Beautiful Strangers at the Bataclan

An essay

I wrote an essay on my experience playing the Bataclan in Paris last year. This is something I’ve meant to do for a while now and feel grateful that

Adam Voith

encouraged me to do so for the latest issue of his literary magazine

Little Engines

. Playing the Bataclan was an emotional rollercoaster for me that ended up being one of the best performances and nights of my life and I did my best to put the experience into words. Thanks Adam for editing and releasing. Head over to the

Little Engines

Sub for the full essay. Excerpt and photos from my night at the Bataclan below:

***

I was listening to the Rolling Stones’ Goats Head Soup, running on a treadmill, when a television in the gym said BREAKING with a blood-red banner. A mass shooting was unfolding in Paris, in real time, at a music venue called the Bataclan.

This was 2015, and I was at home in Kansas City. I’d never heard of a mass shooting taking place in Europe, much less at a show. I had believed, perhaps naively, that the sanctity of music itself was a forcefield from evil, but I was wrong.

A year after the shooting, I wrote and released a song called “Beautiful Strangers,” which references the tragedy at the Bataclan, along with the Pulse nightclub shootings in Orlando and the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. The song has arguably become my most popular, and though it’s been seven years, its rise within my catalog is a testament to our ever-horrendous current events. Its subject matter of mass shootings and police brutality has aged all too well.

The first time I performed “Beautiful Strangers” in Paris was in 2016, almost a year to the day after the shootings. We were booked at a venue called the La Trabendo, just a few miles away from the Bataclan.

When I began singing the second chorus—pray for Paris, they cannot scare us, or stop the music—the crowd erupted. After the show, tearful fans told me that they were at the Bataclan or had lost someone there the night of the attacks, and that my song brought them some comfort. I remember one woman in particular, tears falling from behind her glasses, hugging me as she recounted her experience and the friends she lost. I couldn’t fathom what she was saying. She had witnessed war-like bloodshed and lived to tell the tale. She pulled me close and told me this was her first time back at a show since that night and Merci. 

***