THE WALLFLOWERS, Red Butte Garden Amphitheater, July 19

Jakob Dylan may not have defined a generation, but he defined a period in time for a lot of people.

With his hit song "One Headlight," Dylan and his band, The Wallflowers, perfectly captured the late 1990s feeling for burgeoning adults, especially on the verge of college graduation. Every line in the song echoed the ping-pong emotions of youth, yet they were sang by somebody who sounded mature beyond their years. The music, with its steady driving beat, could prompt spontaneous celebrations or encourage long and lonely drives for abolsutely no reason.Certain bands, especially Dave Matthews Band and Pearl Jam, defined the generation that came of age during the presidency of Bill Clinton.

But "One Headlight" approaches iconic, at least for many of my sub-generation — the latter third of GenX — and for multiple years, it was inescapable, primarily because all of us played it constantly, at parties, in the gym, on long road trips or short runs to the store. To the song, we contemplated lost loves and found romance, we wrote poetry and short stories, we embraced the future and lamented the past. We sang the words that encapsulated our internal struggles, which we actually had time for thanks to a thriving economy driven by a corporate manifest destiny.

Look up the lyrics. The metaphor-heavy song reads like a rapid-fire lament of twenty-somethings struggling philosophically (anyone reading it literally, Dylan has said the song is about "the death of ideas," not an actual death).

Thus, it was not a surprise on Sunday night at Red Butte Garden to see a crowd packed with 30-somethings for The Wallflowers greatest hits tour, many of them with children stuck to their hips. And it was even less surprising to see the crowd casually enjoy the show — after all, The Wallflowers actually have a number of good songs — until "One Headlight," when everyone rose to their feet and really loved the show.

I apologize, because readers probably expect a review. The problem is, I am not a critic. I am a music fan who reviews music, and sometimes separating the review from the critic is impossible.