The Steamboat Pilot & Today

Steamboat Springs — Toward the end of a conversation about how his band has gathered a following in two decades of playing, the subdudes bassist Jimmy Messa said something you could only expect to hear from someone who’s spent much of his life playing to crowds of all sizes and levels of interest.

Messa figured that in the band’s early years, no one was coming to the bar to see the subdudes. Most people were just going to the bar to drink. If there was music, those people weren’t likely to complain, unless that music was face-slappingly awful.

“A lot of people weren’t coming to see us, they were just going out and having fun. And now, just by virtue of our longevity, people finally started to listen,” Messa said. “Now it’s become some of the songs of their lives, so they come and see us, and it’s kind of a reunion for our old fans. It’s something they’ve been doing for the long time.”

In a performance Tuesday for the Strings Music Festival Different Tempo Series, Messa and the subdudes drew a room full of people who fit that description. By intermission, a few couples danced just in front of the stage, inhibitions lost for a chance to hear the music that for years has defined what it is to have a good time. The band members chattered and joked with one another on stage, as they rocked from one feel-good, jammed out, New Orleans-fired song to the next.

The energy of the crowd — even the parts that remained seated — suggested Messa is right in his reflection on the subdudes’ fans. His group’s songs are not the songs of my life, but I can see where they might be, if I were older and originally from Colorado or Louisiana.

It’s to the subdudes’ credit that their live show can bring up a question I’d never really thought about before: What makes something a song of your life?

It has something to do with hearing a band in a certain time and place, probably while you’re young. At the moment, I’m fairly sure the songs of my life are an odd mix of radio rap from the 1990s, punk rock from the same decade and North Carolina bar rock from the past few years.

But I’m also fairly sure I won’t recognize these songs as lasting for a good while, when the bands that performed them are long-since gone. So here’s to hoping that Naughty By Nature, Rancid and The Avett Brothers (playing Tuesday at Strings) go on tour when I’m 40.