Through the Lens: The Night “A Lot Like Love” Took Over the Room

By the Photographer

I spent most of that night watching the room through a camera.

That’s a strange way to experience live music, because you’re always half inside the moment and half outside of it. You’re looking for expressions, hands, light, movement, the instant before someone laughs, the second after a lyric lands, the way a crowd changes when a song suddenly becomes theirs.

That happened during A LOT LIKE LOVE.

The room at The Local in Saugerties, New York had already settled into that warm, loose rhythm that good live shows sometimes find. The band was comfortable, the audience was close, and nobody seemed particularly interested in pretending there was much distance between the stage and the floor.

Then the crowd started singing.

From where I was standing, you could see the whole room shift.

People leaned forward. Faces opened up. A few people who had been talking stopped. Others started mouthing the words, then singing them louder. It wasn’t a staged singalong or one of those moments where a performer points the microphone at the audience and tells everyone what to do.

It just happened.

That’s the kind of thing a photographer waits for.

I remember trying to capture the exchange between Jake and the crowd — the expression of realizing people were singing the song back, the band settling deeper into the groove, the way the audience seemed to become part of the arrangement.

There was something very human about it.

A LOT LIKE LOVE is built around uncertainty — that strange emotional territory where something resembles love closely enough to be convincing, even when something inside you knows it isn’t quite right.

Apparently a lot of people in that room knew that feeling.

The camera can catch faces, but it can’t really capture the sound of a crowd deciding that a lyric belongs to them. That’s why the live recording matters so much. The photographs could show the moment. The tape could let you hear it.

At least, that was the idea.

There were several versions of the song over time, but that night gave it something none of the others could have. It became less about one person’s relationship and more about recognition — all those people singing because they had their own version of the story.

For me, that was the best part of photographing live music.

You go in thinking you’re documenting a performance.

Sometimes you end up documenting a little piece of evidence that everybody in the room experienced the same thing at once.

Unfortunately, there is one problem with this particular story.

I would love to finish by showing you the photographs.

I would love to tell you there’s a box somewhere containing contact sheets, negatives, video, and old tapes from that night.

There isn’t.

A local flood got there first.

The images, tapes, and a good chunk of the physical record of that evening were all swallowed up by water, mud, and whatever else floods decide to carry with them.

So, with apologies, I have no dramatic archive to unveil.

The photographs are gone.

The tapes are gone.

But the song survived.

And strangely enough, that feels appropriate.

Some nights leave you with pictures.

Some leave you with a recording.

And some leave you with nothing but the memory of a room full of people singing together.

— The Photographer

A LOT LIKE LOVE — LIVE
from American Twilight