Trying to Keep Time
There are moments when you realize something was never background noise.
Last week, our daughter Liz sent me a text link to the Foo Fighters’ NPR Tiny Desk concert with a short note:
“Dad, I know you will love this.”
She was right.
I watched it immediately.
“Hell yeah, this is fantastic!”
She sent back a heart emoji.
My day started perfectly.
My reaction wasn’t just casual or nostalgic. It felt more like recognition — our shared neutral ground, our mutual love of music.
Our tastes vary and often align. She converted me to Taylor Swift; I now own more vinyl than I ever expected, and she finds it deeply amusing.
Let’s be clear: I love the Foo Fighters.
But we are a house divided, so I only listen when I am home alone with Dirk, and I play it loud.
The Foo Fighters thrive on scale — stadiums, noise, collective force. Tiny Desk strips all that away: no giant lighting rig, no spectacle, just people close together, holding a song aloft for shared feeling.
Midway through the Tiny Desk set, something dawned on me.
Before books fully entered my life, music had already taken root in my foundation.
Not as entertainment. As a structure.
My older sister was musical. Another sister was a gifted artist who could draw effortlessly. What eventually found me instead was abstraction. Ceramics. Sculpture. Photography. Composition. Physical form. Negative space.
But music stayed constant.
Always on.
For decades, I kept having recurring dreams that I was in a rock band.
Not one exact dream. Variations on the same internal terrain.
Sometimes the guitar was broken. Sometimes the stage was chaos. The performance always continued.
For years, I treated the dreams as nonsense. Now I think they were trying to tell me something simpler.
I experience myself as a performer inside collective energy systems. It explains why endurance sports always felt emotionally familiar. Why transformation work in large organizations energizes rather than exhausts me. Why I’m drawn to moments when institutions are under pressure, and people coordinate through instability. That sentence explains more of my life than I would probably like to admit.
It may even explain why I cannot hear the Foo Fighters’ “The Pretender” without air-drumming the entire song.
Not air guitar.
Drums. Picture me, driving to work air-drumming into a sweat while steering with my knees.
Timing. Momentum. Coordination. The thing underneath the thing.
Maybe that has always been the throughline.
Not standing outside systems observing them.
Being part of a collective motion, trying to keep time.
I still think about the night Dave Grohl fell off the stage in Sweden.
The footage is absurd and painful. He falls, breaks his leg, and chaos enters instantly. What stayed with me: he gets back on stage and keeps trying to play.
Eventually, he tells the crowd:
“I broke my fucking leg.”
The audience laughs nervously because everyone understands the performance has now crossed into reality.
Something beautiful happens.
The band reorganizes itself in real time.
Taylor Hawkins steps forward. Roles shift. The structure flexes. The energy holds.
Years later, after Taylor Hawkins died, that memory took on new meaning.
It was no longer just a story about resilience. It became a story about continuity, fragility, trust, and the strange emotional architecture required for human beings to keep moving together after rupture.
That matters more to me now than it once did.
We are entering an era optimized for individualized experience.
Which may make collective experiences more important, not less.
Live music still does something ancient and stubborn.
People synchronize.
Emotionally.
Physically.
Temporally.
Thousands of people sing the same words at the same moment, not because an algorithm clustered them there, but because they chose to enter the same energetic field together.
That feels increasingly important.
“I’ve got another confession to make, I’m your fool.”
And the chorus…
“Is someone getting the best, the best, the best, the best of you?”
The power of this song is not the lyrics themselves. It is the way listeners insert their own “someone” into the question:
“Is someone getting the best of you?”
A relationship.
A company.
An institution.
A culture.
A machine.
A system.
The song works because the target keeps changing while the feeling remains recognizable.
Many feel something large and impersonal is extracting attention, energy, identity, meaning, and trust.
“Everyone’s got their chains to break.”
Circling back to Tiny Desk.
A stadium band compressed down to human scale.
No spectacle to hide behind.
No distance.
No mythology.
Just people.
Instruments.
Timing.
Shared energy.
And a daughter who knows her father well enough to understand exactly why it matters so much to him.
I am a lucky man.