All My Friends Are Here: A Fan's Farewell To The Fan Club

At the risk of sounding dramatic, I've been facing this blank page trying to figure out how to properly eulogize my Hanson.net Fan Club Membership. I'm not going to try to tackle the bigger picture of the future of the band and hopes for what comes next; today I just want to pay my respects to the fan club that helped shape who I am. I'm not sure the perfect words exist, but as usual, here are a few thousand to help me make sense of how I feel anyway. If any of them resonate with you along the way, even better.

If we're going to talk about the end, I should probably start at the beginning. I stumbled my way back into this fandom in late 2006 and officially became a fan club member in April 2007 so that I could attend the Middle of Nowhere Acoustic recording. At the time, joining a fan club felt absurd and was simply a means to an end. I looked at that first $40 as the cost of a concert ticket and nothing more, and I became "Hollybelle" with the same casual ease of becoming a Target.com member to purchase an online-exclusive t-shirt. I had no idea that I was solidifying my identity in the fandom for the next two decades or that one show would eventually snowball into a couple hundred.

Obviously, the fandom didn't let me go that easily. Back then, the forums were bustling with activity. I was a college freshman, and it became my daily routine to eat breakfast at my laptop while checking my email and hanson.net. The forums moved fast enough that I'd read a post in the morning, think of a reply midday, and have trouble scrolling back to it by the evening. There were obvious “regulars” that all seemed to know each other and a general sense of community that fascinated me. They normalized the concept of traveling to multiple shows before I ever even set foot at my first. Despite the gaps in our years of experience and the mild intimidation of being the newbie, I jumped in and felt welcomed by those forums and the members in them. I'd found my "home" without really realizing I'd been looking for it.

I continued to meet more fans, make new friends, and slowly make my way across the globe in pursuit of good music and good times. During those early years, people in my "regular" life began to ask: "Why do you follow Hanson?" "What is it about this band for you?" I'd always answer that I loved the music and the people and places I found along the way, but today I want to share a more literal answer to this question.

Why have I followed Hanson for all of these years? A simplified truth is that I owe it all to the hanson.net fan club, and more specifically, those fan club forums.

Back when I rediscovered Hanson, my favorite band was Relient K. I loved them just as much and searched for information on both bands on the internet around the same time. The difference is during that time when I was still discovering myself and started diving more into my interests at an age when I was finally old enough to pursue them, I found a community with open arms for one band and not the other. If we’re talking two roads diverging, I took the one more traveled, and finding this fan community has made all the difference. Without the hanson.net forums and the people I’ve met in them teaching me to Do, Go, and Be long before Hanson put it in a song, I never would have set foot on a plane to go see them that first time and let it escalate into the traveling fan life I know today.

I've had mixed feelings about this day for over a year now. I've felt the full spectrum of the Hanson fan stages of grief ranging from "nothing's over 'til it's over, and if it's over I don't want to hear it" to "maybe happiness is worth the chance of a bitter end." I'm left knowing that I can't change the way things ended or that the end felt more bitter than sweet at times, but I can choose to remember the best of times instead of dwelling on the missteps.

I've come to the conclusion that the way I've experienced the fan club is not the way that Isaac, Taylor, and Zac have experienced the fan club, and that's okay. That maybe they weren't more careful with the way they ended things because they themselves would not have been so fragile if the roles had been reversed. I'd like to believe that they didn't realize the added pain caused by the lack of communication because aspects that were of daily importance to some of us were barely a blip on their own radar. They "know" what hanson.net has meant to us, but they don't know. They didn't wake up every morning for the last several decades and read the forums instead of the newspaper. They didn't swap information with a random fan club member in 2009 and continue to meet up with them regularly for the next seventeen years. They didn't meet their best friends there. 

But they shouldered all of the business meetings, the event planning, and the music deadlines that created that magic for us and made it possible for us to form those deep bonds. The fan club may have always been a bit more ours than theirs in some ways, but they created that space and let us run with it. I think a fair analogy would be that they toiled behind the scenes to curate that perfectly magical Christmas morning, and we're the children experiencing all of the joy of opening the gifts while never fully appreciating the amount of work that went into it. We know, but we don't know. That inability to perceive the others' perspective goes both ways. I hope they've experienced the satisfaction of seeing the joy on our faces year after year and knowing that it was worth whatever price they've paid to share it with us.

To the band, their staff, and my fellow fans, I want to say thank you all for being a part of it. Thank you to Hanson for creating a safe space for your fans and allowing us to run with it and make it our own. Thank you to Leigh and Kim who have been kindly herding us while getting to know us for years and have probably seen far more craziness than we will ever know. And thank you to every single one of you that has ever taken the time to say a kind word to a stranger on the internet who happens to like the same band, and then welcome them into your car, your hotel room, and ultimately your life--despite all of our parents' worst fears. Our questionable life choices didn't turn out so bad after all.

Peace, love, and infinitely sappy blog posts,

-Hollybelle

43 Fan Club Events, 19 years, 16 Hanson Days, 12 BTTIs, 2 Moeys, 1 Hammock Fail, 0 Regrets.❤️