Last Friday I played my first real-deal, open-to-the-public, and at-a-venue gig in a very long time. It was remarkable.

I love to swing big, to really just put my whole back into it, to try and hit it out of the park as undeniably as possible (ohh, that one's a goner, says the radio announcer, see ya next season!). I wanna clear the fences, I wanna clear the stands, I wanna damage a windshield in the parking lot. Which means that I miss it entirely often, total whiffs. I'd have a much better batting average if I reined it in a bit, allowed myself to accept the slow and steady work of simply getting on the bases, patience and strategy. But no, for me the big swing and the bigger miss is more satisfying than the measly little infield double. Because if I whiff then that means I swung my hardest, believed with my whole musculature that I could connect. Missing it entirely feels better than doing a meager version of the big, beautiful thing.

I'm not praising myself here, simply accepting how it is with me. But I'd be lying if I said it wasn't goddamn incredible and absolutely perfect on those rare occasions when the bat cracks in half.

The show Friday was a good one by standard metrics: decent crowd, bands got paid, no major technical issues, venue invited us back. As an added bonus my friend's DJ set was extremely fun and the sound system was good and loud and a bunch of us actually danced until well beyond last call. Who could ask for more?

But there's one moment in particular - one perfectly exorbitant, over-the-top, riotously joyful moment that I'll hold with fondness forever.

I planned that night to try something new. Anyone who knows me has heard me talk about how dancing to loud electronic music and running on the treadmill changed my life. I spent much of the last few years bopping in clouds of fog or in rusty warehouses, wandering out into the dawn in a dizzy haze of quiet (there is nothing louder than a bird chirping at 7am after dancing all night). You might not know it listening to my catalog of ambient music and cathartic indie rock, but dance and boogie and disco and house and techno and whatever else sounds good on a big club speaker system is deeply important to me. And in the absence of band practices and DIY rock clubs in the last year I have very tentatively allowed myself to maybe kinda start making dance music. Or more accurately it might be described as music you could probably dance to, if you wanted. Which you really can't say about much of what I've made in the past. No, this is something very new and lightly corny and, for me, kind of holy.

We all arrived at the venue did the normal things, which was perhaps the most surreal part: sound check, hanging out with the other acts, cashing in a drink ticket at the bar. I talked to people I sorta recognized from the Internet and watched the opening band. I kept forgetting how novel it was. And then it was time for me to sing.

The first part of the set started calmly enough. There's a mellow upright piano at the venue, so for the first ten minutes or so I recreated the Appalachian idyll of Cicada Waves, using pre-recorded bugs playing off of a boombox. Eventually I sang a spare arrangement of one of my songs. In the second part of the set, I did what I'm ostensibly most comfortable doing in front of people: playing guitar and singing. I was rusty, but my body remembered better than I did. There was one terrifying moment where I accidentally unplugged my guitar but, hey, we recovered. And then for the third part of the set, I hit play once again on my little Sears boombox and the new tunes leapt from the tape.

Three songs were all I had to get through. I tried to warn the people gathered there, tried to insulate myself a little bit from the terror of unproven approaches. But the keys and kicks on the cassette sounded so loud and so good and with each synthesized handclap I felt myself relaxing into the songs. I was ad-libbing and smiling even if I wasn't dancing enough. I felt exposed and ungainly and full of joy and painfully seen and when the songs called for me to rip some aggressive guitar I clung to those chaotic moments like it was a buoy in the open sea.

But during the final song I put the guitar down and took the mic off the stand, swinging the cord around, a kind of liberation. This song is all promises I made to myself last year, I said, and now those precious little dreams are coming true. The track ballooned behind me, I was pointing and smiling. Folks began to dance and I rattled my red tambourine. When the drums came in it sounded so tremendous, bigger than I've ever heard it. I was beaming and singing, and then right on cue, at a painfully perfect moment in the song's crescendo, Liam turned on the fog and the lasers, which joined the already spinning disco ball. Like heaven opening, truly. Those who were shaking their hips stared up in wonder, taken by surprise by the prom night lights. It was as if we had dropped 1,000 doves from the ceiling. Springs will run, I sang, when come the sun, and I felt them rushing underneath me, we were awash in fog and handclaps and sequencers, buoyant.

The song ended, I had made it through the terror, and then with the fog and the lasers going we all ate birthday cake and danced. I felt it connect and crack, I had sweat through my clothes, strangers in the bar with their mouths full of cake wished me a happy birthday. For so long, I had not allowed myself to remember that being alive could be so great.