Oasis at the Rose Bowl

A wise lad once said, “some might say we should never ponder,” and I’ll tell you what—all I have been doing since seeing Oasis at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena this past weekend is pondering.

When the reunion was announced in late August of 2024, I was very pregnant and very overwhelmed by the idea of purchasing tickets for a concert a year in advance when I knew I was going to have a whole-ass baby by the time the shows came around. Not to mention, the first shows announced were in the UK, which is… very far from Glendale. When the Rose Bowl shows were announced in Pasadena, a hop, skip, and a jump away, I still hesitated because I couldn’t comprehend what my world would look like in September of 2025. Anticipatory anxiety is one of my many talents. I get so worked up about the idea of planning something in advance that I just… don’t. Not because I don’t want to do the thing, but because the logistics of making the thing happen sometimes make my brain short-circuit. And so, I did not get tickets and instead surrendered to the idea that I would be a boring mom by then who had no business attending an Oasis reunion.

Well, it turns out a boring mom I am not! Would a boring mom feel immense sadness watching her peers’ concert footage and decide to buy day-of tickets off StubHub, ditch her husband and baby, and take a friend for a night out on the town!? NO, A BORING MOM WOULD NOT! Did I regret it for a split second when my friend Katrina and I arrived at the Rose Bowl and looked for our seats for half an hour—a nice little wading pool of sweat behind my bangs? Yes, yes, I did. However, I knew it would be worth it, and well, I don’t have to fucking tell you twice, but it was so worth it.

Now for the pondering part …

I was 7 years old when Oasis’ debut album Definitely Maybe came out, and while I was deep in my Hanson and Spice Girls era, I was also a kid raised by MTV, so Oasis was in my elementary school orbit. By the time (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? came out, I added the brothers Gallagher to my pop star bedroom wall collage. “Wonderwall” is one of the first songs I asked my guitar teacher to teach me as a tween (a unique experience, I’m sure). Anyway look, I am not here to try and prove that Oasis has always been one of my favorite bands; I am merely trying to say that this band connects me to a lot of my past lives and makes me nostalgic as hell. The thing about experiencing nostalgia on a dying planet is that it can make you forget that the world is on fire. At least, this show did that for me, and it appeared to do the same for nearly 90,000 other people that night. Seeing both Gallagher brothers on stage together with no tambourines hitting anyone in the head (only tambourines being balanced on heads)—everything felt right in a very “give peace a chance” sort of way.

For two hours, everything in me and around me felt electric (speaking of, I was pissed they didn’t play “She’s Electric”!!!!). It was almost as if outside the walls of that stadium, there was simply no bad news to bear, even though we are most definitely living through an era of endless bad news that we have to somehow figure out how to bear. In front of me, a row of college-aged bros in bucket hats, clutching Keystone Lights, embraced while scream-singing “soooooooo Sally can waaaait,” while in the row next to me, an older gentleman wiped literal tears from his eyes when the opening guitar line of “Champagne Supernova” started. Men in sportswear connecting with their emotions!?!?! It restored my faith in humanity. And seeing videos from the other shows, it looks less like a tour and more like group therapy with a merch line. Who knew two brothers infamous for being cynical curmudgeons would be the therapists we all needed? (See below for bucket hat bros embracing).

I had several “this is a scene from a movie” moments while pondering mid-set about a specific period of my life in my mid-twenties, after California Nights came out, when I was a hot fucking mess. High on Adderall and wasted on white wine spritzers, living that rock n’ roll star lifestyle, baby! I studied live videos of Liam Gallagher for that tour and co-opted a very “serious” attitude on stage. I didn’t want to play guitar as much; my hair was always in my face, and my hands were often behind my back when my tambourine wasn’t at my hip. I desperately wanted to lose the “lazy crazy baby” cat lady persona I had for the first two records, and so I attempted to launch myself right on over to the opposite end of the front person spectrum and take on some Liam G qualities. I pretty much only listened to Oasis during that entire album cycle, so much so that I even requested we cover “Hindu Times” in our set (also I was trying to impress a very broken dude I was “in love with” who was also a giant Oasis head). As I stood there in my nosebleed seats, I realized how different my life looks now and how at the end of this show I’d be going home to feed a baby somewhere between the hours of midnight and three am instead of crawling into bed at three am too wasted to wash my face. I looked around at everyone else in that crowd and thought about how they were also probably having their own reflective moments of lives past.

Even with the sibling rivalry and bad boy lore, many Oasis songs have an underlying hopefulness, with some lyrics even giving “live, laugh, love” energy (I mean this in a complimentary way!!!). I kept leaning over to my friend and saying, “Oasis is hope-core,” when I’d hear lyrics like “we need each other, we believe in one another” or “some might say we will find a brighter day.” I am not a mindreader, but based off the energy in that stadium, I feel like no one there was looking back in anger (sorry). The thing about the 90s and early 2000s is that it was an era sort of defined by togetherness and shared experiences. Social media and smartphones have melted our brains into a puddle and trained us to live in a comparison trap feedback loop of “why am I not spending my summer in Europe like everyone else?” We called people on the telephone! We bought CDs! We stood in line to buy concert tickets! And if you couldn’t make it to a show, you couldn’t stream it online or watch it live on someone’s TikTok—you very much just had to be there. In high school I went to the fucking mall with my friends for fun and actually sat and talked in the food court over Panda Express because we didn’t have phones to scroll away on; we had PAGERS, babe. If our parents needed us, they paged us, and we had to find a payphone to call them back on. I mean listen, everyone was on their damn phone at the show filming (myself included), ok, so I’m not saying it was some return to a prehistoric phone-free life—I’m just saying, it showed how important communal rituals are for us as a species. It gave us a chance to revisit a beloved era; even the ones that didn’t live through it in the first place got a glimpse into what it must have been like.

Inside the Rose Bowl, it wasn’t just about the reunion of the year or the songs—it was about everyone in the crowd finding much-needed relief from all the chaos outside. Watching a bunch of strangers sing at the top of their lungs reminded me how desperately we need moments like this: pure, unbridled joy that makes you remember you’re part of something bigger than your fucking phone and your anxieties. I know it sounds dramatic, but it felt life-affirming to be in a stadium of people agreeing, for once in this godforsaken polarizing timeline, that life can be ridiculous and joyful and worth screaming about.

Anyway, enough pondering. I’m just so grateful that I got to be there and that I get to live in the afterglow of the joy I and so many other people experienced. Thank you to whatever cosmic miracle got Liam and Noel on the same stage again so we could all sing “you and I are gonna live foreverrrrrrrrr” together. Thank you, Oasis; we absolutely did find a brighter day.