Surrounded by familiar faces, the people that you love to see

 Or: I was born in the right generation

I hadn’t been inside the SM Skydome since I was 18. 

It had been about ten years. It was the venue where I got to cover my first concert with a press pass, where I got to see William Beckett from the front row in the most intimate concert I’ve ever attended—only hundreds in the crowd—and he acknowledged me from the stage. But there’s only ever going to be one band I’ll always associate with the Skydome, and it was the same reason I was there at that moment: The Maine. 

I hadn’t gone to a concert of theirs since their pivotal Pioneer Tour stop in 2012 because their newer songs resonated with me less and it got to a point where I’d become mostly unfamiliar with their setlists. But this was going to be the Sweet Sixteen Tour, to commemorate their debut album Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, and they were going to play the whole album on their second night in Manila, along with more deep cuts from their discography. 

My friends and I could not miss this. 

Having been fans of The Maine when we were in high school, we’ve naturally had plenty of time to evolve into different people and kind of grow out of that phase. We tend to joke that we’re “retired.” But as soon as the announcement dropped, it was like no time had passed. We immediately made plans, and for some of us, for the first time in a very long time, we were going to be attending another concert in a mall together—seeing the band that allowed our worlds to collide. 

There was no question to me that I would be getting two-day tickets, and closer to the show dates, I decided to treat myself and check in to the hotel connected to the mall so I wouldn’t have to go home only to come back the next day. Most of this might be personal myth at this point. I’d waited too long to write and I didn’t take many notes on my phone, and it was really just two great nights spent listening to the music of my teenage years live with the people I got to grow up with listening to them. 

It’s so freeing to have a band like The Maine that’s pure comfort. I didn’t have any expectations, save for songs I wanted to hear, because I’d already had such a rich history of experiences related to them. I’d seen them in their prime, I’d met them, I’d even gotten to interview them a number of times. Garrett had literally, at one point, used a photo I’d taken of him as his Twitter icon.

On September 27 we mostly watched from the right-side bleachers. They played over 25 songs that night, including “Diet Soda Society,” “Right Girl,” “Don’t Come Down,” “Misery,” and “Blame.” I’d been playfully livid whenever they’d play “Saving Grace” here and I hadn’t come to see them, but this time they played a beautifully romantic mashup of the song with “Whoever She Is” that had us all swaying. Camz and I kept screaming that it’s my song (being a Halloween baby) during “Forever Halloween,” a track I thought I’d never hear live. And “Another Night on Mars” was a great encore. It was funny how we’d go quiet when they’d play newer songs, then go absolutely berserk when it was time for the classics. 

But what got me crying, grasping the magnitude of the how-we-got-here-ness of the moment, was “(Un)Lost” and the back-to-back double whammy of “Love & Drugs” and “Like We Did (Windows Down).” I couldn’t help flashing back to 12 years ago, sitting on the floor outside this same venue with Mariel waiting in the queue to be let in for that concert, as the same two songs—“Like We Did” and “Don’t Give Up on ‘Us’”—looped over and over.  

September 28 was the Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop show, and we decided to plunge into the crowd for it. We all laughed seeing the band come out in the iconic white and gold suits (not black and blue!) they’d all worn as teens in the late 2000s, destined to be in the running for the new princes of pop-punk and eventually become something else altogether. “Everything I Ask For” will always get me on my feet, the ultimate girl-worship anthem where John comes off as a bit of a lovable loser. “Girls Do What They Want” and “Count ‘Em One, Two, Three” will never stop being good old call-and-response fun. “Into Your Arms” is the only song that will ever make me weirdly emotional during a line that tries to bait you into singing, She’s got the most amazing ass. 

John went into the crowd at one point. I think it may have been to start a mosh pit, or to join one. I’d said to Clarissa the day before that the concert didn’t feel complete without one of her signature condom balloons, and that night she actually delivered. 

