In the week of August 11, 2003, I went to work four times, ate at least six full meals, and found outfits that fit squarely into the "business attire" category, one for each day. I went grocery shopping. Picked up a package at UPS. This is the basic shape of my new life. Laura the grownup. Laura the city girl walking to work in sneakers and changing at her desk, in the high-rise, yanked straight out of her dreams, on Broadway. I remember almost none of this. For the rest of my life, I will remember only two things that happened this week: Hanson, and the sudden, unexpected darkness in that skyscraper, at ten past four on Thursday afternoon.

It seemed related. The thought went through my head, staring at the blackness of my juiceless computer screen: Hanson came to town. And the North American Power Grid simply could not take it.

Cadillac Blues

The China Club was cool—a tiny, stylish little bar wedged into a corner of the theater district. It was too cool for Hanson, thought most of the staff, who spent the entire show making fun of them at the bar. The temptation was there, to jab the overprocessed blonde in the back and kindly remind her that no one, not the people on the stage, nor the people in the audience, would trade lives with her if given the chance.

The crowd was cool too, or it certainly thought so. Cool, and overdressed, and deeply judgmental of itself, if you considered the way everyone was eyeing each other's ass cleavage and mascara, discerning who Taylor would and wouldn't sleep with, under different hypothetical circumstances. Welcome to New York City. Thanks to the obnoxious door time—6:30—I had been out of work for an hour. I needed a drink. An alcoholic one. I probably needed four. The bar sold juice and water and bottled Shirley Temples. It seemed oddly intentional, a way of keeping the band, and us, in our place: You are kids. You like kiddie music. You drink kiddie drinks.

There was no opening act in New York City. God love Tietur, Hanson's opener at other shows, but no one missed him on Wednesday. He's certainly talented, and a few of his songs are lovely, but his low-key approach to singer-songwriterdom is a bad fit for this tour. We haven't seen Hanson in three years. We're hungry and excited, and we want to dance and shout and misbehave. Gentle ballads, unless they're coming out of a Hanson's mouth, aren't going to hold anyone's attention.

With all of that hanging in the air inside, and the heat, oppressive and sweltering, just beyond the walls of the club, three boys bounded onto the tiny stage, and before they played a single note, told everyone to move the hell back.

Off-Broadway

Hanson has a magic about them. We know this. But their transformational power over us at the China Club was nothing short of miraculous. Suddenly a most unpleasant audience became utterly delightful. The venue wasn't selling alcohol, and thought it could get us to bed early if the show started in daylight, but the audience inside it was blessedly grown up. They listened, keenly and with breath bated and fists clenched, for the whole show, and saved the hooting and shrieking for in between the songs. It was shocking, and relatively comparable to how real people attend real concerts.

Hanson, sans the noisy audience peripherals, sounds amazing. The quiet allowed for the appreciation of not just their note-perfect harmonies, but of their new respect for dynamics. This is especially true in the case of Zac's solo, a song allegedly called "Lulabelle," although we're deeply skeptical of that interpretation. The melody is lovely, and the lyrics, or what we can decipher of them, seem appropriately moody for a boy in the throngs of seventeen-year-old love or something. (There is a line in there about not wanting to "sleep alone" that gets a terrifying, violently loud crowd reaction every time.) The song's sweetness is undeniable, but Zac seems less-than-sure of himself as a solo performer. And really, who can blame him? He's seventeen, and he's spent his entire career shielded by a drum set that was twice his size, and singing harmonies behind his two attention-hogging older brothers. His confidence will come, but it may take more than three or four shows to get there.

When Ike took the stage alone with his guitar, we all got nervous, thinking we were likely in for another round of Ike Hanson Pity Party with that dreadful "Sorry for Being Me" song. Someone up front, a quick thinker, shouted a request at exactly the right moment. So it wasn't a great request. OK, so it wasn't even a mildly decent request, and off the top of our heads, we can think of about six others we'd have chosen. The request was "Hand in Hand." And frankly, despite the odds, it was good. Ike seems wonderfully sure of himself these days, like he's reclaimed his place in the Hanson schema after Island/Def Jam tried to turn it into The Wonderful Taylor Show all those years. He performed "Hand in Hand" with a keen sense of focus and intensity, making you forget, almost, that it's not such a great song. (As an aside, it also gave us our first enlightened glance at the crampy, lopsided stance Isaac assumes when he plays. You know, the one he needs the yoga to fix.) Ike's cover of "Rip it Up," on the other hand, has become the song to show up for on this tour. In New York, he broke two strings on it, which nearly tumbled the poor boy off the stage with glee. An amazing thing? It's a superlative moment that has almost nothing to do with Taylor.

