And for those two minutes, he isn’t the frontman of the world’s biggest band. He’s just a witness. He’s watching us sing a song about the purest, most irrational emotion humans possess. You see it on his face—that quiet, disbelieving smile. He wrote a placeholder about a color, and we turned it into a hymn. Here is the deep truth no one tells you about seeing “Yellow” live: It is profoundly sad.

And that is why we keep going back. Not for the band. For the reminder that we are still, beneath all the armor, just looking for someone to look at the stars with.

It’s choreographed chaos. It’s a little cheesy. And it is absolutely, spiritually necessary.