Annie:
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, I was the music editor at the Riverfront Times in St. Louis. This meant I was also in charge of its music blog, then called A To Z. On June 18, 2009, I was at home working on a post to preview the following night’s Matthew Sweet show at Blueberry Hill’s Duck Room. As I often did, I turned to YouTube and compiled a list of killer Sweet videos. However, the song “Superdeformed” wasn’t included–and so I next turned to the Hype Machine.

A search there turned up a link to a blog that had posted a whole ton of Altered Beast demos. And so on the resulting RFT post, I wrote, “And you can get the second part of those demos, right here at this random Cleveland blog called Addicted to Vinyl.” Little did I know that “random Cleveland blog” belonged to a guy named Matt Wardlaw, who religiously checked his trackbacks, saw a link to his blog and then left a comment thanking me for the link and mentioning he remembered seeing my byline in Cleveland.

Being the dutiful Ohioan, I emailed him and played “the Cleveland game,” seeing if we had mutual friends. He wrote back with some chatter about working in record stores and such. I didn’t think much of it, at least consciously. However, over the next few weeks, I found and added him on Facebook (I figured he was taken, as his profile photo at the time was of him and his sister).

Then we began following each other on Twitter:

A week later, that led to a frenzy of Twitter direct messages, as I had been rear-ended and had tweeted about it. We kept talking that way (and incurred Twitter’s wrath for reaching the message limit), started emailing, then began texting and, finally, graduated to phone calls. Our first phone call was three hours, and over the coming weeks, it became a daily thing.

So obviously something was going on. At the same time, I discovered that Heart and the Bangles were playing at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield on a Saturday night in August. I mentioned that to Matt, and he responded that he wouldn’t mind seeing the show with me. Now, traveling to Springfield from Cleveland entailed a drive of something like 10 hours. However, he was willing to do that–and so I agreed to meet him at the show.

As is my way, I was running late on that Saturday, August 22, 2009. In fact, Matt made it to Springfield before I had even left St. Louis. (Oops.) However, I made the sub-two-hours trek and eventually made it to where we were meeting. Nervous as all get out, I texted him to let him know I was there, stood outside my car and pretended to text someone, because I was so nervous.

I need not have worried, however. We hit it off that day and made it official a few weeks later, and nearly four years later, here we are getting married.