It happened on a walk. It was a Wednesday in May and I was just at the top of my street when I spotted the tour bus. Not totally uncommon in Nashville, but I’d been tipped off so I knew something was up. I’d just gotten a text from my friend, another writer, who had told me about an All American Rejects house show, but she didn’t know where it was or what time the band would go on yet. She’d have press access, but as the evening went on we learned that “press” and “access” weren’t exactly applicable here.

I texted her a picture of the bus. Could it be here? She’s almost 13 years younger than me (I’m about to turn 38 and am firmly The Rejects' target market). Seeing that a 25-year-old friend was also freaking out about the show, I knew it was going to be something special. We must have had the same thought: Is there a better way to spend a perfectly temperate Wednesday than screaming along to “Dirty Little Secret” in a neighbor’s backyard? For free?

For me, overpaying for concert tickets stretches as far back as the *NSYNC No Strings Attached Tour, when I saved my allowance to buy $300 floor seats in the summer of 2001. I did the same thing for the Celebrity tour, and then, for many years, I paid a normal amount of money to see hundreds of bands I loved. In the elder millennial heyday, I often bought tickets at Kroger, where there was a Ticketmaster kiosk of sorts. I’d grab tickets for The Calling at Bogarts in 2002 ($15), John Mayer and Counting Crows at Riverbend ($45 dollars in 2003), $18 to see Something Corporate at the Metro in Chicago in January of 2005. The internet arrived in full throttle around that time so you didn’t have to go to Kroger (!) but prices were still reasonable and you often still got a real ticket in the mail or were at least able to print one out. You had proof of experience, a little memento, not a disappeared QR code on your phone. 

“To try and fight Ticketmaster … is to try and wage a war against God,” Kelsey Mckinney wrote in her excellent Defector essay about how ridiculous it is to try to purchase concert tickets these days. There are the presales and the codes, some you get through certain credit cards or purchasing merch or being on an email list or in a fan club. Even if you are lucky enough to get into a presale, you might sit in a 2,000 person queue for 13 hours (which I did to score Eras tour tickets) then when you finally “get in” and try to select tickets, they’re all gone, snapped up by bots or scalpers or other fans — it’s impossible to tell who.

The Rejects current House Party tour was, in many ways, inspired by this challenge. Tyson Ritter, the (gorgeous) frontman of the band has talked openly about the issue, how he’d seen kids financing festival passes, and how as a kid himself growing up in a trailer in Oklahoma, he couldn't afford concert tickets. The House Show Tour basically asks the question: What happened to the kind of DIY shows from when the band was just starting out, and how could we get back there?

The night of the show, me, my husband, my friend and her friend pre-gamed at my house like we were in college. The street was lined with cars, people heading toward the show carrying coolers and cases of beer. It was cool enough to wear a jacket. We poured wine into Dunkin paper cups. We showed up at the house down the street and couldn’t get in — they were absolutely maxed out. Not even my friend’s press credentials could save us. In a normal venue with a normal set of overpriced tickets, that would have been the end of the night. But on The Rejects House Party tour, this was just the beginning. We lingered outside. My friend called her press contact. We ran into neighbors and old friends and heard the beginnings of songs we recognized.

Eventually, we saw people jogging around the side of the house next door. We followed — sprinting around the neighbor’s yard, launching each other over the chain link fence as we saw others doing it (The Rejects are covering all damages on the tour.) I dropped my wine into a small tree and picked up somebody else’s. We landed on the other side of the fence like we’d arrived on the moon. I climbed on my husband's shoulders and fake-smoked Menthols and screamed along to “Move Along.” We drank beers with strangers on the sidewalk til late, waved goodnight to Tyson, and I spent the next day wondering exactly why all this had worked so well. What exactly had The Rejects tapped into? 

For so much of the last 20 years, our favorite musicians and artists have simultaneously gotten both more accessible through social media and less accessible than ever. Even the bands who are just starting out have to deal with expensive ticket fees, the ever-growing cost of touring, and venues and labels taking cuts of everything from master recordings to merch sales. And yet, here is the poppiest of pretty boys from the 2000s pop rock scene, playing their extraordinarily DIY, bring-back-real-rock-n-roll house show tour, promoting their newest album Sand Box. 

