Best shows of 2008 - Have Heart, Down To Nothing, I Rise

As 2008 draws to a close I thought it would be nice to recap some of my favorite shows of 2008. After all, the big draw to underground music, apart from hearing styles of music that you can't hear anywhere else, is the live setting in my eyes.

I can't picture going to a large arena 'concert' (I really hate that word) and feeling any sort of connection with a band, I'd rather listen to an album than be stuck half a mile away from a stage staring at tiny people wandering around a large stage. There is no personal connection there. At hardcore shows, and any underground music styles really, there is no division between the band at those people there to watch them. Everyone is the same, everyone is there for the same reason. I love that.
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My year started off fast and set the bar pretty high for the rest of the year, which is the best way to start a year to be filled with many shows. To begin this tale, you must understand that my friend and I had become addicted to Killing The Dream in the end months of 2007, like really bad. To our dismay, and to anyone else who follows the band, Killing The Dream tends to tour Japan and Europe more often than the Midwest. The closet pass the band would be making in the near future was Nashville, TN, January 3rd of the next year.

We were sad and disappointed and often joked about making the 9-ish hour drive down there just to see them, however, the more we talked about it, the more possible it seemed. So we decided to give it a shot. Getting the trip organized was not easy at first, nobody wanted to drive 9 hours for one show. Luckily for us (upon further investigation), there were 3 awesome shows in a row in Nashville that week. After that, everything fell into place pretty quickly. 3 awesome shows was surely worth the 9 hour trip.

The first show of this trip would be January 2nd, the day that we would leave to go down to Nashville. It was an impeccable show to start the 3 day 'Nashville Fest'. Have Heart, Down To Nothing, I Rise and many more names that have become somewhat notable in the recent days (Wake Up Call, Lie and Wait, Maintain and Foundation) at 'The Muse', an awesome venue tucked away in a darker corner of Nashville.

Despite being pretty wiped out after the 9 hour drive and a brief rest at our trashy hotel, the show was intense. It's a little bit of a blur trying to recall now, but I first learned of I Rise that night which is what I mainly remember it for, but also, it was the first time I saw how big Have Heart had/has got. The first time I saw Have Heart was in Iowa early in the summer of 2007, and probably a handful of people there knew who they were. In Nashville that night, there were a couple hundred of kids screaming every word.


The show was incredibly high energy, tons of kids packed into a relatively small space all going nuts, non-stop stage dives, a perpetual pile on, no fights, no negativity, just an awesome time.

Have Heart closed the show, but that energy was there through every band. It makes me jealous how every time I go several hours outside of where I am from, the scene's seem to much better than ours. Nashville is/was? full of a bunch of awesome kids who support bands and are there to have a good time, no drama, no bullshit, no attitudes. It was really an awesome show.

We then retired to our hotel room, totally pumped that we had driven 9 hours for this, psyched for the next night, when we would finally satisfy the goal of the trip, seeing Killing The Dream...