or-so flight to Philadelphia I decided to book on a whim. Access to music is pretty much always there, just like access to anything is pretty much always there on the internet. And sometimes, it’s like I don’t know what I would do with my time otherwise. I recognize that there was a time before the internet, will almost certainly be a time after even if I cannot fully conceptualize it, but it’s always been around for me even if, at first, it was only in the form of a chunky, off-white monitor, dial-up, and Windows 95.

And so, I had the experience of growing up with access to all this music and the knowledge of how to, probably not-entirely-legally, download it to my Walkman via a sketchy file I obtained from LimeWire that had about a 10% chance of putting a virus on my grandmother’s computer. And this was probably all at the ripe age of seven.

Downloading music onto that Walkman is probably one of my earliest memories, next to telling my mother I didn’t want a baby brother and walking into school on my first day of kindergarten. I remember begging my grandmother to be allowed to download Holiday / Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day onto my Walkman even though it had a bad word in it, and I remember downloading it anyway after she said no. I remember immediately running to the computer to download any and every song I could by The All-American Rejects after hearing Move Along for the first time in line for one of the roller coasters at Cedar Point. And I remember making up a dance to go along with the baseball-themed song from High School Musical I had downloaded, complete with an ultrawide plastic baseball bat and a left-handed softball mitt I owned even though I’m not left-handed.

This is all to say that I’m quite fond of individual experiences. I don’t think I would have been able to fall as in love with music as much as I have, analyze lyrics as much as I have, or connect with art quite as deeply as I have if I was always worried about what someone else thought of it, how they interpreted it, how I looked in their eyes making up a dance to a song that felt juvenile to me even though I, myself, was juvenile. It was a lot easier to be myself when no one was looking.

I realized pretty early on in this project that in order to get a wider perspective on this topic, I was going to have to ask other people their thoughts. Everyone has their own thoughts and opinions and beliefs, and it would be stupid to ascribe objective truths to mine. Not that ascribing objective truths to things is what this project is about, it just felt important to me that I seek the opinions of others since I’m far from the only person in the world. I asked about their thoughts on individualism and their individual experiences with art, and they mirrored mine in a lot of ways, mirrored a lot of what I found online in blog posts and news articles. Common themes included centering one’s own feelings and personal connection to things rather than comparing, contrasting, or sharing them with others. Common experiences include finding a new musician through Spotify’s all-knowing algorithm and immediately binge listening to every song by that artist overnight.

It struck me as funny how, even in our seemingly individual experiences, we seem to focus on the same things. There’s a Twitter meme where someone will share a seemingly isolated experience on Twitter and people in the comment section will go, “I’ve never had an original experience in my life, huh?” I’ve been relating to that sentiment a lot these days.

II. A Note on Collectivism:

There’s a concept in sociology called collective effervescence. I had no idea what it was before I started this project, but it ended up being a critical concept to the project at hand. Collective effervescence is meant to describe that feeling you get when you are sharing some kind of moment, some kind of purpose, with others. It’s that feeling when you realize you are, potentially, at least in that moment, bigger than yourself. It’s that moment in the movie theater where something happens onscreen and everyone around you gasps in unison. It’s that moment at a wedding where you look around and realize everyone’s eyes are locked on the people getting married.

For me, it’s that moment at a concert where the musician’s most popular song comes on and suddenly, the crowd gets ten times louder because the whole room is singing along to every word. There’s a certain kind of irony to being in the middle of a crowd while hundreds of people yell-singing along to the lyrics, “Nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody, ooh, nobody, nobody, nobody.” During interviews, the artist has talked about how she came up for the idea for the song as she was having a breakdown alone in her apartment, in a country she had spent six lonely weeks in, just chanting to herself “nobody, nobody, nobody”. I can’t verify the accuracy of those statements, but if the feeling the song gives me is anything to go by, I would say, yeah, that sounds about right. I wonder what it was like having that song become one of her most popular, whether it told her anything about the state of the world that so many people felt alone to the point that they could recite a song about loneliness word for word with hundreds of other people at any of her given shows that year. It seems like there was some kind of lesson in there, about how all those lonely people could come together in some way, even if it was just to share their experience with loneliness for those three minutes and 13 seconds it takes to get through the song.

