Ghosted by a Rockstar. Haunted by His Music.

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I matched with the frontman of a band I used to sing my heart out to. A brief romance, filled with long messages began and then ended without a word.

Here’s what I learned about the duality of musicians and the heartbreak of mistaking a songwriter’s lyrics for who he really is.

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​PREFACE:

If you’re familiar with my work, then you know my podcast isn’t about my dating life. It’s about Concert Culture. 

I’m a narrative, live music journalist and critic  and I record on location, not from a couch in a studio. I take you on the road with me to venues across the country, talking with owners, bands, and fans to document their stories and perspectives within their concert communities.

When I reference myself, it’s in service of the story, to provide context, not attention. I’ve always maintained a boundary between my personal life and the work, and between myself and the people I interview. The goal is to underscore the thesis and reveal the interconnectedness between travel and live music.

But this time, the road led somewhere new for me, into a place where love and live music intersect.

I had a brief romance with the frontman of one of my favorite bands and it ended without a word.

I’ve been ghosted before, but this was different. I was starting to really like him, and after years of supporting and interviewing musicians, it affected me in a way I wasn’t prepared for. It fucking wrecked me.

This is one of the most vulnerable pieces I’ve recorded. But in the spirit of bringing you on the ride with me, I pushed through the fear because writing it helped me to see how love and loss are part of concert culture too.

What you’re about to read/hear is like reading pages from my journal. And if you’re wondering who it’s about, I’m not saying. That’s not the point.

Producing this helped me process the experience and recognize that after years of documenting live music, I’d lost sight of something fundamental.
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This is Ghosted by a Rockstar. Haunted by his Music. 

THE MATCH: 

He was a thumb-stopper. 
Not for his magazine cover good looks, but because he was the lead singer of a band whose music had played a formative role in my life. It had to be a catfish. I swiped right anyway, then rolled off my air mattress and got dressed for brunch. 

Startup stories in LA often begin with a mattress on the floor and a suitcase full of dreams. But reality hits harder than the cold tile in a Koreatown walk-up. I had just moved into my apartment after a solo car-camping trip from my home in Downeast Maine. The freedom carried its own momentum but the bare walls and borrowed light made it impossible to forget how much I’d left behind.
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Professionally, I’m a music journalist and multimedia producer creating a streaming series about concert culture. Personally, I was nursing a broken heart. My ex used to call me his “Tinder-ella”—ironic, in hindsight, since the ending was anything but a fairytale. Craving connection, I downloaded another app. In a sea of selfies and vague bios, even a potential catfish felt worth the thrill. 

Over waffles, I told a friend from Maine, someone I’d recently reconnected with, about seeing the frontman on a dating app. I pulled out my phone, and we scanned his profile together, looking for signs it was fake. To my surprise, we matched. Even better? He messaged. I was speechless, not entirely convinced it was really him but also because I was flooded with nostalgia. 

Suddenly I was back in my early twenties, living in Amsterdam at a former church turned music venue in the heart of the city called Paradiso. Pressed against the stage, shoulder to shoulder with friends, mushrooms in our systems, passing spliffs like communion, watching his band play for the first time. The intensity of his performance overwhelmed me. 

The music, heightened by psychedelics, brought me to my knees. I was cracked open. It would be easy to call it a groupie moment, but it wasn’t. It had nothing to do with sex appeal; this wasn’t Usher feeding cherries to fans. The connection felt spiritual. When music turns you inward, especially at that age, it changes how you relate to the world. 

I saw, for the first time, how a musician could channel the muse, how performance could transform a person into something momentarily larger than themselves. That awareness became a curiosity that’s never left me. On my podcast, I try to get as close as possible to understanding what draws the muse in and what it feels like to channel it. I’m not looking for fixed answers. I’m learning to ask better questions, to listen for the range of logic and emotion that follows.

Matching with the lead singer on a dating app decades later, after many more albums and concerts of his later, definitely wasn’t on my LA bingo card. But I went with it. 

