Digging Through Lost ’N Sound

As an aging musician with a comprehensive malignancy of good-ol’-days syndrome, I spend a sizable chunk of time contemplating, and consequently lamenting, the current state of independent live music. My personal experience —largely composed of either playing or watching sparsely attended shows — goes a long way toward reinforcing my perception that folks who play music in local clubs, and the folks who like to watch it being played in local clubs, are just getting too damn old. Dealing with the pulls of daily responsibilities (work, family, and the lack of liquid assets to support our passion), we’ve become too old to do it and too old to care about others doing it, too. What’s worse, as I’ve often groused, is that there does not seem to be a next wave coming behind us old farts to take our place once arthritis robs us of our ability to fret a C5.

But how easily my shortsightedness could be corrected by one (long and extremely hot) day spent surrounded by music and people making it who are wholly new to me. To criminally lean into a pun, I found quite a lot during my first foray to Lost ’N Sound, a series of mini music festivals on the Near Southside not unlike our old Music Awards Festivals. More than a dozen businesses in SoMa hosted more than 30 musical artists and peppered the street with dozens more booths offering art, crafts, vintage clothing, food, and even falconry.

Chief among my discoveries: hope. Just because I’ve gotten too old to know what’s happening doesn’t mean nothing is. A host of new and young bands from not just Fort Worth seem poised to reinvigorate a North Texas scene that my generation appears to be quickly aging out of. For more than seven hours, I bounced up and down Main being introduced to fresh new faces in between reconnecting with current friends. The experience was enough to ingnite a little glimmer that the next Lost ’N Sound might be even better and the ones to follow for years to come even better than that.