For the people I asked, collectivism meant sharing an experience with others. It meant being surrounded by others as they experience the art, maybe even collaborating and discussing it with them. It meant feeling closer to others, even if they aren’t quite sure how they got there. And their examples were pretty similar to mine – camping out to see their favorite artist, yelling along to the words of a musician they love with hundreds of others in a crowd, belting out I Really Like You by Carly Rae Jepsen with the rest of the students in their middle school art class.

When you really get down to it, the collective is formed by a group of individuals and is often informed by the experiences they had as individuals. When I’m talking to my friend about a song we both love, I am usually pulling from my experiences listening to and analyzing that song by myself, my interpretation of what we are hearing. When I decide to go to a concert, it’s because I have previously formed a connection with the music on my own.

III. And Their Inexplicable Connection:

I started off this project wanting to take a look at the collective and the individual as separate entities, but the more I dug into it, the more I realized that we cannot escape the link between the individual and collective anywhere, really. For clarification, I’m using “we” here as a stand-in for “all of humankind”, even though I know I don’t really have the qualifications or a right to do that. I don’t really know who would hold those qualifications or that right; I’m just calling it like I see it.

I see that link at the café near my house, where numerous people sit alone on their computers typing away about who knows what, all of whom are looking for their latest caffeine kick in their individual orders. I see that link in my Google Form document for this project asking if I want to look at each person’s answers individually or a summary of all of the answers provided. I see that link in my Spotify app, recommending hundreds of new songs and artists it thinks I as an individual will like based on what I have listened to while at the same time displaying the current listenings of my friends and family on the side of the page. I see that link in my apartment, where my roommates and I retreat to our rooms alone on the regular, only to bump into each other in the common room and go on hours-long tangents to our days, watching the latest episode of Ted Lasso together on yet another platform that tailors itself to what its algorithm thinks our individual interests are.

It’s kind of funny. Before working on this project, I don’t think I would have paid much attention to that kind of thing, but once you notice something, it’s pretty difficult to un-notice it. A collective is made up of a group of individuals, and individuals long to share their lives with a collective, at least to some extent. That’s a generalization, sure, but it’s one I feel good making. I am finally beginning to understand what scientists mean when they say humans are social creatures, that they need to build community with one another, not only as a means of survival and support but also just in making these little everyday things worth anything at all.

I am someone who, as I previously established, enjoys doing things alone, who needs to be alone a lot of the time to rest and reset, and yet I cannot begin to think of what my life would be like if I couldn’t walk the two steps it takes to get from my bedroom door to my roommate’s, pull her away from whatever she’s doing, and go down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about how the novella Le Petit Prince connects to that TV series we finished last week. I cannot begin to think of what my life would be like if I couldn’t invite my best friend from high school to go with me to the next tour of that musician we couldn’t stop annoying all of our friends about in tenth grade. I cannot begin to think about what my life would be like if I couldn’t share it with the people I love and care about. And I couldn’t imagine that experience for others, even if I know they may not share the same outlooks and priorities as I do.

Just to prepare you for the next thing, I can see how this next story may seem or feel like a whole lot of nothing. It gave a lot of details that maybe could have been left out, in a different project. But I really wanted to dive into what I discovered during the course of this project, the implications of the individual and the collective being inextricably linked, and I cannot do that without giving a detailed account of the moment in my life that I believe best embodies this connection.

My therapist recently asked me to recall my best memory. I am someone who, when asked a favorite anything, immediately blanks on any experience or preference I have ever had. But, to my surprise, I did have an answer to her question – one that I could think of off the top of my head instead of sitting in awkward silence, staring blankly at my her for a minute straight while trying desperately to think of some way, any way, to answer her question. It was the first time I saw my favorite artist perform live. I remember that moment and the lead-up to it way more clearly than I do most days, or, at least, I have convinced myself that I do.

It was Sunday, August 4^th, 2019, and I got up at 5AM to get ready for the day ahead. I got dressed in an outfit I had picked out the night before, packed my stuff up, and waited for my Uber that I had booked in advanced out of equal parts anticipation and anxiety for this day. The Uber got me to the train station in my city in less than 20 minutes. To my knowledge, I had never been on a train before, certainly never been to that station before, and I did not know what to expect. I found a seat on one of the benches in the middle of the station and sat down, just taking in my surroundings. Apparently, they filmed part of a Tom Hanks movie there because they needed a train station that looked like it came directly out of the 70’s, and that station hadn’t been renovated in as many years. I sat there for what felt like forever. The train did not arrive on time, and a not-small part of me was convinced that it had already come, and I somehow missed it despite getting there two hours earlier than its scheduled departure time; now a seasoned Amtrack Midwest connoisseur, I find it kind of funny that I expected it to get to the station anywhere near its scheduled arrival time.

