Last week, I saw Morrissey in Atlantic City. (If you don’t know who Morrissey is, I’m sorry… you should find out immediately.) He’s been my very favorite since I was 13ish, and he’s still my favorite artist by miles and miles. My favorite song is “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out,” and number 2 is “Half A Person.” When I make lists of My Top 10 (or 100 or 500) songs or albums, I don’t include him, because he’s all of the top spots and the list begins for others much later.

The question is if we are one sort of person and find the artists that mean the most or if they find us and we become those people? And like so many things, the answer is yes. We are predisposed to Smiths (the band Morrissey fronted) songs. We are emotional, sensitive, weird, and they massage those already screaming places and make them grow. Where we were a little outside of the norm, we became complete misfits and put that on like comfy sweaters. We are the kind of people looking for artists to “save our lives” and so we find them, then we become the people who were “saved” by an artist. It’s an odd circle, but it’s not very complicated. It’s nature AND nurture. I was born and was raised into a Morrissey person.

So, when he plays roughly 3 hours from my house, teenage me would have walked. Now me checks the calendar for days off and the kids schedule and bank account to see about a fancy hotel. When they line up, I am very, very excited to go.

There are few casual Morrissey fans. He is either your favorite, or you don’t really care for him at all (like my brother, who HATES him). Everyone there wore t-shirts and knew every word to 40 year old album tracks. He played new songs, not on a released album, and we even knew those lyrics. How? Because we’re Morrissey people. How would we not know “I Am Veronica?”

The setlist was not the one I would’ve compiled. If you listed the 20 biggest hits for your favorite band, this setlist would have included only 2 or 3. He omitted many of the songs that soundtracked our lives, seemingly choosing by random. Which is really cool, in most cases. In others, it’s still really cool.

It didn’t change my life. I spent the night in the hotel with the Angel, and the 2 of us had dinner with my sister and brother-in-law. My sister and I then went to the show together. Those last 2 sentences were more important to me than any of the songs or even (gasp!) Morrissey himself. I’m not who I used to be.

In the song “Ouija Board,” there are 2 lines that perfectly touched every last bit of me. “..and I still do feel so horribly lonely,” and “I just can’t find my place in the world.” Even the famous lyric from “How Soon Is Now?” – “ I am human and I need to be loved.”

I’m not very lonely too much at all, anymore. I think I finally have found my place in the world, as well as the story of my life. And the 2nd half of the “I am human and I need to be loved…just like everybody else does,” is now what I can focus on, which has changed my life in such beautifully meaningful ways.

There was a sharpie in my pocket for him to sign my t-shirt, just in case we ran into each other. We didn’t, but if we had, I would’ve thanked him, told him how grateful I am to have found him. That’s true. I am a Morrissey person, only now that is only a fairly small part of me…But that fairly small part still listens to Bona Drag on repeat and carries a sharpie and makes me hoarse singing along to pop songs in a concert hall in Atlantic City.