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Solid Sound was this weekend.

It's a music festival at Mass MoCA, curated by Wilco. It is, technically, three days, but I went yesterday and yesterday only, with the rest of the family, and we sort of ambled around and ate popsicles and waited out a thunderstorm in a tent made of umbrellas (also, poked one another in the head with umbrellas while trying to maintain tent integrity) because we were too lazy to go inside or something.

Actually, we might have been holding our seats for last night's Wilco concert in the umbrella tent, but that's semantics.

The Wilco concert, though. The first and last Wilco concert I went to, before this, was in 2006 at Milwaukee's Summerfest, which is an alcohol marinated jukebox on the shore of Lake Michigan. I had just graduated high school, I had just gone to Bolivia for two weeks, and this was probably only a few days after my arrival home (sans luggage--thank you, Air Boliviano). After we got back from the concert, I slept for fifteen hours straight, until three in the afternoon the next day. That concert sticks in my memory as the first time I realized I liked the song Hummingbird, which they played as we were walking out of the park, leaving before the concert was completely set, as my family tends to do.

So move back in time, to when I first listened to Wilco, some time in Dad's car (we were pulling out of the driveway, 1626 Robin Court, or maybe pulling in), and then move forward slightly in the timeline and you'll find me, with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in my grey and orange clamshell Sony discman while I set in the back of the school bus. This is circa 2003. I was a sophomore in high school. The bus route is still mapped in my mind, and I remember listening to Radio Cure as we wheeled through one particular loop of houses. The window would be cold, and I probably had my forehead pressed against it, so I felt every jolt in the road. I was trying to listen to my music, and not the bus driver's radio.

So back to North Adams, last night. I was sitting on a damp dropcloth in a field, and then came the opening bars of a familiar track, and I remembered. I was a sophomore in high school, riding the school bus.

In yesterday's present, the audience rose to greet these songs like old friends (everyone singing you were right about the stars, each one is a setting sun while Jeff Tweedy remained silent). It was a reminder of the strange way music accumulates meaning. For me, there's a string of memories attached to those Wilco songs. And there's other music, all it which I'm incapable of hearing without remembering. Maybe that's less than ideal, the wrong way to listen to music because I'm not just listening to the music, because it's playing in sync with some past iteration of itself (maybe I should take James Agee's advice about Beethoven's Seventh, turn it up all the way, lay lightly on the floor, listen to it loud: "You won't hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it. As near as you will ever get, you are inside the music; not only inside it, you are it; your body is no longer your shape and substance, it is the shape and substance of the music.").

But the things I remember remain, and they'll layer one atop the other with the music in the present:

Heavy Metal Drummer, the second song in the encore at Wilco's June 25th concert, Solid Sound, 2011. We are leaving. I stop and splash mud off my boots in a puddle. In 2006, this was the only song I really wanted them to play (they did). And here it was again. It's a lot like pop, a lot like summertime, that one song that my 18-year-old self wanted Wilco to play live. They are playing it again now. And then they start Passenger Side, and we can't leave just yet, because Mom and Dad want to hear this one, just one more, and we're sharing a trail mix cookie from that co-op in Williamstown, and it's late and I have work in the morning, but right now we're here, music is playing, this is it.