Tuesday Night at the Williamsburg Waterfront: Watching Soccer and Listening to Death Cab for Cutie for Free from Bushwick Inlet Park

We joined our fellow members of the Sneak-a-Peek Freeloader Indie Music Appreciation Society tonight on the fringes of Bushwick Inlet Park's soccer fields at the Williamsburg waterfront to watch some amateur soccer, enjoy the skyline through the mostly covered-over fence,

and loll about as Death Cab for Cutie played a sold-out benefit concert practically next door at East River State Park.

We have four Death Cab CD's, more than any other sexagenarian we know. (That should inspire pathos, not admiration nor envy.) And, yes, we came to them, embarrassingly, through The O.C.'s Seth Cohen character's neurotic patter.

Did you know Ben Gibbard is very polite? Not only was a gentleman when he dated our friend's daughter in Florida, but tonight he said "Thank you very much" after every song. And it was sweet that he dedicated "I Will Follow You into the Dark" to Frightened Rabbit, who opened the night's show.

Anyway, the sound always comes over clearly to the soccer fields and it's sort of contemplative there, without crowds. Christina can lie in the artificial turf in her own little world.

Others can fix their bikes.

And there's always good soccer. We kicked an errant ball back at least fifteen feet to an ardent player. "Soul Meets Body" always sounds good, even when the sun had stopped wrapping its arms around us.

And all we could see were occasional white, blue and red lights blinking or flashing. Yet when Ben asked (twice -- he's really polite), "You guys okay?" -- well, what could we say but yes?

At midnight on December 31, 2003, we were in Apache Junction, Arizona, playing "The New Year" instead of "Auld Lange Syne."

It's always nice to hear, even if it doesn't feel any different when it's live.

According to this photo from Samantha Files on Instagram, this is what it actually looked like onstage for the paying guests:

We're grateful to Death Cab for being on our Chevette's cassette player as we drove around South Florida in 2004, and we're grateful we got to remember those times at Bushwick Inlet Park tonight.