It does last forever.

It’s hard to do a thing like this justice, stepping out at night into the sticky warm summer, driving out past buildings edged in neon lights and glinting under a big moon. Feeling a knot of responsibility unravel starting at your house, where the children are watching movies with their grandmother, and unfurling down highways, still attached to you and getting looser and looser, until you reach your destination. And you get out and walk among the hipsters, the indie guys and girls in their skinny jeans and mullets and cigarettes, drinking beer and projecting cool. And you are wearing your new blue summer dress and brown flats and you’re no hipster, but you feel it, and that’s good enough.
Walking into the tiny venue, a band called Whiskey Folk Ramblers takes the stage and the singer opens his mouth and sounds a bit like Johnny Cash, and you fall a little bit in love with the guy on the horn who is chubby and sloppy and scruffy, but he’s just such a character that you can’t help it. And he’s got that horn and he’s wailing on it, and a horn on a sticky warm summer night, underscoring a Johnny Cash moan? The unraveled knot of responsibilities is quivering behind you, vibrating with music, and you start to feel happier than you’ve felt in weeks.
And then Frontier Ruckus takes the stage, and they’ve got the horn and the banjo and the guy who plays a saw, for crying out loud, and that’s it: the knot snaps, that long thread lets go and you just feel perfect. And it all feels like nostalgia. It’s everyone’s childhood wafting from rusted wet screen doors and mosquito bite welts and sand in your shoes and sweat at your brow and the feeling of forever, that you are young and it will last and last. And the trick is that it does last forever. You just needed this banjo and this saw and these lyrics to remind you.

Dark Autumn Hour! Frontier Ruckus, y'all. from amber on Vimeo.