A Long Message for Vessel
Oh Vessel. My dear friend. My Light and my Dark. You represent a very specific time in life where everything changed. Everything hurt, but everything grew. I became a little more me and you helped me with that. I still remember first seeing the boys on my dash and I had decided to look them up. Was not impressed. Sorry! A couple months later, I was not doing well mentally or emotionally (it was my first year of college and I had gone to a different city). The boys came on my dash again and I decided to give one more try. That try was HOTY and it finally all made sense. I downloaded every song. I looked up all the history of the band and the songs and videos. I bought tickets to see them when they came to Austin that fall for the Quiet Is Violent Tour. Everything was color again and not so lonely. The concert has been and will be for awhile my favorite concert I have ever been to in my life. However, my clearest memory has got to be when I was having a really hard night and I was in bed with my headphones in. HOTY came on and I just kept replaying it until I learned every word by heart.
Every song on that album has it’s own distinction for me. House of Gold was the first song I ever heard by them (without realizing because it was on the radio and I had it on my iPod since before college, just didn’t realize it was them). Migraine was the first song I ever heard by them that night I thought I was discovering them for the first time. Again, I didn’t like it at that time, but it’s because I think I wasn’t ready for them. HOTY has it’s own specific memories obviously. But, Trees has been my favorite song off that album. It’s such a simple song truly, but so complex. I always have a hard time describing it to people because it holds more to me than face value. Just as the whole album does, heck just as the band does for so many people.
Face value, this is just another emo band for people to hate on for no reason. To us? They’re light. They’re poets on both paper and beat. They’re saviors or really just a facilitator for you to save yourself. They’re dorks and ungraceful, but then full of grace at the same time. They’re banana/balloon haters and professional photo editors. They gave us anxiety with phone pinching and soothed that anxiety with music. They bared their souls to us and we bared ours back because they’re our friends. They’re family. We are all family. And that’s what Vessel was. It was just a vessel to bring us together to find our family. And that’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.