Death Cab for Cutie: I Built You A Tower World Tour -- Petco Park, San Diego

Twenty years of writing songs about the slow dissolve of everything beautiful, and somehow the beauty keeps winning the argument.

Ben Gibbard builds songs like architecture — rooms you can walk through, a staircase up to a view you were not braced for — and there is a real difference between hearing Transatlanticism alone in your car and hearing it standing among six thousand people who all drove to the same parking lot for the same reason. Nobody says it out loud. Everybody knows.

Nation of Language opens, and the pairing is almost too neat: cold synth surfaces over warm hearts, the same contradiction approached from the other direction.

Gallagher Square is one of the better outdoor rooms in San Diego — small enough to feel personal, open enough to let the bay in — and an August evening there is the correct weather for these songs.

For everyone who ever played Plans on repeat and never told anybody why.