It was 1990.

I was ten years old and I asked for a mini- system for Christmas. My first! My parents went to Consumers Distributing and bought a bizarre five- in-one system that caught the front wave of the CD revolution before the back wave of the record- player revolution faded out. This Taiwanese knockoff actually had a record player on top, front-loading CD player underneath, an AM/FM radio, and two tape decks at the bottom, so you could perform the extremely rare feat of recording a record onto cassette.

I loved that mini-system. It was such a weird mutant that I think I saw part of my awkward out- sider identity congealed and reflected back through the thing. I was the only brown kid in my school.

My house smelled like curry. I had thick Coke-bottle glasses. I never combed my hair. I never talked to girls.

Fast-forward to 1997. I was still listening to my first two CDs: Forever Your Girl by Paula Abdul and Rhythm Nation by Janet Jackson. Then something strange happened. A popular kid named Rob suddenly took an interest in me. I have no idea why. Rob wore his hair long, carried a guitar everywhere, dated the most popular girl at school, and was really kind and likeable, too. One of those all-round guys that everyone respected.

In our last semester of high school Rob and I began going to the local diner every day between classes. I found myself driving off every morning to philosophize over hash browns that I swirled in ketchup till they were onion-tinged smears of orange mush.

Rob was lead singer of his own band and was really into music, so all his favourite bands became my favourite bands. He first tipped me onto the Beatles and Led Zeppelin and Jeff Buckley and . . . the Tea Party.

The Tea Party?

Yes, they were a three-piece band from Windsor, Ontario, specializing in dense layered goth rock infused with Eastern influences like sitars and tablas and harmoniums. I had grown up hanging out in unfinished basements with my parents and sister while guys would play tablas and harmoniums and the pundit would lead people through prayers and songs to welcome a new baby or celebrate a new home. Hearing those instruments in a totally different and much cooler context blew my mind, especially with Jeff Martin’s deep voice screaming about the grip of “temptation!”

I bought their latest CD, Transmission, and listened to it endlessly.

Near the end of the school year, Rob asked me if I wanted to go see a Tea Party concert in some giant field south of Belleville, Ontario, a couple of hours east of us. He said he’d drive, he’d bring a couple of girls, and I was welcome to join. I said yes right away.

When Saturday afternoon came he picked me up in his beat-up car with two girls I’d never met sitting in the back seat. He steered us onto the highway and proceeded to drive to Belleville like he was in a car chase. I tried to casually hang on for dear life while making idle chit-chat: “So, what do you think they’ll play?” The sudden step up the social ladder was overwhelming. I should have been at home studying chemistry but instead I was in a car, on a highway, going to a concert, with Rob and two girls!

More than twenty years later I can still see the beautiful sunset falling over shimmering Lake Ontario while music blasted out of giant speakers on the stage. For the first time I really lost myself, in a tight sweaty mob jumping and singing and cheering while tablas were drummed and sitars wailed and darkness fell and stars slowly appeared in the sky.

The night wasn’t about me, wasn’t about Rob, wasn’t about the girls. It was about the music. It was only about the music. Because the music is always only about the music. We fall out of ourselves, feel it together, stop our thinking, practice our feeling, forget our brains, and remember our bodies.

It would take many more years, but that was one of the first nights I started to see the thick, shel- lacked layers of self-judgment, self-criticism, and self-labelling I had coated myself with over the first couple of decades of my life. I started to feel that

I could maybe put a little crack in that shellac if I aimed my mind a different way.

I got addicted to that feeling.

I left Rob and my hometown behind the next year to begin studies at Queen’s University, and I reverted back to my natural resonant frequency of dutiful class attendance, hardcore studying, and trying to be as perfect as possible. Orange hash browns and long highway drives were long gone . . .

But I had a new release now.

Over the four years I was at Queen’s I probably went to fifty concerts. I saw the Tea Party every time they came through town, along with bands like the Lowest of the Low, Sloan, Hawksley Workman, Wide Mouth Mason, and Our Lady Peace.

I fell in love with the shows because they took me out of my head, out of my brain, and out of my stress.

And because they were a place where weird mutants and awkward outsiders were always welcome.

Neil Pasricha is an author, podcaster, and public speaker whose international bestsellers include The Book of Awesome series and The Happiness Equation. He received a Canada’s Top 40 under 40 award in 2018.