What it was like
Folk music written by somebody who left a small town and never quite made it all the way back carries a very specific ache — and forty thousand people in a baseball stadium screaming every word of it is the closest thing to a congregation secular America has managed to build.
His gift is writing songs that sound like diary entries you forgot making. 'Stick Season' broke something open for a whole generation of people who needed permission to miss a place they were desperate to leave, and this show sold out fast enough to confirm what the streaming numbers already said out loud.
Gigi Perez opens, with the sort of confessional writing that makes a stadium go quiet in the best way. Petco is open-air, so the songs have somewhere to go — they climb up out of the bowl and dissolve over the Gaslamp.
Bring your parents. They will cry at different songs than you do, and that is the entire point of the evening.