They're screaming. Screaming loud enough to rupture eardrums. To wake the dead. And like clockwork, it happens every night. He walks to the edge of the stage, bends over and extends his hands, and they clamor. They pull, push, shove, step on each other, elbow each other in the face, not caring who they hurt, whether its each other or whether its him. And they touch his hands.

For all of the religious implication, on its surface level, it means nothing. Touching the hand of someone in the third row has probably never made Taylor Hanson fall in love with anyone, nor has it significantly altered the life of the fan in any kind of palpable way. You touched Taylor Hanson. And life went on.

But on its symbolic level, the gesture holds in it of all the complication and complexity of fandom, of all of the layers of meaning and investment we put onto three teenage boys. And at its most basic definition, that's what fandom, what all of this, is about. It's about meaning.

What Taylor is doing, whether he understands it or not, is returning a favor. Hanson only exists because we exist. If there was no one to buy records, to stand in line for tickets, to put up webpages, to worry and obsess, there would be no Hanson. And thus they're irrevocably tied to us, entirely reliant upon us to do what they love in some kind of a successful, financially viable fashion.

Of course we know this well, and exploit it occasionally by thinking that we understand something intimate about them, that by hearing a song they wrote, we can in fact see "them." While there is some inarguable truth in art that can and should bring to light something about its creator, we sometimes think we know the whole story (i.e., Zac is hyper, Ike is romantic) when all we really have are fragments of three personalities. And we really don't know them well all. We're seeing a Hanson that's been filtered and fine tuned by the press, by their own publicists, by their record company, by people who know that we need something concrete to hang onto. Any kind of intimacy we achieve with the band is really a perceived intimacy, a way of convincing ourselves that we matter on some kind of personal level to them when in truth, the only way to reach them is to reach as a mass.

And once we begin to see ourselves in that light, the next logical question would be How do they feel about us? How we feel about them is without question and generally unconditional. How they feel about us seems to be the greatest of the Hanson Mysteries, right up there with the true identity of Dr. Food, and what, exactly, Ashley Grayson's job description is. (The reasons for why we ask these questions in the first place belong in another rant altogether.)

It seems that Song to Sing was an attempt at that, a way of showing us that's really no different from Taylor Hanson hanging his body over the first three rows and risking life and limb to touch a few hands. You start to realize the seriousness of the strange relationship between Hanson and their fans in that song. It's there in the song's almost palpable melancholy, in the sadness that seems to weep out of its every note. It's an acknowledgment of the fact that we will never really possess any part of them, that every piece of meaning we draw from their music is nothing more than "second hand shoes," things that they've felt, that we've recycled into our own existence. It's an admission that while we've found our meaning in them, they haven't quite found their meaning in us, that they're still searching for their song to sing, even while we, in a way, usurp theirs. Suddenly the whole band/fan relationship becomes something less than beautiful, a marriage of convenience rather than love.

But there's also a problem with us as fans, one that's unique to our situation, that complicates things further. And the problem with us is that we're us. Is that we're young. And female. And because of that, our needs and concerns, as well as the things we hold scared, are generally dismissed by the press and by society as less important than those of our male counterparts. We're perceived as generally irrational and overemotional and lacking in reason, so our decisions carry no weight. And that extends to the decisions we make when we're standing in Sam Goody choosing which CDs we'd like to listen to. As much as we're Hanson's lifeline, we're also their greatest curse. The one thing we want for Hanson right now is for them to be perceived as musically legitimate, as a band that's valuable because they create every note of those albums, because they can play instruments, because they're genuine in an ocean of musical acts that aren't. As long as we remain who we are, it won't happen. And Hanson wants that perception of legitimacy as much as we do. They wouldn't hire Jonny Lang, or so publicly jam with Bob Weir if they didn't. So we become Hanson's curse, the very reason why they're labeled and categorized as fluffy, as brainless, as uninspired kid music.

The harshest truth of all is that neither side can stop. That no matter how many times we break apart the situation or try to rationalize it or spell it out so that loving a band of kids who are strangers to us becomes pointless, we can't. It's a non-possibility. Because we can still see ourselves, hear our own voices in those songs. Because those songs, as much as they belong to Hanson, are about us too. They're about everything in us that we can't say, that we can't organize so eloquently as they do. They're about something real. They're about the myriad of emotions that we experience from day to day. And giving that up is out of the question. It's too good.

So the fragile balance continues to hold between band and fan base, between those who don't have any choice other to embrace each other. We take what sustains us, even if it's as fleeting and noncommittal as the press of a hand from the third row.