Heligoats "To Be Alive and Alone" from Making Beds in a Burning House Live at Indie Coffee Madison, WI Jan 18, 2006 PODCAST EXCLUSIVE!

The Heligoats set ended with a brief digression about a fortune cookie fortune, and then an upbeat run-through of this song from the last Troubled Hubble album. But I want to talk about Jason Anderson instead.

When Chris finished, he handed the guitar over to Anderson, little-known as the frontman for a band called Wolf Colonel. You've almost certainly never heard of the band or the dude, as I hadn't before that night. I frankly wondered why the hell Chris Otepka was playing a six-song set to open for nobody in particular. And then something illuminated the coffee shop, the night, the entire ramshackle procession of noise, steam and man that we call live music.

Anderson stepped into the middle of the room, into an area maybe a yard in diameter, surrounded by kids and peering out from under a faded hat. He began to play some driving, simple chord progression and sing with a mid-range rasp. He immediately called on us to sing call-backs and we did it, reluctantly at first, and then less reluctantly. He cajoled the holdouts personally and it quickly got loud -- I wondered what outside passers-by must have thought hearing a coffee shop shouting "Hell yes!" en masse.

His material would, on paper, appear to be straight out of the Bright Eyes handbook, but it was so much less... horrible. Where Conor Oberst whines, Anderson exalts. Where Oberst whimpers, Anderson reminisces. His tales of youth and young manhood were both obvious and edifying; what he was doing was a secular revival. As he rocked -- and he did rock that tiny acoustic guitar -- he traveled more than performed, and he brought us with him. He told us where we were going and why. With every song, with every shout-out-loud, he demonstrated communion with ourselves, with who we were and who we are. We came together and we knew who we were -- who he was -- even though we didn't.

Near the end of the set, it became clearer and clearer that this was something special. An emo boy across the room from us took off his sweater and began to cry -- I couldn't help but be reminded of the fake emo record review I wrote a few years ago. Anderson seemed to understand what was happening and he began to preach the gospel of rock. Don't let this go and don't discount it, he said. "This is our church," but not in a creepy way. It's what we have to bind us, to bring us together across distances. Afterwards, Anderson hugged everybody who came up to talk to him and said it was the most amazing thing he'd ever been a part of -- he even warned potential CD buyers that the recordings couldn't possibly duplicate what we'd just done.

I don't have any clips of Anderson's set because I couldn't record it. It was a singular live event, ephemeral in its peculiarities but eternal in its essence, played out again and again at every show in every city. To record it, to step outside and observe through the flat moire of the viewscreen, it would've been disgraceful. This may never happen again in this way, but it happened once, and that's enough.