Clear Eyes. Full Heart.

or, Explosions in This Guy

The world can feel pretty ice-cold these days for those of us with warm hearts. Many of this year’s headlines have emanated with the stench of death and moral decay.

But there is a mantra I repeat to myself when I feel that icy chill and catch a whiff of that pallid stench.

The earth is not a cold, dead place.

That lyrical phrase was coined by a Texas band that, ironically enough, writes no lyrics. And this week I giddily drove all the way across Pennsylvania to see that band play. The 30-hour trip was oddly frigid for April, but music and road-tripping light a campfire in my heart.

I felt warm. I felt alive.

And I couldn’t have been less dead.

I took the road less traveled to Pittsburgh, skipping the overpriced PA Turnpike and visiting Ohiopyle State Park. It’s a wooded wonderland sliced through by the raging Youghiogheny River, replete with rock-carved waterslides and glistening waterfalls and long pedestrian bridges.

The natural waterslides delight tourists in the summertime, when the water level is lower. But in their current state, the roiling water would dash you against the rocks and disembowel you in a matter of seconds, leaving your entrails to float all the way to the Monongahela.

(After careful consideration, I opted against this particular activity and chose to enjoy a bowel-preserving hike instead.)

Scenic spots like Ohiopyle validate my conviction that Pennsylvania admirably holds its own with any state east of the Rockies. Our colorful, contoured commonwealth is filled to the brim with woods, caverns, waterfalls, and hidden pockets of beauty. My bucket-list goal is to show my kids as many of them as possible.

Heck, that’s my bucket-list goal for the next 5 months. No time like the present.

After my nature jaunt, I proceeded to the Steel City for the concert. I met up with two buddies I only know because of the existence of post-rock, a music genre that has conjured up a community of intense natural camaraderie. One of my buddies is 37, one of them is 72, and I am 45, but the music makes all of us feel 23. Post-rock is the fountain of youth.

Leroy, Doug, and I grabbed dinner and headed downtown for the show, animated by pre-concert euphoria. All 3 of us are big fans of Explosions in the Sky, but it was their first time seeing them play live. As for me, I hadn’t had the pleasure since the late ‘00s.

It’s an exquisite feeling to fall in love with a band’s music as a single guy and then reconnect with those songs almost 20 years later as a married father of 2. Their music is a thread that connects my late-booze-era self with my 40-something-dad self. It transports me back to a time before my kids showed me the meaning of love and reacquainted me with wide-eyed wonder. (Or to quote another one of this band’s albums: How strange, innocence.)

For a band whose songs set off a fireworks display in your heart, Explosions in the Sky is quite a fitting name. Their music is cinematic and deeply emotional. Delicate and eviscerating in the span of a single song. They scored Friday Night Lights, and their musical ethos is nicely distilled by the tagline of that film and TV spinoff:

Clear eyes. Full hearts.

For many of us, this tumultuous moment in time fogs up our vision and empties our emotional reserves. This wearying world can make it hard to be anything close to lucid or hopeful. As my dear friend likes to say: “It’s not easy being a human.”

But my eyes were crystal clear and my heart was filled to the brim as I drove to Pittsburgh to savor music’s ability to connect us with each other. Its sheer aesthetic wallop. The pure catharsis it offers to us as emotive creatures of this earth that is not a cold, dead place.

And I have 4 soft-spoken, hard-rocking guys from Texas to thank for that.

Much appreciated, fellas.