Wolfgang Amadeus on a Parking Deck

Phoenix played a show on the rooftop parking structure of the Cologne trade fair in June 2010, part of a corporate concert series—the kind of sponsorship deal that would have felt wrong for them a few years earlier. But Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix had happened by then, and they were no longer a secret anyone could keep.

I remember when Phoenix was a secret. Not deeply buried—a French band with a decade of records, friends with half of Air and Daft Punk by association—but a secret in the sense that knowing them felt like knowing something. United in 2000, Alphabetical in 2004: sleek, slightly melancholy guitar pop that sounded like it was assembled in an empty apartment at three in the morning by people who had read too much, felt too much, and figured out how to compress all of it into three-minute songs.

Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix changed the scale. 1901 and Lisztomania were everywhere, inescapable in the way that briefly makes you resent something you loved first. But it was a genuinely great record—Lasso, the way Rome builds and then refuses to fully release, Thomas Mars’s voice sitting just slightly above the guitar lines, unhurried, like he already knows how it ends.

I never made it to that parking structure in Cologne. A concert on a rooftop parking deck still sounds like a better setting than most arenas.