Last year was easily the strangest, most life-altering and erratic year of my life. While for many people 2022 was meant to be a year where we got back to doing and being things that the pandemic kept us from, the beginning of 2022 marked a major ending for me. Two weeks into January, my Mom died. When you start a year with loss, it feels impossible to come back from that. I won’t lie; I basically went into hibernation until the spring. But then my friends started encouraging me to travel, to go to things, and to change the trajectory of such a shit year. I let my community rally around me, I lost myself in live music, and I let it all culminate beside a lake in Western New York on a beautiful August evening.
Back at the height of the pandemic and being locked away in our houses - when I thought for a brief moment that maybe I’d only ever get to see my friends again through a tiny computer screen - I needed to ground myself in hope and I needed it badly. I think we were all longing for something, or someone, that could reassure us that things got better and the sun comes back out again. Nostalgia was one thing I found myself grasping at to feel safe, to feel like I knew and understood who I was and what was happening to us all. There amongst organized folders of old 4x6 photos, grainy cellphone videos of bands who’ve since broken up, and playlists of the music we used to sing in my ‘95 Buick Century, I found what I was looking for.
I wish, dear reader, that I could paint you a detailed picture of the first time I heard any of Vinnie Caruana’s music. I can’t. I’m from Long Island, and when I was in my teens and early 20’s, Vinnie’s voice was just always there. If I was in the car with my friends driving Ocean Parkway late at night drinking 99-cent Arizona Iced Teas because we couldn’t get into bars, Vinnie’s music was there (probably “Sailor Tattoos”). When we were laying on the floor of someone’s basement talking about how we’d all get out of here one day, Vinnie was there, too (probably “Green Eyes”). When I went off to college in Western New York, I took the music along for the ride - my first ugly break-up (“I Took a Beating”), the first person to really see me (“Ship to Shore”), the first group of friends where we let one another see the ugly shit without judgement (“Hey”) - some of the most important moments of my life were soundtracked by The Movielife and I Am the Avalanche.
So it was really no surprise that late at night in 2020, in the quiet dark with my giant headphones on, when I couldn’t sleep and the sadness of what was happening was too much to handle, I would put on a playlist of music from better times and was greeted by the sound of Vinnie’s voice. And that’s where I was when I found my ray of light. I Am the Avalanche’s song “Is This Really Happening” has all the hope I could ever need, but with a hesitation and an almost mistrust of the good moment that I knew I would feel when the time came.
Lyrically, the song fit in way too easily to my life at that time. The entire first verse has a metaphor about a man who is trying not to drink something he maybe shouldn’t, and I was a year sober in the middle of the pandemic. “A New York winter is mighty cold”, no shit. “This perfectly perfect disease has got me down on my knees…” could be COVID, but it also could be my Mom’s Alzheimer’s. But my favorite line will always be “no not to play but just to say ‘I love you more than yesterday’”. I would sit on my bed and listen to this song over and over again and picture myself surrounded by my friends, in someone’s living room or backyard singing along to this song on a little portable speaker. The image of us all together again, reveling in the moment when we were finally able to come out the other side got me through when the panic threatened to take hold.
You can therefore imagine how excited I was, in Easter 2022, to be seeing Vinnie play acoustic at St. Vitus in Brooklyn. It was fun and he was funny and I was with one of my very best friends. The only thing was…he didn’t play the song. This is not a dig at him; the songs he DID play were big time favorites of mine and I was so happy just to be there having an experience akin to the one I’d been picturing for two years, just with a group of mostly strangers all singing along at the tops of our lungs.
Then, the following August my friends from college and I met up at a lake in central New York for a long weekend. We’d done it once in 2021, but this second time made it officially an annual tradition. We all come together at a friend’s family cottage and make garbage plates and try not to drop our phones in the lake. We talk about life and sing karaoke and my dog eats things he shouldn’t and we all laugh until we cry. But this year was special - this year that same friend who’d been at St. Vitus with me had gotten Vinnie Caruana himself to come and play an acoustic set with some fairy lights strung behind him on a camper, with the sun setting over the lake in the distance. And from a camping chair in Canandaigua, New York, Vinnie asked me to share my story with these people I love more than I love myself, of why I wanted to hear this song I love so much, and all the things I thought I’d never be able to survive through. And then he played it for us. And even though COVID had been horrible, and my Mom was gone, my best friends were all around me again and everything was okay. And I couldn’t believe it was really happening.
The snow’s actually melting in front of my face.