Sweat and the reverb from the subwoofers drench my ears as I look on towards the arena in Camden’s Wiggins Park.

  It is late July. The sun shines brightly across Philadelphia and Ben Franklin Bridge. The Xponential Music Festival held all the possible excitement. This was my first festival, and my, was it a festival to remember.

  After watching the first gig, Pinegrove, I knew that the beat of the music would be eternal beyond Sunday.  

  Everyone should attend music festivals. There, you lose all sense of hunger, sleep, and society. There, you just focus on the raw beauty of the music. There, you hear those who have heard all your life, or those you have just met.

 At first, bands like Wilco, Spoon, and Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes, motivated me to attend the XPN Festival.

 As a sixteen year old, I had never been to a concert, unless you count a Beatles cover band at Barclay Farms or The Celtic Festival in Quebec City. The Camden festival was a time I needed to experience this music in the raw form.

  It was a musical pilgrimage.

  The music festival lasted three days. I went with a friend who also shared my taste in the music. There were bands there ranging from a three sister folk band from Oregon, Jospeh, to a full on seven person jazz band, Preservation Hall Jazz Band.

  When we first walked in, we got our wristbands and eagerly plotted our day’s agenda. Friday’s meet and greets got cancelled due to impending rain. The people there were with their freebies and infinite Grateful dead shirts. Ice cream samples were my diet, as well as the cucumbers scrunched in my purse. We came prepared with towels and a plastic spoon for the Spoon concert for Saturday. (Not even my puns cease for music.)

  These voices had filled my earliest childhood memories, now transcending throughout my present life. And I still get all the feels. I was lost in a state of elation and shock, with the lights and subwoofers. It was during Wilco’s Friday night concert, during “I’m Trying to Break your Heart” when I realized the beauty of interpretation in a concert. Many musicians improvise during concerts, allowing the audience to hear an original variety of the song.

  I suggest everyone to embrace the concert experience. We all have our bands that we enjoy listening to repeat while studying or even taking long drives. Yet we can truly enjoy and see the music played in front of us with those who think as we do.

  New voices and faces hit my Spotify playlists and YouTube searches. I met that person, I shook their hand. The new and old faces that bring us together in something called a music festival. What beauty. All the smells of sweat and the nasty, occasional marijuana, the sights of sun pierced leaves and beach chairs piled inside the mosh pits, everyone shaking their heads and bopping around. It comes naturally, because I do not feel myself moving, except for my heart and the sound waves dancing right to the brim of my baseball cap.

  Sunscreen creases my clothing, but the spirit increases as the people gather for the music.