You'll Taste It In Time
Seeing Sunny Day Real Estate last Sunday in London is a confrontation of time in its brutality and grace.
On brutality: on places like YouTube almost every single one of their live shows from early to present day is available at one click, a time capsule compressing 34 years of their career into a few searches and scrolls. Within a matter of minutes I could see the same people at 19, 24, 35, 48, 52, rapidly aging into older men performing the same songs written when they were young adults at the height of their career. Along with all the lost opportunities, could-have-beens falling in and out of relevance through the decades.
Sunny Day Real Estate performing Pillars in 1999
Their first ever headline show in London/UK was in 2010 when the band was in their mid-30s, just a few weeks before I visited London for the first time as a teenager. If my memory is correct I had already read about them in a magazine that did a special feature on the most iconic Sub Pop releases at the label's 20th anniversary, although I was not drawn to their music until years later and was oblivious of where they were as a band at the time. It goes without saying that I, too, over those 16 years aged into a 30-year-old woman who experienced change and loss and would sometimes feel like a stranger to the person that I've turned into today. Like many people, sometimes I also wake up in the middle of the night and ask myself "how did I get here?!", not out of dissatisfaction but just shocked at the distance between now and the previous chapters that still felt like yesterday.
On grace: with time came crystallisation. They've grown older and wiser and arrived at a better place on both a personal and professional level. They reconciled, built upon their artistry, became even better musicians and play those songs from 30 years ago even better, objectively. They are getting waves of new young listeners who resonate with the timeless teenageness that is Diary. And with time I also found my way to their music organically through multiple unlikely long stops. It took me over 8 years from the point of learning about the band through the 2008 magazine to listening to Seven for the first time, liking Diary so much that I tried to search for a CD at Rough Trade East on my second visit to London in 2017, ordered a CD online in 2018, and it somehow took me another 8 years to explore beyond that one album. Time is what allowed us to eventually cross paths virtually, and later physically in London last Sunday, as this also happened to be the band's first headline show in Europe since their 2010 debut.
A snapshot of a timeless moment
In the 90 minutes when we were in the same space and meters apart, I experienced both a sense of timelessness (as in, it was as if time temporarily didn't exist) and a premonition of loss. The next day as an attempt to recover from the unrealness of the night before, I turned on a podcast where the band looked back on their 30-year journey. Jeremy saying something along the lines of "some things take 10 years to figure out" hit me deeply, and he said it with such lightness and peace that it somewhat eased my fear of transience. In simple words this again reinforces the teaching that instead of wanting to hold on to things, just have trust in time and let it flow. "You'll taste it in time".
Since my first visit to London 16 years ago, the city had also become one of my anchors. It represents an idealised version of what/where I could be in the future, but it has always been at a distance despite my attempts at finding my place there. Being in London this time also feels like a reckoning of the shadows of my past, my body seems to remember how to walk these same streets that I walked so many times when I was 21-23, except that at this moment in time I find myself no longer wanting to prove anything to this city. London is finally a place where I can be relaxed and in the moment and not be intimidated by its all consuming momentum and presence. While walking past the numerous structures and monuments embodying glory from the past, I notice that they no longer provoke a response.
I feel relieved that some of these shadows are still integral to my being and identity, although, as ever, I'm still chasing some kind of ideal with the understanding that it's as silly as wanting to chase the sun. What I have now is a lucky outcome nonetheless because there were so many ways in which the world/time/life could have swayed me yet I stood my ground as much as I could. Things went in and out of my life but what mattered always stayed. The layers of identities grown from fears and insecurities shredded off over the years and what's left now is finally closer to the truth.