It’s shocking when the curtain drops. For an hour, you were sitting before the second stage, red light pulsing occasionally, the atmosphere set by ominous magnetic loops. Then you’re treated to a thumping DJ set by opening act Boys Noize. All of this is prelude, because you don’t expect the naked vulnerability when the curtain on that second stage drops. It looks like a cube dropped in the center of the arena, like something from another dimension has found its way to our reality. The curtain drops and there he is. This man has provided the soundtrack for over thirty years of your life. He’s probably done more to shape the contours of your life than anyone. He’s right there, he’s at a piano, and he begins slowly, but with purpose. He’s taught you what it means to be vulnerable, and you, you’re an open wound that everyone surrounding you in your life can see. You’ve had to learn how to live with that naked vulnerability, because you can’t hide it. You’ve been broken more times than you can count, sometimes by your own hand. And he’s right there.

It’s shocking that he would just appear before everyone like that, intimate, an exposed nerve without the anger and force his music is known for. There’s an eruption of cheers before he pushes down the first chord, before he speaks a word. “I think you always had a feeling… like you knew it all along.” It’s not even a well-known song, a soft piece emanating from his soundtrack work. Still you know all the words, you speak them quietly in tune with his voice. “I kept believing I was never meant to be, but maybe I just had it wrong.”

Things are hard right now, things are falling apart all around us. The old world sails into the fog, receding into nothing. We crave some sort of stability, and for some of us, nothing’s ever been stable, least of all our own minds. We yearn for that communal experience, and there’s you, in an arena with thousands of people dressed in black, speaking the words quietly together. Some don’t know them, some shout their adoration, some are still in shock at the closeness, the intimacy. “In a world that isn’t ours, in a place we shouldn’t be…”

None of us belong. None of us make sense. We are the aberration, always on the outside, always excluded; something within us doesn’t fit, something fallen into disrepair. It looks so easy for everyone else.

“For a minute, just a minute, you made it feel like home.”

I’ve been to three shows on this tour, flown to different cities, driven hours away. What makes me do it? I’ve seen him live many times; I’ve been in the audience for an intimate q & a. He and his wife furnish their home based on the amount I’ve spent on band merchandise.

Sometimes all we need is that familiar voice in the darkness that says, “I know how it feels.”

His biggest inspiration once sang, “we were born upside down, born the wrong way round.” The rest of the show is a treatise on this, on the ways society or religion or the nation-state fail us, and all the ways we try to cope with that failure—drugs, sex, self-harm. He sings a rare song called “Non-Entity,” and that’s all of us in this cathedral of light and sound, non-entities. We scream and jump and dance. We ache for catharsis.

For other people, music is just background noise; it’s something that helps pass the time while you’re doing something else. It didn’t used to be this way. You’d dedicate yourself to what you’d listen to, you’d seek it out and it meant something. Maybe it wasn’t always, “I know how this feels,” but it was for me. It is for me. It’s a communion through sound and movement and time and space. It’s the chorus between you and me. It’s meeting to strike the chord.

Outside of this place, we’re medicated, antidepressants, anti-anxiety, we’re in therapy, we’re mothers and fathers and children and everywhere and nowhere in between. “And I will haunt these hills forever, without a reason to believe…” We’re alone in a crowd, we’re exhausted by small talk, we can’t keep up with our friends, we’re overwhelmed by injustice and suffering and hypocrisy. There’s no shortage of reasons for us to shut down. Nothing is enough to keep these horrors at bay. Why do we continue?

“When I can feel you beating inside of me, I have everything I need.”

We continue because we have to. This man likely saved my life just by continually moving forward, by plumbing the darkest depths of his soul and transmuting it to something raw and honest and beautiful and showing me how. I’m a writer myself; I’ve taken those dark parts and put them to the page. When the show is over, when the book is written, you feel empty, you wonder again what it’s all for, because we exist on a continuum where there are no fixed answers and only one end state. Sometimes a minute is all we get.

For a minute, you made it feel like home.