I was so excited to sing “Love is a luxury,” she said during “This Is the End.” And the feeling of getting to scream 81! 23! Means everything! To me! during “We All Roll Along” is something indescribable that not everyone will get, but here it’s practically a love language, and few things are as powerful. 

And then there’s “We’ll All Be…” A song that goes on forever, but never long enough. My friends and I held each other tight as we declared, And for the first time, I feel less alone. For the first time, I can call this home. And later, We all have been degraded. We all have been the greatest. 

I had zero regrets about the hotel stay, even if it was a little pricey. I had a good breakfast, piling my plate with annatto rice and creamy chicken and fried dumplings and dry noodles, plus a little chocolate chip scone. And two consecutive days of concerts was a lot, but nothing I couldn’t wash away with a hot shower as soon as I got into my room. 

 

I spent most of both days with Camz, Audrie, and Steph—the three I regularly talk to the most, along with Cheska. But really the whole affair was nothing short of a family reunion: frantic waving and voices going shrill with excitement upon spotting these faces we hadn’t seen in years, some of which we never thought we’d see again. We sang along to lyrics that are probably tattooed on our minds (if not literally tattooed somewhere on our bodies), we laughed about old inside jokes and got up to old habits, we took pictures, we caught up over dinner, we sat down when we needed to because our joints did not work like they used to. “We’re so old!” 

I was especially grateful to have gotten back in touch with Kat and Clarissa, who flew out to live this great big new adventure in America not long after the tour. 

People express doubt all the time these days that you can meet friends online, particularly Tumblr, even more that you could manage to have them cross over to the real world. But as someone whose lifelong friends are from Tumblr, I’m just like, “Skill issue.” 

But of course these friendships are the absolute rarest gems from a bygone era, and I’m constantly being reminded of how lucky we are to get to have something this special. It felt extra real, looking around the Skydome and seeing them, feeling them, hearing them right next to me. These were people I met on a screen because we all loved The Maine a decade ago, and somehow they’ve become inextricable constants within my life. Nobody has ever oomfed harder than we have.

I wouldn’t even really called it a “reunion,” because we’ve all been here for each other all along, like the Skins cast. 

We’re so lucky. We’re so lucky. The timing, the people, the places. We got to be young at a time when these were the bands and these were the songs that were at their peak, living out our exhilaration, living through our angst, and living vicariously through them. Physical media and Astroplus release parties, music video premieres and waiting for surprise screen time on MTV, vinyl pre-orders and waiting two months to listen to the album until the record arrived and you could drop the needle. Microblogging when people weren’t afraid to interact and weren’t too cool to mess up their pages, so we just talked directly on our Dashboards through our posts and reblogs. 

A scene when being part of a scene meant something. You just truly had to be there. 

This kind of thing will never happen again, for us or anyone else. 

It wasn’t just our little corner of the internet—it was also a subculture and pocket of time that allowed us to meet in person frequently and really keep in touch. For a brief time concert producers actually took note that this is what teenagers were listening to, and they managed to bring these obscure-ish bands often enough. Think about it: even There for Tomorrow, even The Downtown Fiction. Many of us were also entering college, and it was just easier to make plans and keep seeing each other and hanging out.   

Live shows at Ayala Malls came to define a generation—our generation. They were common enough that they became unlikely markers of a specific era in my life, of my coming-of-age. Days when Fridays meant going to the mall after school to hang out at Timezone, or see the latest Harry Potter movie (I wish I could make a different reference, but I have to be true to the time), or try new toppings on frozen yogurt. It’s just that sometimes, you just happened to catch Cobra Starship performing their hit “Guilty Pleasure” live and in person at the activity center, and it felt like the most normal thing in the world. 

When the LIV3 Tour was announced to be kicking off for a four-day run in 2011, it caused a huge shift. We could look at how our lives had changed and pin it all on this one crazy week. Our post-concert emotions didn’t cease for six months, as the February show dates bled into high school graduation (for some of us, including me) and the summer and some of the following school year, until we had a new thing to focus on: embarrassing to admit, but it was the All Time Low concert in Araneta that would be taking place that September. And one of the acts for LIV3 was going to be The Maine, whose then-latest album Black and White had pretty much been a soundtrack of my senior year. 

