This is getting weird: The day after a fan fatally leaped onto the stage at a Swell Season performance, Charles Haddon, the lead singer on English synth-pop band Ou Est Le Swimming Pool, apparently committed suicide by leaping off of a telecommunication tower behind the main stage immediately after his performance at a festival in Belgium. The day before, the Thursday of the Swell Season tragedy, Michael Been, frontman for the U.S. group The Call, died of an apparent heart attack at the same festival while working as the soundman for his son's band, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

The heart attack is merely a coincidence, but three leaping incidents in a little over a week (a Phish concert at Jones Beach, a Swell Season concert in California, and the Haddon suicide in Belgium) is a disturbing trend, and one to which I cannot fathom any link or reason.

Before the Swell Season concert at the Portland Zoo, their first show after the on-stage suicide in California, Glen Hansard wrote on the band's web page, "Making and performing music is what the band has always done in good times and in bad. Our hope is that in this communal experience tonight we can somehow help our own grieving process after what we just witnessed. The show will most certainly be different than any other we have ever played. We wish to continue to be sensitive to family and friends of this individual and hope that in performing it is not viewed as a selfish act. We have not come to this decision lightly. We continue to have them at the forefront of our minds and hearts."

For the record, due to rain alternating with hot and humid weather, I did not go to yesterday's "No-Name" festival at Atlanta's Goat Farm. As far as I know, no one leaped off of anything during the concert. As the picture above implies, I spent most of today practicing Zen with the Chattanooga sangha.