Lamp @ Regency Ballroom

20241001

Last summer, Ryan and I had spent hours trawling through every level of Tower Records in Shibuya. I’d left the building with many new CDs and merchandise, and among my favorite purchases was the re-print of Lamp’s For Lovers album.

To me, For Lovers feels deeply mythical. I don’t know if that’s quite the right word, but that is how it feels every time I listen to it. It was the soundtrack accompanying me through the pandemic years (and even before that), through moving out for the first time and then for the second. One night, I’d spent hours searching for the exact location of the beach on the cover of For Lovers. On RYM, its descriptors include: soothing, lush, mellow, bittersweet, warm, uplifting.

It’s all these things at once. I plug my earbuds in and close my eyes to the gentle, paper-like tone of Yusuke Nagai’s voice, harmonizing with Kaori Sakakibara’s soft, bright vocals, the almost analog-like tremble of Taiyo Someya’s guitar. It feels like I’m listening to music through the thinnest of walls, in a good way. Every time I listen to the title track, “For Lovers”, my chest tightens, my eyes get slightly damp, and a lump forms at the base of my throat. The rest of the album always feels like a warm hug: like coming home, buried under the duvet after a warm shower.

When Lamp announced that they were doing a North American tour, I knew I had to get tickets straight away. I’d held their music close to my heart for years, and I didn’t know if I’d ever see them live in my lifetime. No need to have an Asian tour, apparently; let’s just open for Mitski and hit the road. I don’t have TikTok, but I kind of knew that they’d blown up there in the past year, and apparently to the point that they had enough pull to do a full tour. (And with two dates in SF alone!) So I knew that it would be crowded, but I didn’t know to what extent.

The show started at eight, and doors opened at seven. I thought it would be good to get there a bit early so that I could check out the merch booth. It’d be sick to grab a copy of the For Lovers vinyl, which was re-pressed for the first time in many years. In the end, I arrived at the venue fifteen minutes before the show was slated to start, but the line snaked around the entire block.

The entire block. As in, all four sides of the block that was adjacent to the Regency Ballroom. I literally walked around in circles (or a square).

It was kind of funny, though. I’d stand in line, walking forward a few steps every so often, and watch people who were in the same scenario as me just walking along the line, non-stop, searching for the end of it. At one point, a middle-aged man in a white linen shirt, thick glasses, and long graying hair walked down our entire length of the block.

“Extra ticket? Anyone selling an extra ticket?” He kept repeating that as he walked along the one-way street, slowly, slowly, so that people would have time to respond. At the same time, an empty Waymo—part of the city’s self-driving car fleet, a white sedan that looked otherwise normal except for the giant cameras that flanked its sides and top—trudged along behind him, its built-in detectors unable to run over a pedestrian, honk, or maneuver past him to get ahead.

I finally reached the start of the line. It was fifteen minutes past eight, but they hadn’t started yet, because more than half of the crowd was still stuck outside. Security check was just extremely slow, for some reason.

But the pit was relatively empty. I decided that it would be a better use of my time to snag a good spot—in the center, for good audio, and in the front-half of the pit—than to search for the merch booth, especially since it was a sold-out show.

It was so good. I teared up, right at the very end. Like Ryan says: why are Japanese bands so good? They sounded even better than the studio recordings. They played my favorite songs, including, of course, “For Lovers”. Maybe that’s a cheesy, overrated pick for a favorite Lamp song, but it’s hard to overstate how I feel when listening to it.

One odd thing, though, was that the crowd didn’t quite cheer for some of the songs that I thought were Lamp classics. Well, they were Lamp classics for me, I guess. And they would cheer at songs that didn’t stand out to me in any special way. I figured that those, then, were the songs that got caught up in the TikTok algorithm.

At the end of the show, the group of guys behind me talked about how they should’ve moshed.

I was desperate to catch my last bus back, and so I didn’t look for the merch booth, even while on my way out. On the bus, my earbuds were plugged in (listening to Lamp, haha), but I overheard a conversation that made me pause the music immediately. The guy in front of me was carrying a poster tube and a copy of the For Lovers vinyl, and I’d been eyeing it with jealousy for the whole seven minutes we'd be on the bus.

A lady struck up conversation with him, and asked him how he had gotten the vinyl; she was super jealous. He responded by saying that he started lining up at 10am. They let you in at 10am? No, he replied, they let him in at seven. So he was first in line for General Admission, and got to the merch booth early enough to grab a copy of the coveted vinyl, but it also ran out very soon after him. (I would later learn, after doing some research online, that they limited the number of copies of the vinyl for each stop of the tour, and half of them would be reserved for those with VIP tickets anyway.) After listening to all of that, I felt absolutely no bitterness at all that I hadn’t gotten merch. I love Lamp, but I don’t love Lamp enough to line up for nine hours in SF in the middle of a heatwave.

On the way home, I was on my phone. My friends back in Singapore had all gone for the Gilberto Gil show; some of them even got to shake his hand, and got hold of the setlist. I was immensely jealous—though not as jealous as I was of the guy’s For Lovers vinyl, I must admit—but then I realized that I got to watch Lamp, and the envy settled. I still can’t believe I got to watch Lamp live? Now, it’s time to manifest Lamp for Fuji Rock 2025.