Blink-182. They’ve been a staple of my pop-punk repertoire since I was a wee little thing. I wouldn’t say their breakup was particularly devastating to me, because quite frankly, I can’t stand the s/t album, but upon hearing of their reunion, I was overjoyed! I just knew this would be *the* concert of the summer, and I was 100% right!

Usually, I try to concentrate on the positive things about the bands and people I meet at shows when I write these gig reviews, but this show was so epic that I have to explain my entire weekend. I suppose that makes this more of a blog and less of a gig review, but tough toenails. If you want the abridged version, read the last couple of sentences and skip the rest of this. For the tl;dr, keep reading.

Friday night, I braved the Garden State for the first time, all by lonesome. I managed to navigate myself through Penn Station and get a ticket to Meadowlands, then get myself to the stadium, without getting too terribly lost. So far, so good! The weather wasn’t quite cooperating, so it was off-and-on sogginess as I wandered between the four stages set up for Hoodwink. The theme of that night was for bands to do complete sets covering other bands, which I thought was a novel and fun idea.

My friends and I arrived at the venue early (at least, our own idea of early). The diehard fans had already formed a line, and some kids had even spent the night! There was also a good number of band members coming outside to greet people. I met up with fellow Equalizer Kristara so we could go street team the line and get people interested in Equalize.

Oh, Thursday, how I love thee, let me count the ways. I’m not sure I actually remember when I first heard Thursday, but since they’ve been around for as long as I’ve been listening to music it doesn’t really matter. I can still remember the first time I heard Full Collapse: tucked into a school bus on my way back from an away game (because I was, indeed, a band nerd), fuzzy headphones glued to my head, willing away all the noise and sweat and exhaustion from the night, listening to a cd my friend gave me. All the passion, all the energy from that record blew me away. And listening to Thursday today, listening to Common Existence and to them live, you know that the same passion they have never disappeared.