“The Most Human You Can Be”: Navigating Grief and Love at a Fred again.. Concert

At 27, I’m far too young to be the crotchety old lady scowling at everyone in the venue. But there I was at New York’s Terminal 5, slippery and tight as a sardine tinned tight alongside the 3,000 other people who came out to see Fred again.. I’d been waiting months for this show, to see my favorite artist during the first of a three-night residency that would end his tour. However, Terminal 5 is my (read: everyone’s) least favorite venue, and this was decidedly the worst concert crowd I’d ever had the displeasure of being in.

Basked in a blue light that would no doubt turn into the deep cerulean that shrouds the cover of the forthcoming Actual Life 3 LP, I was witness to some of the most shocking displays of pit politics I’d ever seen. People shoved and shouted, merciless in their attempts to keep their “spot.” In front of me, a guy juggling two drinks per hand was getting ripped a new one by a group of girls who insisted he “go back the way you came” because “we paid $400 outside the venue for these tickets.” The tall girl next to me, viciously vaping to pass the time, elbowed me in the head as her arm descended from her latest drag. She glared at me, and I wondered how it was possible the community around an artist could change so drastically in just ten months.

In December of 2021, I was surrounded by the most loving crowd at the 650-cap gem Music Hall of Williamsburg when Fred played “Billie (Loving Arms)” to close the show. The drop, which would’ve inspired an explosion of limbs for any other artist, brought the floor together in a massive group hug. I craved that experience, but I wouldn’t find it here. 

Instead, realization dawned as spiny elbows compressed my ribcage from all sides. The moment I feared, that every music lover fears, had undeniably arrived: disenchantment with an artist who means so much to me.

In all fairness, this had little to do with Fred’s music. A classical pianist mentored by Brian Eno, Fred Gibson’s venn diagram of talents positioned him to be a once-in-a-generation solo act after years as a superproducer. Fred again.. builds songs around internet-scrounged audio and brings electronic music to a place of pure authenticity. It is deeply cathartic as much as it is deeply emotional – especially when considering Actual Life 1 was written about Fred’s experience of falling in love and then losing his partner to illness. 

Over the past six months, my appreciation for Fred’s music had deepened as he flexed his production skills with a slew of rave-ready singles in a variety of electronic subgenres. And then deepened further as he twisted those releases into impossibly different moments of euphoric gratification at every show I’d been to. I spoke to Fred about every track on AL1 for the album’s one year anniversary, which concretized my fandom for not just Fred again..’s music but for Fred Gibson’s pureness of heart.

Clearly, I’m not alone. And while I could make snide comments about the indie music journalist to frat guy pipeline that propels an artist into stardom, I can’t fault anyone for being deeply and singularly moved by Fred. It’s the reason I’ve worn my fandom as a badge of honor since his solo debut, and the reason I stayed put in this insufferable crowd as my roommate and I waited for my boyfriend to come back with our whiskey.

In the reception-less pit of Terminal 5, I checked my phone to see if a text had slipped through, ready to turn my phone flashlight into a bat signal. No “all they had is garbage whiskey” texts like I anticipated from him. Instead: a text from my boyfriend telling me to call my friend and below that, texts from my friend pleading me to respond to her. My stomach dropped and a familiar panic hit. As my legs autopiloted me out of the crowd, I shouted “I have to call my friend, it’s an emergency” to my roommate behind me.

In the hallway nearest the doors: reception, finally. The opening measures of my cell phone’s shrill ring received a cheer from the crowd; the droning bass of “Kyle (I Found You),” the song that made me fall in love with Fred’s music, was filling the cavernous warehouse. My friend picked up. In between sobs that carried the disbelief and anger that only death knows, she told me that Al and Beth went dancing on Sunday and got in a car accident. More sobs, more space in between them that I was eager to be past and simultaneously scared to be on the other side of. Al had passed away.

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Some backstory is necessary here.