It was pretty clear that while those of us in bandom listened to many acts, the center of our ecosystem and the band that tied us all together was The Maine. If LIV3 was the beginning of everything, Pioneer Tour was where all of it fell into place. Full fucking circle. 

I’m going to hand it over to 17-year-old Fiel from 2012 for a bit: 

You listen to a band for almost five years, and for the first three years you think you’re never going to see them live. You think you’re alone, all this time, listening to them, you think nobody else in your country gives a shit about them. Well, you know there’s got to be somebody else out there, but you don’t know how to find them. You think, “I’d do anything to hear this live.” You think, “Of course, it’s never gonna happen.” 

But somehow, unprecedented and unexpected, this band had ended up here, in my city, in my “hometown,” as pop-punk cliches go. 

You look around, and there are people who feel the exact same way you do, who love this band as much as you do. And you never thought this moment would ever come. 

And you’re there. You’re so lucky to be there. 

This was also around the time Tavi Gevinson launched her online magazine Rookie, which in turn inspired and launched several copycat youth-oriented zines—one of which was our very own Elision, ideated during an idle, random conversation we were having while waiting around for yet another Ayala Malls concert to begin. We were young enough to want to do everything and believe we could make it happen. On my blog I’d post stupid song lyric Picnik edits on pretentious pictures I took with my Nikon D3000, and for some reason they’d get hundreds of notes. As 13- to 16-year-olds we all had businesses selling one-inch wristbands, designing them ourselves and emailing suppliers to produce them for us… and getting detained by mall security for trying to sell them at a Good Charlotte show in Glorietta.

Yes, we literally made (most of) these

Now that I’m 30, I sometimes think about the Tumblr Ask I got when I was 16 that just said, You are so young. It was meant to be condescending, to tell me I didn’t know shit about anything. Of course, I only replied with a GIF of somebody blinking, unimpressed. But that was the best and worst part of growing up online, after all: getting to make mistakes, getting to start over, getting to put something out there and have it travel and reach an incredible amount of people, even if it’s not perfect. 

The whole world was my Tumblr Dashboard, and my Tumblr Dashboard was my whole world.

My online friends and I built our trust and memories as we kept seeing each other, hands held tight and moving our bodies in the dark to the backdrop of all the songs we loved, live. Gathered to share our voices and our elation and this experience that’s bigger than all of us. It went on for a couple of years, every few weeks or months. And it felt only apt to have the culmination of it be the 2013 Fall Out Boy show in Araneta, after they came back from their four-year hiatus. I had turned 19, and I was ready for something else. Everything else.  

I was at prime malleability when I was 16 to 18, waiting to be shaped into a person. I could become anyone. It was that age when the bands you listened to became part of your identity, and in my case, they literally wound up creating domino effects in every facet of my life, for the bad sometimes, but mostly for the good. My friends, my job, how I create and how my passion manifests, how I handle grief and depression. 

We were the ones who were always saying, “I was born in the wrong generation.” But years later, it feels pretty good to realize we couldn’t have been part of a more fitting, more right one all along.

Even if I was “over it all” by 2013 and we all started branching out to other interests, my online friends and I kept in touch, and it wasn’t just because we had our zine or we were still following each other on social media. We’d become IRLs, reaching a level of closeness that allowed us to know each other inside out and love each other—not friends from Tumblr or Twitter, but bona fide friends, period. Tied to each other for life by the blue-moon moments we’d been through, the way nothing else can and nobody else would understand. Organic, true, valid, although I know in my heart it’s always been that way. I had called it a scene, but it was much more than that. It was a community. 

I’ve written this so many times: We came to be in each other’s lives because we loved the same things, and now we love the same things because we’re in each other’s lives.

