Commit This to Memory

Motion City Soundtrack in Indianapolis. June 4, 2016

A few months ago, we took a road trip to Indianapolis to see our favorite band, Motion City Soundtrack, for the last time. Sunday was their last show, so we just wanted to say a few things about the band and what they've meant to us.

Back in March, the band announced that they were breaking up and going on one more Farewell Tour. This was not something we were not going to miss, hence the 9 hour road trip. MCS has really been the soundtrack of our lives, and our relationship, over more than a decade. If you know the band, then that statement may have given you pause, as they sing more about heartbreak and self-destruction than love, but let me explain. (In case you missed it, Theo has previously written in this space about the ongoing saga of asking MCS to play our wedding. It obviously didn't happen, but that's ok.)

Theo & Amber with Claudio & Justin. Silver Spring. Jan 2015.

Theo introduced me to Motion City in 2005, shortly after he came back from Japan. He'd seen "Everything is Alright" on constant rotation on Fuse in his apartment in Muncie and picked up the album. I was living in Peoria at the time, and MCS was making a tour stop just west of me at Western Illinois University as part of the MTV Campus Invasion Tour. So we drove all the way out to the sleepy town of Macomb, Illinois for  the first concert we ever attended together, and the rest was history.

In our 11 years of following this band, we've been to 8 shows all over, including Indianapolis, Chicago (on more than one occasion), Urbana, DC, and Silver Spring, as well as a meet-and-greet at a Best Buy in Aurora, Illinois. We've gotten older, and the crowds have gotten younger, but the music has never ceased to be relevant to our lives. (Because I seem to be caught in a bittersweet nostalgia mode for the past week or so, I've had the last track from their new album, "Days Will Run Away" stuck on repeat.)

I'll never forget driving around sleepy Macomb after the show desperately looking for something to eat, navigating hordes of screaming teenage girls wearing plastic derby hats just to get my t-shirt signed by the band in Indianapolis while on their tour with Panic at the Disco. We rocked out in the third row at the Canopy Club in Urbana, Illinois and were thrilled to get a chance to chat with most of the band after the show. We sat in traffic for so long on I-90 in Chicago that we missed part of the band's too short set at the Aragon Ballroom when they toured with Weezer. (We both have an irrational hatred for Jack's Mannequin who never should have played a longer set on that tour.)

Amber with Matt. Indianapolis. June 216.

In 2012, we had just moved to DC and were having an absolutely miserable time. Theo was slogging his way through a heavy class load and I was commuting to NYC twice a week on a Greyhound bus. We were broker than broke and living in a horrible bedbug-infested apartment. When my parents asked what I wanted for my birthday, I said that I just wanted MCS tickets for their upcoming show at the 9:30 Club. Not only was the music amazing, it was so wonderful to experience something familiar in a new place. It felt like spending an evening with old friends.

Aside from traveling to their shows, the music has really been the soundtrack for our lives this past decade. Commit This to Memory helped me write seminar papers my first year in my doctoral program. Even if it Kills Me kept me going on the frequent drives from Urbana to DeKalb to visit Theo. While My Dinosaur Life lived in my CD player for about a year, it will always remind me of listening to it on repeat in 2010 while we drove from Detroit to Saginaw to bring my parents their new rescue bearded dragon. The day Go was released, Theo picked me up from my mind-numbing summer job at the mall and we listened to the album on the way home. And we played Panic Stations on repeat last fall along the entire western edge of Virginia when we returned to DC for Theo's dissertation defense and graduation.

 Last week's show in Indianapolis was perfect. Though it was crowded and hot in that too-small club, everything rocked and the whole crowd sang to the favorites. It was a perfect mix of a fewer new songs with the old standards to help us say goodbye. We also got to chat with most of the band afterwards to express a small amount of our gratitude for their music over the years. (Theo was much more eloquent with this in person than I was. I forgot the name of one of my favorite songs and inexplicably recited the list of cities where we'd seen MCS). Beyond the stellar music, the thing that kept us with MCS all these years was their generosity. Even though they were extraordinarily successful, they still took time to talk to fans after the show and interacted on social media. It's sad to think that we won't be driving somewhere for another MCS show some time next year, and I don't think we'll ever follow another band the way we have with this one. But thanks, MCS for everything. The future freaks us out too, but we're glad we got to spend these 10+ years with you.