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Hayd: Bowery Ballroom & Portraits /  by Liz Brown

I have this thing I call “sad in a fun way.” It’s the sort of sad that you need to feel whole, to feel fully, to let the sadness pass and pass through you and move past you. Sometimes I can’t move on without a cry. And sometimes I’ll go to sad movies alone and let myself feel it all and take it in and let it go.

I listened to Hayd’s music on Wednesday before his show at Bowery and it felt like that. I had to stop listening after a while because I grew too nostalgic and melancholic and I needed to get work done. But I think that’s a sign of something well-written and well-felt: that you can’t help but feel it, too.

Jump ahead to the show. I got there at doors to secure my spot and since there wasn’t a photo pit, I landed right in the middle of a group of folks I didn’t know (which is really the only way it happens when you arrive somewhere by yourself). But this felt different. Slowly the solitary folks and duos became a group, as they asked each other’s names and invited each other to tacos after the show. Folks sat in groups on the ground, waiting and playing games (can we normalize sitting down between sets?).

Part way through his set, Hayd began describing the isolating nature of sadness and hard feelings, but the magic of all of us feeling it together now. Admitting we all feel it, and even singing into the feeling, takes something isolating and makes it a conduit of connection: “We’re not alone—we’re together as you can see.”

When he left, the person to my right wiped tears away and quoted the iconic Euphoria line: “Is this fucking play about us?!”

And maybe that’s the point: it is. We all feel the same things, but some folks have the magic of putting those feelings into words and into songs and making the rest of us feel less alone, by giving us a space to feel and sing the same lonely feelings together. 

So, yes, the fucking play—the fucking song—is about us, all of us, alone and together tonight.

Portrait Time!