I stood up with my things and made my way toward the counter very slowly, intending to ask if I had somehow missed my train, but there was a man in front of me inquiring about its status, so I stepped outside of line, my fears somewhat abated. The train eventually arrived, and I headed out the back door of the building to the tracks. I waited in the designated coach line and found an empty seat near a window. By some miracle, the seat next to me managed to stay empty the entire time. I don’t remember much about the train ride itself, other than listening to music, losing cell reception, and seeing a lot of cows and even more grass and even more fields of wheat. I also posted a cheesy quip on my Instagram story about my trip. The artist I was on my way to see has a song that goes, “If you’re going, take the train,” and I thought it was fitting. I am slightly embarrassed to say that I decided to go by train in no small part because of that lyric. It also helped that I didn’t have car, and train fare is way cheaper than flying.

There’s one place, on the very outskirts of Michigan, right next to the water, that I remember taking note of because I thought the buildings looked so pretty. I take note of it every single time I pass by it on my way to Chicago. It feels almost familiar now. I still have the Google Maps location pinned so I won’t forget them, swearing to myself every time I pass by them that I will visit someday. It felt like forever until the time zone changed. We got just into the Chicago city lines or, at least, just began to pass by signs for the city, and I remember thinking that it looked different than I had imagined. That’s probably just because we weren’t in the city center yet, so the high-rises hadn’t come into view. I remember thinking to myself that I should take note of the graffiti, but I couldn’t tell you what that graffiti said or depicted. I remember wondering how, logistically, some of the graffiti got there in the first place, how a person could reach those spaces. I remember thinking that it took a lot longer to get to Union Station once we entered the city limits than I thought it would. I remember thinking about how I didn’t know the L went aboveground. We got to Union Station, eventually, and I remember being surprised that the drop-off point for the Amtrack train I was on was underground, or at least sheltered.

I got off, and all of my anxiety about the day flooded back to me. I had no idea where I was going. I found the nearest bathroom and collected myself there, pulling up Google Maps and steeling myself for the journey ahead. I’ve found that bathrooms are a good place for things like that, no matter where you are. Eventually, I gathered up all of my courage and made my way out of the bathroom. In no time, I found myself lost inside of the station, with no idea how to get out, but I wasn’t about to ask. I probably made my way around every corner of the station and then some before I finally found an exit and booked it the hell out of there. I spotted a group of people that I knew, immediately upon seeing their outfits, were going to the same music festival as I was, and decided to follow them a ways, double checking with Google Maps that I was heading in the right direction. After a while, the group no longer seemed like they were going the same way I was headed, so I continued on my own, and I found myself outside the gates of the festival.

I wandered around the gate looking for an entrance before finally spotting one. It hit me, as soon as I got within the gates of the festival, that I had been up for at least five hours at that point and hadn’t eaten, so I wandered around until I found a stand that looked like it made decent Mexican food. The festival gates had only just opened recently at that point, so the stand was not fully open yet, and I ended up getting some nachos instead of whatever it was I had originally wanted because it was all they were ready to serve. Breakfast of champions. I sat alone at a picnic table across the street, eating my nachos and dodging the bees and hiding from the sun. The nachos were pretty good, if I’m remembering correctly.

Eventually, I found myself in line for what I would eventually find out was a booth sponsored by American Eagle. Someone working the booth was going around the line collecting names and emails to sign them up for an American Eagle rewards program. In that line, I met someone with the same birthday as me, year and all. She was an art student in Chicago. I don’t remember her name, and I can’t really recall her face, but I remember being obsessed with her outfit and so stunned by the fact that out of all of the days of the year, all of the years someone could be born, I just so happened to stand in line next to someone with my same birthday. It felt like fate, like we were connected somehow. Once my turn in line came up, I entered the booth and I never saw her again.