Sure, there’s the exquisite nostalgia of it all, the reliving of one’s youth, a throwback to the kind of house shows a lot of us used to go to when we were young, the kind of scene I wrote a book about. But it’s not just Millennials at these shows (sure, there’s a lot of us) but it’s also Gen Z and Gen X. The age range in Nashville must have spanned 25 or 30 years. Porta potties and no ticket fees, BYOB and “Swing, Swing?”,  screaming along to a song you’ve always loved with friends and strangers because everywhere around you the world appears to be crumbling so why not come together and forget it all for free for an hour or two? That, to me, is the essence of a concert.

The Rejects aren’t the only band trying to tap into the real spirit of live music. Two weeks after their house show, I got wind of another free show, this time another of my favorites of the era — Relient K. They played a free show announced at 7 p.m. that same night at a tiny burger bar next to my first apartment in Nashville. I stood on a cracked vinyl stool and screamed the words and drank beer straight out of the pitcher, remembering exactly what it used to feel like to be able to go and see your favorite band without the hassle of a lifetime. It was simple and wild and free!

Other artists have found their ways, too. Maggie Rogers sold tickets herself, only in person, for her Don’t Forget Me Tour. Andrew McMahon of Something Corporate and Jack’s Mannequin, took on an elaborate system to work against scalpers and ensure actual fans got tickets to the Something Corporate tour last fall. McMahon shared a video before the tour sharing that they’d be working to “purge” anything that looked like scalper behavior by cancelling ticket sales that looked fraudulent and reissuing them.

They also made ticket exchanges only available at face value, so that if your plans changed or you wanted to resell, you could only do so at the original price. These types of efforts can be laborious, but, they do work. I went to their show at the Ryman and paid $85 a ticket. Still pricey, but not completely unreasonable, and the tour was almost completely sold out before shows started last summer. Rogers sold out Madison Square Garden among other venues on her tour.

Distilling the success of the Rejects Tour down to nostalgia and the fight against Ticketmaster isn’t fair, though it’s obviously a part of it. At its heart, I think, is a desire to regain the spirit of something that’s been lost as the music industry has changed. It’s a return to accessibility, it’s reconnecting to a fandom that has become distant faces in a massive crowd or just names on a screen and likes beneath a post. Bands like The All American Rejects know the industry is broken; they’re aware that going along with the status quo isn’t going to work — or, if they do, it might feel pretty soulless. They know something’s been lost as the industry has shape-shifted over the years — and in some ways, I think they’ve already found it. If they were doing it for the cash, it’d be a bad plan (the band is funding the tour themselves.) If they’re doing it for the glitz and glamour, the porta potties argue otherwise.

Tours like these, rule-breaking and all, enable Millennials like me to pretend to be 21 again or actually be 21 — you’d be surprised at how little difference there is (minus the hangovers.) To me, in Nashville, it’s a reminder of the type of scene  that built the city I fell in love with over the last two decades, the city I wrote a novel about. 

It’s a return to form, really, because isn’t this how every band gets their start, or used to? They play a house show over off White Bridge in Nashville. They pass around a jar to ask for gas money so they can get home after the gig. They pack out a Warehouse in Bushwick or New Faces Night Out at The Basement or charge a $10 cover for four bands at the East Room. Maybe some of them go on to play stadiums and arenas and massive festivals, but even Paul McCartney must crave that old intimacy of the Hamburg days — he played Bowery Ballroom to a crowd of less than 600 people back in February. Arcade Fire showed up at Skinny Dennis last week in Nashville at 11 p.m. after Bonnaroo was cancelled, playing to a bar that only holds about 300 people. 

When these bands got started, they played shows like this because they loved playing music with their friends, throwing their instruments in the back of a van, meeting the fans (the girls), hyping up the crowd. As Tyson Ritter said the night I saw them, rock and roll was born in backyards and basements, and so was most music. So maybe not just the fans craving the way things used to be, the way it felt when this all got started. Maybe it’s the artists too. Call me a nostalgic sap, but if this is the trend — I hope it stays.

Lo Fi by Liz Riggs is available now, wherever books are sold.