I grew up in Seattle. I don’t have siblings, but as the child of political refugees who fled the War in Viet Nam, I had a shockingly large extended family who also made it out of the country. At an early age, however, I became very familiar with loss as everything from old age and the long-term effects of Agent Orange began to claim my family members. With a single mom whose generational wealth was robbed by a war she had little to do with, who was starting from scratch in the United States, I was lucky to befriend other only children whose parents looked after me as their own.

One of those families was the Monahans. After an initial battle over who stole whose namesake, Tia Monahan became one of my best friends, and Tom and Teresa Monahan became another set of parents to me. They made me dinner when my mom had to work late, and cheered for me at tennis matches as loudly as they did their own Tia. They named a room in their houseboat as mine, and I went to nearly every Monahan family function. So when Tia started losing people, I felt the effects as waves rather than ripples, and we – only children who had each known more loss than most do at 50 – were buoys for each other in a very specific riptide. 

When I moved to Viet Nam after graduating college, I received a call from Tia similar to the one I got at Terminal 5. It was about four months into what was looking like an indefinite stay for me as I considered a job offer among the ancient ruins and seafood of the beach-side town Nha Trang. Tia called to tell me her dad was recovering from surgery. Then she called to tell me that he’d gotten an infection. Then she called to tell me he was gone.

No matter how much death you’ve faced in your life, no matter how much or how little time you have to anticipate someone’s passing, nothing really prepares you for the moment it happens. Every person who departs is different and the hole they leave in your life is shaped to their unique imprint. The memories you have together are unique, as are the conversations you won’t get to finish. Each journey out of grief’s most intense stages are also so frustratingly individual, but eventually you find some footing.

In the years that followed Tom’s passing, Tia was spending more and more time with some of her parents’ best friends, Al and Beth. She called Al and Beth her California parents, and the last time I’d seen them was at their little Sebastopol ranch over one of those perfect, dry, sun-drenched weeks that are abundant during a California summer. We filled our days with coastal walks, ranch kitties, and never ending meals, with afternoons spent reading and evenings laughing into our glasses at nearby wineries.

On a warm Monday night, Al and Beth took us to their favorite bar to go dancing. Like most regulars-only dives in the area, outsiders raise eyebrows – Tia and I especially, because we were by far the youngest there. But as long as you were there to dance, age was truly just a number. The local blues band played what felt like forever that night, and outside of slinging shots with locals, we danced every second they played. Al and Beth danced harder and longer than Tia and I did, and I remember looking at them, two free souls in a blues ballet, and thinking this was the blueprint for getting old. It was one of those great nights that you can’t anticipate, that glows with a surreally beautiful quality in my memory because of how random it was. To this day, it’s the best Monday night I’ve ever had.

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Back at Terminal 5, I was crying into my phone pressed against a venue floor sticky with beer, sweat, and New York City street grime. I have a vague memory of shouting away (many) people who came to ask if I was okay and eventually peeling myself from the floor. When I got to my feet, I had a mission. I needed to find my boyfriend and my roommate, and tell them I was leaving. The only problem was that a rowdy show had started in a venue with no service, and I had no choice but to dive, tearful and fragile, into the crowd again.

In all honesty, I don’t remember the next few hours well. I know I elbowed past a lot of territorial assholes, that I left tears on a lot of shoulders. I know my boyfriend somehow found me, having peeled off from my roommate to search for me, and held me as I cried in a torrential sea of jumping bodies. I also know that as my search for my roommate reached despair, Fred asked the crowd if he could slow things down and requested silence before launching into the morphed cello notes that kick off “Me (Heavy).” 

The emotional centerpiece from Actual Life 1, “Me (Heavy)” is the only song where Fred centers his own words instead of a sample – because, as he told me, he hadn’t found a song that said what he needed to say, so he had to say it himself. For most of the track, Fred speaks to his partner in the hospital, but there are moments when his lyrics refer to her in the third person. It’s unclear whether he’s murmuring to himself, informing the listener, or pleading with the greater powers that dictate life and death. What is clear is how he struggles, how he negotiates with the fates, and how he comes around – not to acceptance, but to acknowledging that he’s as ready as he’ll ever be for life without her.