I took some kind of personality quiz at the American Eagle booth and it assigned me the color, yellow and gave me some blurb about who I was as a person, who all yellows were. Personally, I would not have chosen yellow for myself at that time, but whatever. It’s a brand-based personality quiz I was taking at a music festival. It did not have any serious baring on me, personally. In the booth, workers gave me a temporary tattoo of a hand signing “rock on” on the back of my hand and a yellow see-through fanny pack. I think I might have taken a picture in some kind of photobooth-esque stand. I don’t think I got the pictures developed, but maybe they gave me a QR code or something. I never did anything with that picture, if they did. I don’t really remember much more than that about the booth, except that it was a nice, albeit temporary, escape from the blaring sun. I do remember the temporary tattoo being etched into my skin for days after the festival, the sunburn that coated the stretch of my skin after the festival, retaining an outline of the then-faded tattoo. A hand etched into a hand. I thought it was ironic.

I checked the daily artist lineup on my phone, looking for the one musician I was there to see. She didn’t play until the end of the day, but I wanted to scope out the stage so I would have an easier time finding it later. I found it in no time, the American Eagle stage. American Eagle seemed to be following me everywhere that day. There was barely anyone in the crowd, so I sat back and watched some musicians I had never heard of sing music I didn’t particularly like. I stuck with the set, though. I don’t know why. Maybe I just liked the experience of being so close to the stage. I was at the barricade, after all. I’d never been at the barricade at a concert until that point, and I made it my mission to get to the barricade at the set I was there to see.  

I checked the daily artist lineup again, searching for any artist I recognized. Forty more minutes until Ryan Beatty took the Bud Light stage. That’s where I was headed, then. It wasn’t close to the American Eagle stage, but it wasn’t far, either. I wasn’t Ryan Beatty’s biggest fan, so I felt content just hanging back behind the crowd and sitting on the lawn. I remember liking his shirt, but I couldn’t tell you why. I don’t even remember what it said.

I only really knew him through BROCKHAMPTON features, so I found out what his music was like live and in stereo. More pop than I had imagined, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I added a few of his songs to my Spotify as the set went on. His set ended, and I had to figure out what to do next. Time to check the artist lineup again.

A musician I listened to casually, Joji, was set to play on the other side of the park in an hour. It wouldn’t take me nearly that long to get over there, so I explored the festival a bit more. I stumbled upon the two smallest stages in the festival, one of which Alex G was playing at. I didn’t know it then, but he would become one of my favorite artists a few years later. At the time, I stood and watched a few minutes of his set and made a mental note to myself to look him up later. Later came and I didn’t remember to look him up, but my Spotify algorithm and Tumblr mutuals knew me well enough to recommend him over and over until I finally gave his music a real listen and immediately bought tickets to his next tour. That kind of thing is sort of a pattern for me, given that the entire reason I was at that music festival was because my Spotify algorithm and Tumblr mutuals had recommended another musician’s music to me before I finally listened and fell head over heels for the music.

I pulled myself away from his set and made my way to the stage Joji would be at. I used the bit of downtime I had to rest on the lawn. It’s not like I was trying to make it to the barricade, so resting for a bit wasn’t going to ruin my plans. Finally, after what felt like a while in the early August heat, the show began, and me and hundreds of, as far as I knew, strangers belted along to song after song, doing that sort of arms-in-the-air, hips-sort-of-swaying-but-not-really dance that you do when you’re in the middle of a crowd of people on a hot, humid day in a city you just became acquainted with hours ago. I remember the show being one of the most bizarre sets I had ever seen. At one point, he gave fake spoilers for the then-new Toy Story movie that I believed for months until I finally got around to watching it, realizing that hey, Woody didn’t die after all!

The set came and went, and as the crowd disbursed, I – you guessed it! – pulled out my phone and checked the artist lineup. By this point, I figured it was late enough to start camping out for the set I was there to see, so I set out to the tail end of the JID concert. There was a line of porta potties on the street directly next to the stage, and I hadn’t gone to the bathroom for hours at that point, so I made the valiant decision to line up to use one of them. It certainly wasn’t the best experience of the day, but it maybe wasn’t the worst, either. At least I wouldn’t have to pee during the set I was there to see. I sat back on the lawn in front of the stage as JID performed his final few songs and made a beeline to the barricade as soon as his set was over.

I made it to the second row in the audience, directly behind the people at barricade, and waited. Some people in front of me eventually left, and I made it to the barricade. To be honest, I probably needed that for stability at that point. It was a hot day, and I decided it would be a wonderful idea to eat as little as possible and drink as little as possible after that porta potty visit so that I wouldn’t have to leave my spot in the crowd. Probably not the smartest move, but I was ready to suspend my humanly duties of eating and drinking for a few hours if it meant being front row for that set, and it did pay off, so here’s to making bad decisions, I guess.