My username was Wave1, from the license plate on the first car I ever drove cross-country after graduating from college. In Missouri, farmers always waved to me, and it took me a minute to realize they were reading it as a request. It also nods to another crossing: when I swam the English Channel, pushing through cold waves for hours. Now, maybe, it marks a new kind of passage: my crashing into LA. 

THE MESSAGES: 

His first message, sprinkled with star emojis, read: “Hi Wave! Soundwave, ocean wave, hand wave?” After some playful brainstorming with my friend, I replied, “Light, seismic, electromagnetic, so many waves. Which ones do you like to ride best?” He responded, “All of them. Where would we be without them?” That match sparked one of the most memorable text exchanges of my dating life. 

We wrote to each other for weeks before meeting. Long, Civil War-style letters lit by neon instead of candlelight. Knowing that one of our generation’s most respected songwriters was reading my words, I obsessed over tone, subtext, word choice. It felt like being back in English class. I even drafted replies in a google doc before hitting send. It was the holidays, and he was back home. We talked about everything from family traditions and books to music and even our favorite Ralph Wiggum lines from The Simpsons. Mine: “Me fail English? That’s unpossible.” His: “I eated the purple berries. They tasted like burning.”
 
I was still a little skeptical but when he mentioned unique details about making records, my doubt began to fade. Dating app dialogue usually consists of one-liners, emojis, and quick descents into sexting, void of courtesy. But this felt different. It had rhythm and care. 

At one point, I mentioned how rare it was to have this kind of exchange, and he agreed. He always replied with intention, and with impressive turnaround time. The app became a container for our digital courtship. Every time his name lit up on my phone, I felt a hit of dopamine. I knew he was probably talking to others, most people are, but somewhere in all that back-and-forth, a new side of him emerged: thoughtful and interested in me. 

In her article “Warning! Don’t Date Musicians” published in The Times, Gillian Orr writes,“Of all the appalling men I’ve dated, I don’t think I’ve ever been mistreated as badly as I have by musicians… they will happily stomp on your heart and leave you for dust at the first opportunity.” Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues carries a similar message about the emotional chaos that often trails behind men in bands. I’ve heard firsthand stories of love strained by relentless touring. And then there’s the old adage: never meet your idols.

Curiosity has a way of muting caution. With everything I knew, I agreed to the date.
 
DATE ONE: 

Knee-high socks. Mini skirt. Black blazer with a silver half-moon belt. Heart pounding. Dewy forehead. My hands shook as I locked my apartment door. To be fair, I always get nervous before first dates and also before my interviews with musicians. This was the confluence of both. And after such a slow build-up, my nerves were cranked to eleven. I remember approaching the museum and spotting him from a distance. His look was unmistakable. Even from fifty feet away, I felt relieved: this wasn’t a catfish. At least not in the traditional sense. 

He was standing beneath a massive tree, gazing up into the branches. I ducked into a nearby parking garage to collect myself. It’s always awkward walking toward someone from so far away, that long approach, like prey crossing a clearing. I caught my reflection in the convex backup mirror, took a breath, and walked toward him, away from myself.

We hugged, and what struck me first wasn’t a scent, but the absence of one. Up close, he was handsome. Our eyes locked. The chemistry was immediate, even if his clothes told a different story. 

His jacket strained at the buttons. Neon tennis shoes with aggressive foam soles screamed orthopedic flair. But then his gentle brown eyes drank me in. “You’re so pretty,” he said. His familiar voice wrapped around me like my favorite blanket. “I love your belt.” 

If I had to guess, he was nervous too, rambling on about the leaves. The moment felt unreal, or maybe just too real. I was alone with a rock star who, without his guitar, the spotlight, or thousands of adoring fans, was just a guy I met online.

In between small talk an arborist would probably roll their eyes at, I felt completely outside myself. One part of me was nodding along about trees; the other was in full-blown overthinking mode, trying to figure out how to be the kind of woman a man like him might want. 

