Love, peace and harmony.

Tonight I went to see Morrissey in concert, he's playing five shows this week. As soon as he started singing, I realized this was the first live show I've attended since Alice's death. There were shows I wanted to see in the last year, yet my heart just wasn't into it.

Morrissey rocked. I basically cried through the whole set, mostly because I was thinking about Alice. He opened with one of my favorite songs ever, "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard this One Before" from the Smiths circa 1987.

I was soon transported to our home growing up.

It was as if I was sitting in the family room, and Alice was in the living room listening to this album on the record player, with the "tone" setting on low. I could see her sitting on the rust colored carpet, because my mom preferred we not sit on her relatively new sofas, with the album and sleeve splayed out before her. It felt like I was a sophomore in high school all over again, and I missed being with her, even though necessarily in the background of this picture are feelings of hostility, aggression and instability coming from our quarreling parents.

He also performed "Death of a Disco Dancer" from the same album Strageways Here We Come making my time travel experience seem that much more real. I sang along
"Love, peace and harmony
very nice, very nice, very nice
but maybe in the next world"
and thought how Alice and my mom shared this hope for love, peace and harmony among all of us. I'm inclined to think it's a pipedream, as Moz is saying.

What felt good, in a strange way, was his openness about death. He's always been dark, still, he tore into a song called "One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell" in which he sang again and again "and you will never see the ones you love again." I wondered if he was speaking from experience, and how I knew well the pain in what he described. He prefaced the song with "I know you think you'll go on forever." And it just isn't true.

To be sure, he also presented a more loving demeanor, a surprise for me. He changed the words in the first song from "I still love you/only slightly less" to "I still love you/only slightly more." Maybe I just didn't see his kinder side before?

Morrissey's most recent album opens with "I Will See You in Far Off Places" which evokes Alice for me. I see Alice in far off places, because I take her there with me. So it's fitting that I sensed and felt her at the show tonight.