Eventually, more and more people lined up behind me for the next set, a DJ I’d never heard of called Lane 8. If using the porta potties wasn’t the worst experience I had that day, that set certainly was. Sorry to any Lane 8 fans out there. Maybe it was just because I was hungry and achy and mildly to moderately dehydrated and I just wanted to see the musician I was there to see, but I was straight up not having a good time in that front row. At one point, he left the DJ station and bowed in the middle of his set. I was in the front row, so I desperately tried to keep my laughter under control, but I don’t know how good of a job I did. Other people seemed to be vibing with the music, so I tried to force myself to like it, I really did, but I was too sober to find any kind of enjoyment out of it at all, sans the laughter. Eventually, after what felt like far too long to be what was most likely around 45 minutes, the set ended, the crowd once again disbursed, and I felt like I could breathe a bit better.

This was the moment I had been waiting for. My favorite musician of all time was set to play in just 30 minutes. I excitedly snapped a photo of the stage and the barricade to send to my aunt, who had absolutely no idea who this musician was but had been forced to listen to me go on and on about her music numerous times in the past. She sent back something along the lines of “cool!”, which, yeah, I wouldn’t disagree, but it didn’t feel like she totally grasped the severity, the true importance of this moment to me; I was seeing my favorite musician for the first time, and I was in the front row. I hadn’t been in the front row of any concert before that day, let alone one I was so excited to see, one that I had taken off work for and made my way to Chicago for the first time for and spent at least a month’s worth of my wages on. This was kind of a huge deal for me as someone who, according to my Spotify Wrapped, listened to around 75,000 minutes of music that year and was in the top 0.01% of listeners for that artist.

Among the waves of crew members and musicians in the tour band setting up onstage, I spotted her. The musician I was there to see – Pitchfork’s 2018 indie darling Mitski.

The first thing I noticed about her was her glasses, those skinny, wire-framed ones that you can find in spades on any college campus. The second thing I noticed was about her was she was blocking the stage herself, meticulously marking the floor with masking tape to remind herself where she should be during her performance. As someone who had only recently escaped the clutches of high school theater, I was overly excited to see her do this. It was almost as if the things we did to make our theater performances better in high school were things that real-life entertainers did to make the performance go more smoothly! Who would’ve guessed? Either way, it seems pretty rare for a musician to do that themself, at least at the shows I’ve attended. I hadn’t seen a musician do that before, and I have not seen a musician do it since.

She finally returned backstage about 15-20 minutes before the show started, as the commotion that comes with setting up any music set winded down. Before the show, I made conversation with some of the people around me. There was a man who didn’t really know who Mitski was, who liked to stand at the barricade for music festivals and discover musicians he had never heard of before. There were two girls a bit younger than me who had never been to a concert before, let alone a music festival. There was a person to my left, whose outfit I could not look away from, who had just flown into Chicago from Los Angeles for the festival that morning and had plans to go to a different music festival as soon as they returned. The minutes ticked by as I learned more and more about these strangers’ lives and experiences, the knowledge that I would probably never see any of them after this day firmly planted in the back of my mind.

Finally, there was some real action onstage again. The stage was set up fairly simply. On the back wall, the name MITSKI was lit up in capital letters, and there was a small wooden table and chair placed in the middle of the stage sitting on top of some of the blocking tape. The tour band walked onstage and got their instruments ready. The keyboardist, Michelle, seemed to have a following of her own outside of touring with Mitski if the crowd chanting her name was anything to go by. I made a mental note to follow her on Instagram and Twitter after the show, and I actually remembered to follow through with my mental note that time. It was a good choice; her posts are delightful.

The crowd slowly settled until suddenly, the opening chords of Dan the Dancer rang out, and Mitski walked onstage singing about Dan and the long limbs he got from leading day to day, hanging onto a cliff that stretched him every day. I didn’t particularly love that song in comparison with her others before that day, but I walked out of the set for a newfound appreciation for it. Either way, I knew every word, so I immediately started singing along, very conscious of the fact that my voice did not sound great to those around me, but neither did theirs, so I wasn’t too bothered. I don’t remember the exact order of the set after that, except that I’m fairly certain she ended with Drunk Walk Home, my Twitter username’s namesake.

