My husband and I have always loved live music. Sean thrives on punk rock and a good mosh pit, while I’m more agnostic. All live music energizes me. So when we finally arrived at the point where we could shed our U.S. belongings and travel, we wistfully said goodbye to almost weekly live music outings in Denver.

We decided to make Valencia, Spain, our home base. We arrived on October 4, 2022. By October 27, we were attending our first live concert.

We arrived at the Loco Club a bit early, not knowing the venue or how crowded it gets. It was empty. That’s when we learned it’s true: Spaniards do not arrive early.

While I am game for any music genre, I wasn’t sure how much I’d like a concert in a language I didn’t speak, let alone understand when sung. But the experience is the destination, I repeated to myself.

The Loco Club was comfortably filled before the opener came out. The crowd was local. The venue was immediately social, filled with smiles, chatter, and happiness. Happiness is an odd word, but that was the vibe. Happy.

The opening act was U.S.-based, of all things, but the real test was the next band, Red Beard, from the Canary Islands, Spain’s archipelago off the coast of northwest Africa.

The band’s lead singer came on stage and connected with the crowd in their native tongue, complete with all the ’th’s that sound like lisping to the non-Spanish ear. But when they started their show, hard Southern Americana rock came out of their guitars, and English came out of the singer’s mouth. Sean later learned from the merch guy that Jaime Jiménez Fleitas doesn’t speak a word of English. And yet it was Lynyrd Skynyrd meets Johnny Cash.

I love going to concerts with Spaniards. Their enthusiasm is sincere and endearing. Men dance and wrap their arms around each other like American men would be loath to do. People sing along in English with a Spanish flair. They bounce off each other without inciting a fight. At the Red Beard concert, Sean befriended a group of mutually aging rockers, and by the end of the evening, they were shouting his name.

Now, we seek out concerts wherever we go. I enjoyed Dvorak at Vienna’s Golden Hall. In Barcelona, we saw “country music’s favorite punk rock band,” the Vandoliers, in a room full of Spaniards who knew every song. Sean has followed his favorite bands from Wales to England to Germany. Recently, we attended a concert by a Cuban musician hosted by Sean’s barber, Manolo. Manolo’s wife is Cuban, as were most of the 20 people squeezed into the barbershop that evening to hear a cherub of a young man play the guitar and violin so beautifully.

What I learned that night at the Loco Club has followed me to every music venue since. It’s not about the music. It’s about sharing with other people from other places. Music reveals people and culture in a way a walk in the park or coffee at a café never could.

Kim Essex and her husband Sean, along with their dog Trax, have lived in Valencia, Spain, since 2022, using it as a home base to travel and dog sit their way through Europe, Africa, and Asia.