It’s funny and it warms my heart so much to think about how we used to joke about Ovation Production bringing ‘80s nostalgia acts, and now we were pretty much the ones going to nostalgia-bait concerts. But I’d be doing The Maine a disservice to call them nostalgia fodder, because even now, almost two decades into their career, they’re as experimental and relevant as ever. And even if I’ve moved on, they’ll never stop meaning a lot to me. 

The morning of September 29, I checked out and went home, my wristbands from the two previous nights already buried like confetti somewhere in my bag. It never stopped feeling a little strange, a little empty when the bands were gone and it was all over. “On the ride home I started to get sad,” I’d written in my journal the day after I attended some concert in 2014, ten years ago now. “I always do when [something great] ends and I get preemptively nostalgic.” 

In my room I dug high (the overhead cabinets) and low (the boxes under my bed) for any artifact I could find from when I loved The Maine the most, but I was an idiot and let them all go. I’d sold my signed albums, including the copy of Black and White I’d bought from their merch table at LIV3, when my mom had gotten sick, and the regret kind of stings. But at least I still have my autographs from the whole band—and one from William Beckett—from when I was doing my silly “project” where I collected musicians’ stripper names. This was the kind of crude faux edginess that was acceptable during peak bandom, okay!  

And I’ll always, always have that time after we’d taken our picture for the Pioneer Tour meet-and-greet session, when I was walking off to let the next person have their turn, and I hadn’t even taken a couple of steps when I heard: “Fiel!” 

I’ll let 17-year-old Fiel take this again (even though I can still pretty much recite it verbatim): 

“Yes?” I turned around and faced John, the one who had called me. By my flipping name. I was looking him right in the eye, not even aware of anything or anyone else.

“Fiel, right? How do you spell that?” John asked. “F…?” 

“F-I-E-L,” I said. 

“F-I-E-L,” John repeated with a smile. “Fiel. That’s pretty!”

I still scream into a pillow about it sometimes.  

I may not have had any expectations going in when it came to the Sweet Sixteen Tour, but it was cool to end up in the front row (off to the side, but still) during the second day. And, okay, let me just have this, but I don’t think I’m being delusional when I say that John had looked over and our eyes had met while I was singing along to “I Must Be Dreaming.” 

These photos are so bad but whatever

We locked eyes, and he pointed at me as if he remembered me from all those years ago. The sight line was so clear, and I don’t think it was meant for the rando in front of me. He’d done it before, too, during an event at the Mall of Asia in the latter half of 2012, and if my memory serves me correctly, maybe even at Fairview Terraces in 2015. 

And I honestly wouldn’t put it past him, because I know that’s the kind of sentimental person he is. 

It was so, so wonderful to watch him take the stage again and note that he’d grown up too, right along with us. I’d been a fan of his since he was 19, and he was 21 the first time I saw him live, 23 the last. He was 36 now, married, a father. A girl dad! It was crazy to see how his demeanor had changed. He took himself a bit too seriously in his 20s, like many of us do, weighed down, in his head. I wish I could’ve told him “I get it,” but it’s enough for me to have listened to his music and think, “He gets me.” Now here he was. More confident, more likely to tell dad jokes (so much dad jokes), a certain lightness to him. Like he’d finally seen what was on the other side, and he’d found that everything was going to be just fine. Still every bit the rock star. 

(It's been so strange as well to look back on these bands and realize that so many of them found success online right out of high school. They'd seemed like whole people already, but they weren't that much older than us, and they were also just figuring things out. These people were from small towns, 17 to 20, already living out of tour vans, already total pros, already writing music that will not just resonate but prove to stand the test of time. Again: that just doesn't happen anymore.) 

John at Pioneer Tour Manila in 2012

There was a tweet where a younger person was asking, “Can you imagine being a teenager in 2014? Was it really like this?” And someone had quoted it with something like, “It was great and you weren’t there and you’ll never experience it.” 

And they were being funny, but it made me stop and really reflect on it. The truth is, there’s something enviable about being a teen in every decade. I’ve missed out on so many things, and I’m only getting older, but it made me glad that this, all of it, this is what I got.