What I do remember is being in awe of what someone could do with only a table, a chair, and their body. The performance was absolutely spectacular. There was no grandiose body contortions or dancing so hard and so fast, you wondered how exactly she was keeping up with the vocal performance, but the movements lent themselves to the songs in a way that was perfect for the tour. I can’t remember ever feeling as connected to the music as I did watching her perform it in real time, and at that point, I had probably racked up hundreds of hours listening to it. It was something that I couldn’t have experienced alone, but I couldn’t have connected with it then as much if I hadn’t already listened to the songs on my own so much, either.

There were three or four moments that stood out to me the most. Describing them cannot do them justice, you just had to see it, but I’ll try my best. There’s a part in her song First Love / Late Spring where she says, “wild women don’t get the blues, but I find that lately, I’ve been crying like a tall child.” The lyrics themselves were enough to send me into a tailspin the first time I heard them, but during the performance, she did this thing with her arms like she was praising a higher power before throwing them down in defeat, and something about that simple act has irrevocably changed what I feel when I listen to the song. I can’t exactly describe how, it’s one of those things where you just feel it, but I don’t really feel the need to describe it, either.

There was another part in the set where she was singing the bridge of I Bet on Losing Dogs, lamenting to the audience, “I only want you when I’m finally fine, how you’d be over me looking in my eyes when I come, someone to watch me die, someone to watch me die,” and at that point, she was kneeling on the table as if she was sat on top of another person, moving her knees back and forth to crawl in place. It almost seemed like she, herself, was the losing dog she bet on. I don’t think that is fully what she intended when she wrote the song, but after watching that performance, I certainly do think that’s part of it, an idea that had not occurred to me up to that point.

Another moment that stood out to me was her performance of Geyser. Clearly conflicted with herself, she sings, “’Cause you’re the one I got, you’re the one I got, so I’ll keep turning down the hands that beckon me to come. Though, I’m a geyser, feel it bubbling from below, hear it call, hear it call, hear it call to me constantly, and hear the harmony only when it’s harming me, it’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real enough,” anxiously moving around in the chair before finally standing up in one fluid motion, pacing around the table that was on its side at this point, and finally crouching down, clutching the side of the table with one hand while hiding behind it. I’ve always felt the conflict in the song – Mitski’s music has a really good way of making the audience feel what she’s trying to convey – but it was never as clear as it was in that moment. Suddenly, the implications of her repeating these words over and over, like affirmations to herself that this is how she actually feels, what she actually believes, came barreling down in a way they hadn’t on their own.

The final stand out moment for me came during her final song, Drunk Walk Home. There’s a part at the end of the recorded song where she just starts screaming in the microphone, and it’s very much primal, but at the same time, it seems like there’s some measure of control in the way that she screams. She screams on purpose, matching the screaming with the rest of the song. It’s kind of like that scene in Midsommar where Dani finds her boyfriend sleeping with another woman, and the other young women in the commune breathe and scream with her. She cut the scream altogether during the live performance, supplementing it with more emphasis on the guitar and the movements she was making. She started at the back of the stage, the bottom half of her body hidden away behind the table that now resided back there, still on its side with its legs facing the wall of the stag. She crouched down again, and slowly made her way to the front of the stage until the final chord of the song let out. The lights flashed bright red before cutting to black each time the guitar vamped up, until the very last moment of the song. That scream, which before seemed so essential to the song, was not missed during that performance. Everything it conveys, everything it adds to the song, was conveyed and added with the performance alone. It occurred to me, after watching that performance, the myriad of ways a person can get to the same point, the myriad of ways someone can share their experiences and emotions with others. I think it would be disingenuous to chalk all of her music up to simply sharing her experiences and emotions with others – it obviously takes a lot of time and effort and artistry to do what she does – but I think what makes it so compelling, to me at least, is the way she can walk you through experiences and make you feel like they connect deeply with your own, whether that’s true or not.