But the fact that he had asked me out felt like its own kind of confirmation. I didn’t need to shapeshift. I just needed to be present. We were simply two people, showing up, hoping to be seen, maybe even loved, the way we want to be.

Contemporary art gave us the opportunity to flirt, flex our wit, and stay shoulder-close. The chemistry kept building. He cupped the small of my back as we passed through a heavy door. Our humor clicked, easy, electric. We teased each other about overwrought installations and whispered too loud in quiet rooms. He leaned in, head tilted. “What do you like most about this crumpled soda can glued to the canvas?” “That it probably has its own PR team” I said. And we cracked up. 

There was a certain mystique in the tension between musician and journalist. Neither of us wanted to give too much away. We had only touched upon our professionals briefly in our correspondence. It felt like mutual withholding, its own kind of sex appeal. A test of whether we could show up as our real selves. Turns out, my real self was kind of swooning.

Take away his profession and my front-to-back knowledge of his discography, if a guy can make me laugh, that’s my Achilles’ heel. He made me belly laugh, and I gave it right back. The banter was unmatched. We volleyed observations and shared side glances at the most absurd art pieces, finding the same things funny for the same reasons. It felt easy. And I could tell he was into it too, because the date kept going.

From the museum to iced matcha lattes in Little Tokyo, through a tunnel of books downtown, we wandered the city, swapping stories at every turn. Time felt elastic, like it was stretching just for us. As we passed a graffiti-covered alley, he turned to me and said, “Whoa, déjà vu.” Some say déjà vu means you’re exactly where you’re meant to be, that your soul’s been here before. I lit up, leaping to conclusions. To me, it meant this moment, this date, maybe even me, was meant to be part of his story. The déjà vu sealed it. At that point, the falling-in-love fantasies were fully activated.

Eventually, we ducked into one of his favorite spots: the Whole Foods hot bar. “Dependable when on tour,” he said. Not the most romantic setting, but we were starving. We settled into barstools overlooking the street, slurping minestrone and sipping sparkling water. 

He opened up about his childhood, his struggles with addiction, and his commitment to deep therapy work. It was raw and vulnerable, what the internet might label as floodlighting, but in the moment, it felt like real honesty. We talked about the kinds of things potential partners should talk about. We discovered shared moral ground, how we both valued introspection, and the power of forgiveness. 

We laughed the entire walk back to my car which was parked outside a fried chicken place blaring radio static, offering some white noise to our makeout session. 

Our lips were like magnets that had finally found each other. The chemistry swirling like a genie let out of a bottle, he said he wished it were a more romantic setting. But to me, it already was. Driving home afterward felt almost impossible, like leaving a scene that hadn’t finished playing out. 


THE DELUSION: 

Back at my bare apartment, his goodnight text felt like the warmest hug—a digital affirmation that he was into me. I wish I could say I played it cool, but I’d be lying. For days, I was lost in my imagination, concocting romantic scenarios like they were fact. His déjà vu moment felt like spiritual permission to believe in it. But it all blurred the truth: I had only met him once. 

A few days later, I was soaking in the bathtub, listening to his music with new ears, when he texted saying he wanted to see me again. I was already deeper than I realized, building a full-blown fantasy of being in a relationship with him. Alone in a new city, still nursing heartbreak, and then suddenly being swept into one of the most magical dates of my life with the frontman of a favorite band felt like the universe was scripting my LA love story. I suggested another museum. An easy button for two people in sobriety. I knew second dates are typically when the connection gets tested, the “critical choice” stage in screenwriting terms. But I wasn’t following that writing formula. In my mind, I had already cast him, scored the montage, and staged the ending, all without fully developing the character.


