The guitarist, bassist, drummer, and pianist walk out, confidently striding to take their designated places on stage. The crowd cheers as they spot them in the black background. But they all have one thought on their mind: “Where is the lead singer?” As the crowd becomes quiet in anticipation, he leaps from the side of the stage into the middle and the concert begins.

Magic Man, from Boston, Massachusetts, is known to take people back into their past. Listeners are almost forced to pick out a specific memory, and well, dwell on it. They are forced to recall an event they might have not known they recalled in the first place.

For this reason, Magic Man’s music is versatile.The band is made of five people — a lead singer, a pianist, a bassist, a guitarist,  and a drummer. Their music, similar to indie pop, echoes 80’s style and is widely accepted amongst college students.

I witnessed this at their concert at the House of Blues. My friend and I were squashed in between 200 very excited 20- somethings. As I made my way through the crowd to get a clear view of the lead singer, I became more and more aware of the hands in the air, the humidity that kept us all together, and our eyes, all following the crazy dance movements of the man singing on stage.

“This restless heart, keeping me up through the night,” is a lyric in the song “It All Starts Here,” focusing on the feeling of frustration, but excitement. This is more like an anthem for the college students who contemplate their future every day.

“Nostalgia is something we’ve tried to invoke in a lot of our music … any time they hear the song, it transports them. It becomes a soundtrack to a part of my life,” said Alex Caplow, lead singer of Magic Man, in an interview with Baeblemusic. This is probably the reason why the room was full of hopeless college students.

I imagine that almost all of them had just run out of a class, asked for early leave from a job, or fought with someone they cared about before lining up in front of House of Blues. Unusually busy lives and schedules cause distress. People often cannot let go of their childhood and teenage years and go somewhere to escape. On that night, their escape was a concert.

Caplow sang “Chicagoland” and made the crowd go wild. The bunch of them jumped up and down as the beat became louder and louder, they sang at the top of their lungs, and when the lead singer told them to, they danced.

I found this to be utterly brilliant. A group of people, who do not know each other at all, can act like they are best friends for a night and be crazy. Instead of dwelling on their past, they feel the past in their present and enjoy every moment of it.