I’m a little older now than I was the last time Neutral Milk Hotel came to town. Unlike most other concerts I’ve been to at First Avenue, on Monday night I did not push my way to front-center. I was not offered any drugs. I did not drink a beer, nor did I drink too many beers and lose my coat check ticket.

I’m currently 21, which means that I was five years old when In The Aeroplane Over The Sea—which celebrated its 16th birthday the night of the show—came out, and the last time Neutral Milk Hotel played a show in Minneapolis, at the 400 Bar in 1998. (Frontman Jeff Mangum has played Minneapolis since, but under his own name.) Neutral Milk Hotel stopped touring before I turned 10, so unfortunately I didn’t catch them on their first national tours. Monday's performance at First Ave was an all-ages show, but I still felt like one of the youngest faces in the crowd. Unlike many of the fans at the show on Monday, I don’t remember when the band had their big break.

I was introduced to Neutral Milk Hotel via a middle-school love interest, and I put "Gardenhead/Leave me Alone" on my first iPod in 2005, about the same time I was snatching up my dad’s copies of Rolling Stone before he could get to them, and downloading mislabeled singles from Limewire. These memories are tied tightly to the emergence of my own musical preferences, and a long progression of trying on different sets of ears—one that I’m still not sure I’ve finished.

As the screen rose on Monday night, Mangum sat alone, surrounded by horns, banjos, speakers, tools, tables, and what appeared to be a lamb figurine. The band seemed genuinely excited to play together—the instrumentalists mouthed along the words when they weren’t jumping emphatically, and Mangum’s voice cracked with sincerity and enthusiasm at all the right times.

Although it could have been one, Monday’s show was not a lighthearted, nostalgic sing-along. Songs like "Holland, 1945" and "Song Against Sex" still struck a distinctive balance between anthem and unease—they were dissonant, longing and unruly. Mangum’s voice would be lifted by the horns and drums only to suddenly clash against them. The performances didn't always match the songs' recorded versions, but they were faithful to the band's spirit of deliberate imperfection. In that sense, it was a success.

It became apparent that I wasn't the only Millennial to be impressed with the band: during an especially long tuning break before "Oh Comely," a fan shouted to Mangum, “Will you be my dad?!”

In the past year, I’ve seen a handful of the bands I discovered in my junior-high forays into “grown-up” music—Built to Spill, Wilco, Bob Dylan, and now Neutral Milk Hotel. It begets a certain sense of closure; I can finally begin to make sense, and let go, of that part of my life. As the band played, I thought back on the different selves I'd been during my years as a Neutral Milk Hotel fan, and I imagine older fans were left with an even more acute sense of nostalgia.

The band closed the show with what they called a lullaby, a 1998 b-side called "Engine." Mangum crooned the final line, “…then wake up your windows and watch as those sweet babies crawl away.”

Kyra Herning is a student at Macalester College.