DATE TWO: 

We met in front of LA’s famous dinosaur bones, and to my relief, the chemistry was still there. We wandered past dusty dioramas, trading giggles and quick kisses. When he casually mentioned he'd had diarrhea that morning, I chalked it up to tour bus humor and let it slide though the overshare definitely caught me off guard. He asked if I wanted to grab dinner near his neighborhood. “Sure, why not?” Then I got into his brand new soccer mom car, which was a small disappointment considering that his music screams vintage Land Rover. We merged onto the 110 at rush hour. The horror. But how a man handles traffic is an early tell. He passed. Until we got to the restaurant. 

We didn’t have reservations. He was hangry. Watching a frontman unravel over a wait time was an abrupt shift from artistry to humanity. And even more so, having to coddle him felt like I was back with my hot-head ex. But once we were seated, hand rolls and hot tea in front of us, the conversation transitioned into a subject I was eager to talk about. Relationships. 

We met on Feeld, the app for alternative dating, kink-forward, ENM-friendly, and unapologetically exploratory people. Not your average Hinge match. He spoke openly about no longer believing in traditional monogamy. Given his life, split between cities and always on tour, it made sense. As a music journalist and realist, I got it. Believing a frontman isn’t making a unique number of connections on the road is naive. 

Over sushi, we unpacked emotional intelligence and sexual ethics. But under the sterile glow of overhead lights, it started to feel more like a philosophy seminar than a date. There was mutual understanding, but no flirtation. No heat. The genie of chemistry had left the room. Maybe I was too eager to please, too focused on meeting his criteria, and lost sight of my own. Or maybe he was testing how much I wanted him. Some men crave being the object of desire, which alone can create something like attraction in them. But instead of holding my ground, I conformed. And for someone who might be drawn to the thrill of pursuit, maybe I made it too easy. 


THE FORCED FUMBLE: 

Dinner ended. We could have, and likely should have, called it a night. But we went back to his place instead. Which, to his credit, was a vibe. A tastefully designed space that made up for his mom-style car. Records spun. Seltzer was poured. We curled up on a buttery brown couch that seemed to say, “stay a while.” 

I wanted to recapture the spark we lit outside my car on our first date. To build on that momentum; to start a new scene in my LA dating story. I flirted, teased, tried to create heat. After all, we met on a sex-forward dating app. But something was off. Every time I leaned in, he leaned out. Literally, to the bathroom. 

In hindsight, I probably should have backed off. But he didn’t ask me to leave, and didn’t set any boundaries, and I mistook that as a green light. So I kept trying. I straddled him, whispered sexy, sweet nothings of consent. He responded with lines like, “That’s interesting,” or, “I’m not into lingerie.” Not exactly the language of arousal. Not even the language of presence. Still, I kept going. I became a court jester of seduction. The harder I tried, the more limp he got. His energy was far away, but I wasn’t ready to let go. I wanted to feel wanted. 

But he’d already checked out, physically, emotionally, gastrointestinally. He said, “I have to get up early.” A subtle cue that really meant, “please leave.” He kissed me at the door. And I left. 

When I got back to my apartment, there was no text like before. Maybe he was tired. Maybe he was super sick. I went to bed without spiraling, still feeling grounded in the connection we had built in person and weeks worth of messages. But by the next day, when nothing came through, the tide started to turn. 

Anyone who’s been ghosted knows the feeling. And because it wasn’t my first, I recognized the signs the moment they crept in. The dry mouth for no reason. The racing thoughts that scattered before they could land. No appetite until suddenly I was inhaling an entire bag of chips. The slow unraveling of certainty. The desperate texts to friends, fishing for reassurance. 

He had been consistent, I told myself. He liked me enough to at least tell me he didn’t... right? 

At this point, the ocean had completely receded, exposing a shoreline littered with things I didn’t want to see: shells of shame, rejection, regret, and doubt. As night fell and city lights filtered through my blinds, the silence turned suffocating. No new messages. Then it hit, the internal tsunami I’d been bracing for. A wave of panic crashed through me, confirming what I didn’t want to admit. I’d been ghosted. 


