Elbow is playing Washington, DC tomorrow night. I bought my ticket the day they went on sale.
The last time I saw Elbow was… 2017? After the release of Little Fictions? That feels right. Yes, November 4th. It rained in Washington that evening, and I stood outside in the rain outside the 9:30 Club. Little Fictions. Wonderful album.
Elbow did a west coast tour — just a week, if I remember correctly — in January 2020 in support of Giants of All Sizes, before COVID shut everything down. (I saw Carbon Leaf in that same small sliver of 2020 when the world was still sorta normal.)
A lot has changed in five years.
Giants of All Sizes came out two weeks after I was released from the hospital due to the blood pressure crisis that left me half blind. I remember listening to that album on my walks through Dallastown in the months that followed as I rebuilt my strength and my health. “Empires,” the anti-Brexit song, feels relevant in these days of Mad King Donald — “Empires crumble all the time, you just happen to be witnessing mine.” And “Weightless,” Guy Garvey’s song about his dying father, besides being a tear-jerker on its own merits, is resonant.
In the spring and summer of 2020, the band did a series of socially distanced YouTube videos, the #elbowrooms sessions. I shared the videos on Facebook with family and friends. I remember the sheer joy I felt when, in one video, Jack Garvey, who happens to also be the grandson of Dame Diana Rigg, ran into the camera’s field of vision. I wrote in March of this year that in some ways it feels as though March of 2020 never ended, and these videos were part of that strange traumatic time, bringing joy and life to solitary and isolated days. These performances remain some of my most beloved Elbow tracks, and when I watch or listen to them or the Live at the Ritz album released that spring I will always remember Gandalf’s gentle admonishment: “Do not fear to weap, for not all tears are evil.”
Elbow has released two albums since then — 2001’s Flying Dream 1 and last year’s Audio Vertigo (with a companion EP, Echo, earlier this summer) — and I could not tell you a thing about them. I know one, Flying Dream 1, is a softer, more introspective album, and the other, Audio Vertigo, is a harder-edged rocker. But I couldn’t name a song off either, except for the cover of “We Have All the Time in the World” from the Audio Vertigo deluxe edition. I can’t hum a tune. I don’t know if it’s because I’m older, because March 2020 never ended, because the world went strange. They never connected with me. I’ve never had a moment where I suddenly felt I had to listen to Audio Vertigo the way I felt I had to listen to Little Fictions.
For what it’s worth, the same thing happened with Coldplay with me. The three albums since late 2019 — Everyday Life, Music of the Spheres, and Moon Music — didn’t connect with me, either.
I’ll put on Audio Vertigo later today to familiarize myself with the music — I initially wrote “refamiliarize,” but that felt disingenuous — and I think I’ll be okay. They’ll play the hits tomorrow — “One Day Like This,” “Grounds for Divorce” — and I’ll be fine.
Oasis Live ’25 rekindled my love of the brothers Gallagher. I’ve listened to more Oasis, Beady Eye, and High Flying Birds in the last month than I had in the last two or three years.
May seeing Elbow tomorrow rekindle a similar renewed love for that other Mancunian band.