To this day, I have seen over two hundred bands live, and many of those bands I have seen multiple times. Going to concerts is something I love doing and is always very high on my list of priorities. It should not come as a surprise that I keep a running list in my head of all the bands that I have yet to see, but I am crossing my fingers when I hear of a tour stopping near me.

For anyone who knew me in middle school, it might come as a shock to you that Boys Like Girls never made that list. From the day my sister brought home their debut album in 2006 and told me to listen to them, I’d been quite obsessed. I always got way too excited whenever their videos played on MTV, and I basically stalked their Myspace page. The physical copy of their album “Love Drunk” I bought the day it was released in 2009 can still be found in my apartment. However, truth be told, I never thought that I would actually get to see them perform. I was too young to convince my parents to take me to any of their shows back when they were a full-time touring band, and by the time I could drive myself, they had dropped off the face of the earth. They had not made an official breakup statement, but that did not stop me from assuming they had broken up years ago. So when they announced a small tour with only 13 dates in celebration of their 10-year anniversary for their self-titled album, I was determined to go to the closest stop. Which is how I found myself making the four-hour drive to the Vic Theatre in Chicago on August 12th.

It was very clear that this tour was intended to take the audience back in time, and it worked. Opening for Boys Like Girls was a cover band called The Old Fashioned. If there is one thing I can say about this band: they really knew their audience and played their set accordingly. Just like their band name suggests, they played acoustic medleys of throwback jams. From a song comprised of popular Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, and Britney Spears tracks, to a lengthy mix of emo anthems from My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, The Used, and Taking Back Sunday, this band acted as a time machine. With barely any prior knowledge of the band, practically everyone in the crowd was singing along to each familiar clip that made an appearance in the medleys. While there was nothing necessarily outstanding about this band, they were an enjoyable way to spend thirty minutes waiting for the headlining act to take the stage.

Boys Like Girls continued the throwback trend by playing their debut album in its entirety with each song playing in the order it appeared on the album, followed by an encore performance of three select tracks from their album “Love Drunk”. From the very first chord of “The Great Escape”, the band stayed true to their original release by bringing energy to their set as if they were still fresh out of high school.

Despite the time taken off from touring together, the men strutted across the stage like seasoned performers and continued to respond to each other like close friends. This did not feel like a performance from washed-up rockers running out of money who were looking to make quick cash by throwing together a reunion tour, it felt like a group of guys who had experienced life and were returning to something they were very passionate about. Vocalist Martin Johnson proved this when he stopped their encore performance of the song “Love Drunk” by saying to the crowd, “There are a million barely audible videos of this song uploaded to youtube. Can you please stop trying to Snapchat this? We have four more songs left. Can you spend the next twenty minutes just enjoying the music like people did when we were playing shows in 2006?”

The lack of cell phones allowed the band to emphasize their music and allowed the crowd to connect to the music in a way that had not been achieved earlier in the night. Instead of holding phones in the air, the members of the crowd were clapping and jumping along to the beat of the songs. All of the members of the band stepped out closer to the edge of the stage and provided the people in the venue with a much more intimate experience.

Boys Like Girls brought the show full-circle by finishing their set with their first single “The Great Escape” for a second time that night. In all of the sets I have seen live, never have I seen the exact same song played as both the opening and closing track. As a long-time fan of the band, the ending was very satisfying. Overall, they did not disappoint. I was not upset it took me 10 years to see Boys Like Girls because this performance was definitely worth the wait.