LOST AT SEA: 

Adrift on my mattress, a life raft with no land in sight.
I had already been mending a broken heart from my ex, and this blatant disregard tore it wide open. The only thing keeping me tethered was ambient music, layered, winding, freeing. 

The music moved like slow currents, carrying me somewhere unexpected. As if to say: I’m going to cradle you. Relax. Stop resisting the pain. Let it wash over you. So I listened. I lay pinned in place as my mind drifted. With each track, a new emotion surfaced. Shame circled. Embarrassment swelled. 

I replayed every moment of our last date like a quarterback reviewing game tape, fumble after fumble, every misstep in slow motion. My eagerness, my desperate attempt to be chosen, reeked of need. Red flags to him, I’m sure. And all the while, the music held me. Not to fix it, but to keep me afloat. A buoy in the dark, sludgy waters of regret. 
 
And the saddest part? The romantic songwriter, the magnetic performer whose lyrics are laced with tenderness and courage, was gone. I was hurt by his silence, but also by the realization that I had mistaken his lyrics for the man himself. I wanted to believe that someone who could write that beautifully must live by the same depth. 

I knew the sea would eventually settle. It always does. But for now, I had to ride it out because somewhere in the churn, I would find compassion for myself. 

So I let go and let the wave carry me home. 

When I woke up, my pillow was soaked with tears but clear thoughts lapped gently at the edge of a new day. 


THE RECOVERY EFFORTS:

This wasn’t a stranger disappearing after a forgettable date. This was a man who once replied with care and speed, a man who writes albums about heartbreak, human struggle, and redemption. Someone whose career revolves around language and meaning. And yet, he couldn’t find three words for me. The absurdity was humiliating.
Yes, it was brief. And yes, dating musicians in LA isn't rare. But that doesn’t make it less baffling. Our exchanges showed he was capable of communication. He simply chose not to. Our conversations about morality, forgiveness, and love felt sincere. I believed that if it ended, it would end with words.

Dr. Émile P. Torres, in a 2024 Truthdig article titled What Ghosting Says About Society (And Why It Hurts So Much), outlines several common causes: communication overload, personal crises, and most often, disinterest. Ouch
Torres writes. “The ghoster is concerned only about him/herself, without considering the partner.”

He continues, “Many ghosters act out of fear, insecurity, or emotional avoidance, retreating into silence rather than facing discomfort, even if they later regret denying someone basic dignity.”

And worse: “Ghosting is more than an event, it’s a message: You, the ghostee, don’t deserve closure. You aren’t worthy of understanding why or receiving an explanation of how. You are something to be discarded when I, the ghoster, no longer need you.”

I also had to consider a harder truth: because I was frictionless and made things easy, maybe I was convenient to disappear from. Ghosters often assume people like me “won’t make a big deal about it.”Maybe that was true here too.
None of these explanations changed how it felt though: let down. I’ve dedicated my life to music, to storytelling, to uplifting artists. And instead of being met with respect, I was dismissed.


The absurdity of contradictions didn’t end with the research. It only compounded when I came across video interviews of him repeating, almost word for word, the same stories he told me on our first date. Lines I’d taken as intimate were part of a well-worn script, one that had circulated through town but never quite sold. Who was he, really?

At first, I felt sick. Then confused. Then, empathetic. I hadn’t fully considered how hard it must be to step out of the limelight without shedding the role. When your identity is built around performance, it must be hard not to keep performing even offstage, while eating soup at Whole Foods on a first date. The double life artists of his caliber have to navigate suddenly came into focus. The glory, the attention, the adoration, it all comes at a cost. 

After a week of tortuous rumination, I tried to rationalize. Maybe something happened. Maybe I had to reach out. Eventually, I did. A gentle, open-ended message, just seeking closure. I was on a trail in Malibu, the sun slipping into the Pacific. As the sky dimmed, so did the hope for a reply.
None came. And in its place, a haunting.