After swimming upstream in a bleary-eyed daze, trying to hold onto my boyfriend in a fruitless search, I stopped and listened to Fred play my favorite song. I never thought I would see “Me (Heavy)” live and hearing it now, in this unfathomable situation, was a buoy in the riptide. I decided then to stop fighting the people around me, to stop looking for my roommate. Instead, I cried in safe, sweaty anonymity. Nestled in the belly of Terminal 5, I was insulated from the real world. What had felt hostile and uninhabitable was now a welcome respite from what lay beyond the venue walls. 

New swells of tears came as familiar songs, with lyrics and melodies I’d heard hundreds of times, landed sharply on an impossibly fresh wound. When Yasminah’s voice repeated “I can’t wait to see your face again,” I couldn’t help but think about how Al, Beth, Tia, and I would never have another night dancing to the blues together. When Danielle sang “If I die in your arms / There’ll be a smile on my face,” my heart broke thinking about Beth waking up in the hospital thinking Al was in the next room over.

After the show ended and the crowd filed out of the venue, releasing me back to reality, I called a cab and headed to Tia’s. When I walked in, Fred was playing from her phone. We hid from the world under a duvet and ran through tissue boxes while Actual Life 1 played on repeat.

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The days that followed brought a steady stream of news. 

First and most excitingly, I found out that Beth was in stable condition and despite a severe brain injury, doctors were hopeful that she’d wake up. 

We also learned more information about the accident. After hours of dancing, Al and Beth were crossing the street and heading home, leaving that same blues bar that we’d been to when they got in the car accident. A mix of emotions came with that knowledge, at the forefront of which was anger. But it also made me happy knowing Al spent his last night doing his favorite thing with his favorite person.

And somewhere a little deeper, stored in a place suppressed by fresh grief, that I couldn’t get to right now but that I knew resisted calcification, I could feel a flicker of gratitude. I was grateful that I had gotten to witness Al and Beth dancing together. In my mind, Al would continue twirling in an endless blues ballet, happy and free, forever.

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A few days later, I was walking through the doors of Terminal 5 again. Fred was closing his tour with one final show in Hell’s Kitchen and, in addition to tickets and two friends, I carried complex feelings with me into the venue. Over the past few days, I’d reflected on the Fred show and found myself both fond and resentful. I didn’t have an appetite for the songs from the actual Actual Life albums, but the only thing I did want to listen to was the Actual Life 2 Piano EP, in which Fred reprised five AL2 songs, drawing out their emotional cores into sparse, meditative piano interpolations of his originals.

It was a strange feeling, not wanting to be too close, but not being able to stray far. Fred’s music had been the unwitting soundtrack to a terrible night, but it had also been the thing that saved me from it. I grappled with both as the show began. Standing in the back of the venue, a strange zen took hold as bass blossomed over the crowd and I watched smiles spread across faces around me.

Many that bobbed in my peripherals probably didn’t know that grief was the foundation of Fred’s debut, that it’s still the thread tying every song together as he grapples with it over time. I came to the show prepared for the hurt, anticipating the music would be even more painful than it had been a few days before. But instead, I found myself turning over an essential truth of Fred’s music in my mind: As much as pain and loss are unavoidable touchstones within the spectrum of human experience, so are joy and hope. Rather than those being mutually exclusive, Fred holds both together and marries them into a single expression of humanity. They are intrinsically intertwined, for him in his experiences and for me in mine. 

Kyle Tran Myhre’s voice boomed into the venue:

In this smoking chaos 
Our shoulderblades kissed 
I found you
I found you
I found you beautiful
I found you exploding

And then Dermot Kennedy’s:

And if only you could see yourself in my eyes 
See you shine
You shine

Something was creeping up through the cracks in my sadness, and despite how far I was from a silver lining, how wrong it felt to be anything but bad, I felt a smile split across my own face. Through the words of Kyle and Dermot, Fred broke open that gratitude that had been flickering in me for days. 

As the music played, I was overcome with it: How amazing that we find people to love in this smoking chaos, in the dizzying nonsense that rules us, that gives and takes with no rhyme or reason. How incredible to overlap on this plane with people who come to mean so much to us. How wonderful that we get to see them for the special people they are, that we get to cherish them and love them. Even if they may never see how great they are themselves, even if we may never get the chance to tell them.

