Lit A Place in the Sun, 1999
In 1999, I won tickets to the HFStival. It was a big deal. The show sold out very quickly back then and the line up that year was incredible. Many of the bands that I loved listening to on the radio (DC101, mind you. WHFS didn't have very reliable reception for me) were going to be there. My friend Ryan and I went to the Hecht's at the mall at 3 or 4 AM and waited in line. When they opened the doors to start selling tickets we slowly wound our way through the store to the Ticketmaster counter.
Fun side note: A young, unknown Annapolis band played an acoustic set in the middle of the store. A couple of years later, that band was huge and all over MTV. They were called Good Charlotte.
But before we got up to the counter, they pulled both of our names out of the raffle to win tickets. We both won 2 tickets and it was great.
If memory serves, Lit was the 2nd band to play the Festival. I want to say that Jimmie's Chicken Shack opened, but that would be conjecture. Lit was fantastic and fun and just wonderful.
Then, later that summer, my Aunt and Uncle worked in the medical tent of Woodstock '99 (which took place in the town where one of my sets of Grandparents lived) so I got to go for free. It was pretty fantastic, though I wished at the time that I would have more control over what bands I got to see. (I basically wanted them to leave me to watch Everclear, but they didn't want to leave a 16 year old alone at a HUGE music festival. Which was good thinking on their part, in hindsight)
After waiting all morning for them to pick me up from my Grandparents' house and missing most of the first day, and then getting set up but then having to help a girl try to find her family's tent in the OCEAN of tents that all looked the same, I finally got to go watch a band perform. The band was, of course, Lit. And they were fantastic and fun and wonderful then, too.
So then school started and my final Lit memory of 1999 is listening to this album on my Walkman (having recorded it to a tape, because I didn't have a CD player) on the bus to the Renaissance Festival with the Drama Department. It was fun to have such high energy, melodic music to soundtrack a trip with a group of people that were still pretty much strangers to me, but who, by the end of the year, would be some of my closest friends.
Lit pretty much soundtracked 1999 for me and I'm pleased to say that the album DEFINITELY holds up. Check out the video for the song you definitely know by them. And then below that, check out some non-singles from the album that are just as good, if not better!
Lit - No Big Thing
Lit - Quicksand
You can buy
A Place in the Sun at
Amazon,
Amazon MP3, and
iTunes