THE HAUNTING:

Back to the old saying: never meet your idols. They say it because the person behind the art might disappoint you. But I’d take it further: don’t match with your favorite musician. If the man doesn’t measure up, the music becomes an eerie reminder of what you hoped for and what used to be.

As Gillian Orr writes, “the music follows you into the mundane. One minute you’re shopping for groceries; the next, you hear it, and you’re right back in it.” That’s the haunting part. But she got something I didn’t: an ending. “He made a feeble apology before returning to join a bevy of girls,” she writes. I’m envious even of that.

For me, when he disappeared, the songs took on a new form like a poltergeist. What once felt like an anthem, the kind of music that made me scream lyrics out the window while flying down dirt roads, suddenly felt cold and hollow.. If he could be careless with words, or with the lack of them, how could I not hear that in his music?

Now, pressing play comes with resistance. Seeing him promote new work on late night shows or hearing friends celebrate a performance of his stirs up an unexplainable ache.

And because music is a mirror, his songs now reflect parts of me I’d rather not see: The woman who clung to the man and let go of the music, even though the music had never let me down.

PROCESSING & CONCLUSION:

Psychiatrist and author Dr. Mark Epstein, in his book Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself, writes, “Things change when the way you explain things to yourself changes.” To move through this, I had to consciously think different thoughts. Three ideas helped.

First: Roland Barthes’ the Death of the Author. Once art is released, it no longer belongs to its creator, meaning lives with the listener. I hold onto that, especially with his music. I choose to let the songs carry me back to the joy of screaming lyrics on back roads.

Second: acousmatic listening. Pythagoras taught behind a curtain so his students would focus on the message, not the man. I started wondering, what if concerts worked that way? Lately, I’ve been going to shows with this in mind, closing my eyes and letting the music stand on its own. Because in an era where performance is so tied to spectacle, effort, and charisma, it’s easy to confuse showmanship for substance.

Third: Perspective is personal. I laughed during a rerun of Seinfeld, Season 6, Episode 19, “The Jimmy,” when Jerry says to Elaine, “I can’t watch a man sing a song. They get all emotional, they sway. It’s embarrassing.” Once you see a male performer through that lens, it’s hard to unsee.

Because really, what’s manly about crooning into a microphone, eyes closed, pouring out emotion? It’s not masculine energy, it’s vulnerable, expressive, feminine. And yet we project power onto it. Maybe that’s the illusion.
In the wreckage, gratitude. The first time I saw him perform, decades ago in Amsterdam the synergy in that room charted a new course for my life: from venue to venue, city to city, capturing the stories that unfold onstage and in the crowd. That calling eventually led me to LA.

So when my first date here was with the frontman of that same band, it didn’t feel like a coincidence. It felt like a continuation. Or maybe a reminder that even when you think you’ve hardened, music can still bring you to your knees. It can still make you feel something new. Love and loss remain life’s best instructors because They reveal more of who you actually are.

This isn’t how I imagined my journalism skills would evolve when I moved to LA, but I’m also not too surprised. The heart of my work has always come from lived experience, from empathy. As an emotional investigator of concert culture, I tell stories from standing alongside the fans. Not to chase celebrity, but to meet the music where it lives,  in real time, in real space, with the people who feel it. Music lives differently in all of us, yet connects us in ways we can’t fully explain. That mystery is the pursuit.

Do I love being backstage, soaking up the energy of a set, and interviewing artists about their work? Absolutely. But the most vital part of the job now is discernment, the ability to see the frontman and the man as two different people. I’ve had to face my own duality too: the journalist and the woman. The one who documents. The one who dates. 

Because when the concert ends, the fans disappear, and the text message is sent, it’s not the music that replies. It’s the person.

Kyle Lamont is an award-winning producer, founder and host of Concert Cast, an indie travel series exploring concert culture. Her new, always-on video chat show about live music premieres soon. Listen at ConcertCast.live or contact her at [email protected].

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