The musicians walked offstage, the set ended, the crowd disbursed, and I called my grandmother to let her know I was on my way to the train station. My cell service sucked, and I am sure she could barely hear me over the sound of the people around, but I think she got the message. I had about half an hour until my train was supposed to depart, so you bet I hauled ass out of that park and to the train station. It was dark, I was alone, my entire body ached, I needed food and water, and there was a woodchip stabbing my foot with each and every step I took. Every time I saw another person, it put me on edge in the way that walking alone at night puts pretty much everyone on edge. Finally, I couldn’t take the woodchip anymore and stopped at the edge of a bridge to whack it out of my shoe before hurriedly sticking it back on and power walking the rest of my way to Union Station, where I almost immediately got lost again. I eventually made my way to where the trains departed but had absolutely no idea where to go from there. I finally spotted someone working at one of the desks, but people were already in line to talk to her, and at that point, I did not have long until the train was going to depart. I don’t quite remember what happened next. I remember standing in line and getting increasingly anxious about missing my train and listening to what the woman told the two people ahead of me, but I don’t remember actually talking to the person who worked there or anything, really, until I made my way to the train.

I found an empty seat, plopped down into it, and put my headphones on for the four-and-a-half-hour ride ahead, apparently not having gotten enough Mitski during the show. Eventually, a woman and her child sat beside me. About an hour or two into the train ride, I felt someone tap my shoulder. The woman asked me if I could watch her kid while she went to the bathroom, and I said sure, only half comprehending what I was agreeing to. I asked the kid about her trip to Chicago and where she was going now, but for the most part, we sat in awkward silence as the kid messed around with one of her toys. Maybe the silence was only awkward for me, though. The mother eventually made her return on just the wrong side of too late for a bathroom trip, but it’s not like I had anything better to do, so I didn’t mind much.

I popped my headphones back in, plugged in my phone, closed my eyes, and zoned out until I was startled from my half-sleep by the commotion of the passengers next to me getting off the train. We were nowhere near the Toledo stop yet, so I went back to my half-sleep pretty quickly. Eventually, the song Carry Me Out by – surprise, surprise – Mistki came on and once again, I was startled from my half-sleep, though this time it was by the roaring sound of the guitar during the second half of the song, where it really picks up. Any tiredness I was feeling immediately left my body. It felt like some sort of spiritual revelation, but what it actually was is that second wave you get after you’ve been awake for far too long but still can’t quite find it in yourself to go to sleep. It was around 2AM, and we had about an hour left to go – or so we thought. Eventually, our train was halted by a freight train, which took priority since the freight train companies are usually the ones who own the rails. It wouldn’t have been so annoying if we hadn’t literally been five minutes away from the station at that point, but that’s classic Toledo for you. After about 45 minutes, the freight train passed, we made it to our station, and I called another Uber.

Only 22 hours had passed since my last Uber trip, but it sort of felt like a lifetime had passed. At the very least, it felt like a week had passed. The Uber was surprisingly chippy for someone awake at 3:30AM, but I did my best to answer his questions with the same enthusiasm he showed me. I just got back from Chicago. I was there for a music festival. Yes, the shows were cool. It was my first time in the city. I definitely want to go back again sometime. After a few minutes, the conversation died down and we sat in companionable silence for the rest of the 20-or-so minute trip. I fished out my house keys, locked up behind me, and made a bee line to my bed, where I promptly passed out after stowing away my bag.

I didn’t really go into this story intending for it to be as long as it is, but it was probably the best example I could think of to get my point across: individualism and collectivism don’t just exist in separate vacuums, they work together, for and against one another. I wouldn’t have gone to that music festival if it weren’t for some of my friends pushing me to listen to Mitski, but I also wouldn’t have gone if I hadn’t made such a connection with her music alone, racking up thousands of minutes on Spotify, listening to her songs repeatedly until I knew every word. It took me less than a month of listening to decide that I would see her on tour. I bought my train and festival tickets and headed to Chicago alone to have this experience, but make no mistake, I would not have had this experience without the countless people I met and interacted with and sang alongside throughout the day. I may not have been there with anyone, but I certainly wasn’t there alone, and at the end of the day, I was at that show to see someone else perform.

I could probably spend another hour picking apart the interconnective web of individualism and collectivism that made up that particular experience, but I feel like I’ve made my case well enough as it is. Maybe you, dear reader, can spend the hour picking those out if you feel up to it. Or maybe you can spend the next hour thinking about how these connections show up in your own life. I won’t tell you what to do one way or the other.

I don’t know how much this realization matters at the end of the day, but figuring it out made it feel like it mattered to me. I think I view life just a bit differently because if it. Like I said at the beginning, I am someone who values and enjoys their alone time, but I am coming to appreciate the fact that I get this enjoyment in part because I know I won’t be alone forever. That would just be an upsetting existence.