Anyone who’s ever heard Jack Antonoff speak for longer than five minutes at a time probably knows that he loves being from New Jersey. In true New Jersey fashion, he isn’t subtle about it. It’s a consistent theme in the music of Bleachers, Antonoff’s band. It’s only fitting, therefore, that the first show that Bleachers played after quarantine was in Asbury Park, New Jersey, at a music festival called Shadow of The City, hosted by Bleachers.
Tickets for the festival went on sale in June of 2019, a year before the intended festival date in 2020 and before the official lineup was announced. After multiple postponed dates once lockdown set in, a date was finally set and September 11th, 2021 arrived after years of anticipation. For the vast majority of people in the audience, it was their first time at a concert since the pandemic started. For Bleachers, it was their first live show in over two years.
As the sun set and anticipation rose, Asbury Park was covered in stars. The audience became more densely packed, inching closer towards the barricade, and the crew prepared the stage for Bleachers. Soon enough, everything went black and the crowd began to cheer- a telltale sign that the show was about to begin. One by one, the band assumed their positions. Evan Smith, Mikey Hart, Sean Hutchinson, Mike Riddleberger, and Zem Audu: each a multi-talented musician bringing their own personality to the band. They are silhouetted by a deep red light that bathes the stage. They wait. Jack Antonoff enters the stage as a single spotlight hits the piano in the corner. He takes a seat at the piano, seemingly unnerved by the audience’s wailing, and begins to play.
The show opened with “91,” the first track on Bleachers’ new album. What started off as Antonoff alone at the piano soon built into a boisterous orchestra as the band joined in, one by one bringing the audience into their world. Immediately following, the band played “Let’s Get Married,” a pop anthem speaking of devotion and returning to a lover with renewed joy after a period of hardship. The 2017 song took on a new meaning in the context of a band returning to its loyal fans after years apart. This was true of every song on the setlist. Every song meant something new after living through a season of life that was so massively unpredictable. Hearing Jack sing the words to “Everybody Lost Somebody” (“Come on, motherfucker, you survived / you’ve got to give yourself a break”) brought cathartic tears to the eyes of many audience members. Friends grinned at each other with knowing smiles, couples clung to each other. The band was feeling it differently, too. You could see it in their glaces to each other and hear it in their playing. Everyone had their own stories.
Towards the end of the set, Jack walked to the very edge of the stage, as close to the audience as he could manage, and joked that he was only singing the next song because the fans relentlessly asked him for it. The song was “Foreign Girls,” a deep cut from the band’s sophomore album Gone Now. He sang, reaching towards the crowd, just his voice and the audience’s voices echoing back to each other, “Trying to find my way back home / ‘cause I know I’ve been a stranger lately.” At that moment it was so easy to understand why this show felt more intense than the live music we experienced before the pandemic. It’s not just that people were excited to be at a concert again, it’s that you could look at the people next to you and see yourself reflected in their eyes. You could look up to the stage and know that the band was feeling everything just as intensely as you were, and just as personally. This was a space full of people who had lost themselves in some way over the last year. Everyone, regardless of where they came from, was trying to find their way back home, to regain their footing, to find the version of themselves that they recognized.
To put it plainly, it was the perfect show to bring a group of people back into live music. There was a shared awareness amongst both the audience and the band that playing music and sharing music is a privilege. Touring, something that once felt like a guarantee in every musician’s career, suddenly became something fragile and inconsistent. It was abundantly clear as Antonoff ran laps around the stage and held his guitar over his head shouting, “That was the first Bleachers show in over two years! We will never forget!” that the special connection between fan and musician is stronger now than ever before. The divide between artist and fan dissolved for a few brief moments in time as we realized that we all needed each other, we all missed each other, and we all need the rush that only comes from dancing to the music you love with the people that love it just as much as you do.