Do you have music that’s so tied to a person or a place that anytime it comes on everything comes flooding back in?

I don’t know when I first heard tindersticks, sometime in the late-90s most likely. They were a favorite of people I got to know after moving back to Chicago in 1997 and getting a job at Pearl Art & Craft. It didn’t suck me in right away. In my late-twenties I wasn’t so susceptible to the florid over-the-top romanticism tindersticks traffick in. Still, they’d invade my psychic space from time with their sweeping strings and despondent melancholy.

In 2009 the band played at a deconsecrated church called Epiphany on Ashland Avenue. I didn’t go but a woman from that group of friends a decade back did. We got together a year later and tindersticks, especially two or three particular songs, were the de facto soundtrack of our relationship.

We broke up at the end of 2014 but I packed up those songs and many of their others in the boxes I moved to my tiny apartment in Bridgeport. My attachment to this music outlived the relationship. Now there were other associations formed when I listened again and again to the same songs. But underneath, the memory of the failed romance and the whole era that led up to it lingered. It’s never gone away and by now I don’t want it to.

In 2020 the band announced a New York show. I bought a ticket and a seat on a plane. Then, a Chicago date was added and I got tickets for that as well. But neither concert was played for reasons we all know about.

In the fall of 2024, they announced a US tour. I bought my ticket the second it went on sale. Then November 5th happened. The tindersticks show at the Athenaeum the following April was one of the very few tangible reasons I had not to get of the ride for good.

I race from the bookstore, north to the theater. My seat is in the second row. Some friends are directly behind me. I catch my breath and stop sweating from the ride as we chat. Then the lights go down and it begins.

They didn’t play a single song I wanted to hear but it was still one of the more sublime concerts I’ve ever been to.

Can I ask a favor? If you were planning to order a copy of my Moby Dick, could you do so now to ease my publisher’s mind?

Arcade Publishing will be putting out my version of James Hogg’s The Suicide’s Grave—being the Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner as well as re-releasing The Marvel Universe: Origin Stories, probably later this year or maybe early the next. If you want a copy of the current version of the latter, you should get it soon, as I’ll probably take it off sale in the coming weeks.