Oh, and Taylor is Taylor, I guess. Slinky, feline, beautiful Taylor with his aching voice and limb-y porcelain body, which he uses to great effect, despite the seated acoustic pretense of this tour. When he sings, his eyes flash as if he's about to devour you whole. He still stands up, waves his arms, lets the ladies in the front claw him at will. His enunciation is quirky and inconsistent and interesting as ever, with the emphasis landing on all sorts of wrong syllables. It is the work of someone who clearly feels music more instinctively than words, who just knows where the emphasis needs to go. His "Crazy/Beautiful" was electric as ever, hair hanging over his eyes, attention laser-focused on the keys. "With You in Your Dreams" too, in its new man-voice key, showcased his voice in remarkable ways, as it always has. A funny moment, though, at the beginning of the song: As the silent crowd listened intently to the intro, Taylor paused, turned to the audience, as if remembering all of a sudden, and said softly into the mic, "Oh. You guys can sing the 'oh ooohs' on the chorus, OK?" Like he had it scribbled on a sticky note somewhere and momentarily forgot to remind us.

More classic Taylor could be found toward the end of the show, in the sing-along portion of "This Time Around." The song has become our obvious battle cry, the anthem of our disenfranchised Hanson-loving lives. Hanson knows this, and asked the sweating, overexcited lot of us to sing along—like we weren't already—by splitting the room in two and asking one half to sing the chorus, and the other half to sing the "won't go downs." Taylor, perched at the end of the stage and looking excited enough to hurtle himself off the edge, somehow got very out of synch with what his brothers were playing behind him. For an instant, a look of blank, silent panic flew across his face, like he'd momentarily forgotten what planet he was standing on. He got the rhythm back, bless him, but you kept waiting for Zac to bust out in hysterics.

"Rock N Roll Razorblade" fared better in New York. Taylor, who hit bad notes like they were going out of style in Baltimore, clearly hit fewer of them in Manhattan. There's a moment in the middle of the song where he crashes down on the keys, just to create a big, ugly, rockstar noise. It's cool—again, clearly something he picked up from Ben Folds. Amazing how, when the notes in the rest of the song are right, a mad crash of wrong ones is zingingly effective. It's like everything else: those Hanson boys are a little slow, but they don't disappoint in the end.

New York State of Mind

I don't think I understood it until I got here, but New York City Hanson shows carry with them a nagging, but interesting set of baggage. So much of their popular history, from the Beacon Theater, to Live at the 10 Spot, to the Seventeen photo shoot in Central Park, was built here. There are, of course, the other mythic New York perhipherals—The Hotel. TRL. Stories of Hansons getting piercings downtown, and catching jazz shows at The Blue Note. Even their fans here have a kind of glittery famousness all their own. It is that old, old idea at work, the notion of three sweet Oklahoma boys unleashed on a tiny, neon-lit island that offers anything, both naughty and nice, to anyone who asks. Maybe that's what builds the pretension, the thick animosity among the crowd: We all want a piece of that, to be the girl standing next to Taylor as he stands in that East Village shop, deciding which tattoo would look best at the nape of his neck. Here, moreso than in any other truck stop or strip mall they play in any other non-city in America, Hanson are rockstars. They are fatcat, cigar-smoking, king-of-the-world stars in a too-nice hotel with fans sleeping on the sidewalk outside. In New York, Hanson still feels famous, instead of almost.

And maybe that is why the show's finale seemed so oddly, joyously appropriate. No one knew what it was. It took a whole verse of that creeping, slinky little melody, souped-up Hanson-style in three-part harmony, only not so angelic this time. It was one line that did it, that flipped a switch, a keen, ironic jolt, for everyone in the crowd: Sweat until my clothes come off, purred Taylor Hanson into the microphone with enough horny verve to make it actually happen, at least in the minds of the crowd, which howled in recognition. A pity they had to leave. We could have used them the next day, when an overheated city that had been doing plenty of sweating of its own, went resolutely dark and stayed that way for the next 24 hours. These days, Hanson puts off enough heat and light to electrify, awe and silence even the unruliest of urban landscapes.