Tears rolled down my cheeks as Fred went in on the up-tempo piano that makes “Dermot” a celebration of love and connection. I’d cried at almost every Fred show I’d been to – the first two times from the acute euphoria of seeing my favorite artist. The fourth time, from receiving awful news. Now, at my fifth show, I cried again thinking about how grateful I was that Beth was going to wake up and that I’d had the honor of knowing Al at all.

Grief is such a fickle thing. When you’re living in it, when you’re truly immersed, every day is a series of trial and error as you act and assess, testing what brings comfort and what brings the sting. And it’s different for everyone feeling the loss because, though I am in a place where gratitude could find me, I wasn’t nearly as close with Al as Tia was, and it would be a long time until she was there, if her path ever took her there at all. Mourning is a solo ascent with different avalanches for everyone, no matter how many people are making the climb with you.

And there’s little solace to be found, especially when confronted with the surreal randomness of death and its related events. Looking back, I couldn’t help but think of how bizarre that last Fred show was. How strange a circumstance, finding out someone you know and love has passed away the second your favorite artist is walking onstage. How strange for that artist to also be reliving his own grief every time he performs, with that night being no exception. How strange for him to have played my favorite song that meant so much more in that moment than it would’ve at any other show.

I’ve heard it said that the randomness of death is a reflection of the unexpected joys in life – yes, that’s from Star Trek – and I think that may be true. But if it is true, that leaves us at the mercy of randomness, which is a terrifying thing. There’s no explanation for that randomness, and so we’re tasked with the responsibility of figuring out what to do with it.

If it is true, that means we must accept that randomness, and potentially even be grateful for it, according to some.

Fred refers to a speech by Stephen Colbert as his “bible,” and in it, Colbert reflects on how “it’s a gift to exist. And with existence comes suffering. There’s no escaping that... If you’re grateful for life, then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can’t pick and choose.” Which means we ultimately have to be grateful for loss. “[From loss,] you get awareness of other people’s loss… which allows you to love more deeply, and to understand what it’s like to be a human being,” he says. “It’s the fullness of your humanity. What’s the point of being here and being human if you can’t be the most human you can be?”

In the months since the shows, I’ve been relearning the familiar outlines and edges of the Actual Life albums with a fresh perspective on loss. I now see Colbert’s words all over these songs. Though I can’t deny his perspective on a theoretical level, I don’t think I’ll ever be grateful that loss happens. But some gratitude has stuck around: it’s gratitude for the brief time I had with Al, for the second father he was to my friend, and for Beth’s recovery (especially now that she is officially out of the hospital!).

This fresh perspective on loss has also been accompanied by a fresh perspective on love. Whether you subscribe to Colbert’s philosophy or not, he’s of course right when he says we’re human – and we are cursed and blessed with feeling everything that comes with being one. I think this makes us imperfect in life. Probably in death, too. We’re definitely imperfect in love and in loss. But it’s being human that allows us to love at all, and if loss is the price we must all eventually pay, we’re left with no choice but to love fiercely and to love boldly with however much time we have.

The moment from the Terminal 5 shows that comes back to me most often now is when Fred asked everyone to turn on their flashlights during “Angie (I’ve Been Lost).” Usually I cringe at those types of things, but I couldn’t deny the beauty of a raucous crowd stilling to ignite a moment together. The dense white glow of thousands of cellphone lights burns in my memory still. It seems significant to me that, of all the songs, Fred wanted to illuminate the one about resilience and growth from tragedy, about choosing to keep trying even when you feel impossibly lost. There’s a good chance I’m reading into the moment out of a desire for a sign, or desperation for self-preservation. It could have been a coincidence that Fred chose to bathe “Angie” in light.

But maybe some things aren’t so random, least of all the choices we make to hold our love next to our loss and carry them both with us as we decide to be brave enough to keep loving despite loss.

For what it’s worth, I don’t believe it was random at all.