I’ve been listening to Manchester Orchestra since first hearing them on KFOG, but I was lucky to be exposed to the band live at their acoustic KFOG Private Concert this September. I say “lucky” because they are a band whose currency is emotion, a visceral melancholy, namely, something singer Andy Hull has the ability to emote without you needing to analyze the lyrics. And when that’s what you’re getting from just two musicians on stage with guitars, you know you’re a part of something unique.

Hull admits Manchester’s songs come across differently on stage than they do on their records. He attributes that to the fact that they don’t really put out “quick tracks” (their songs average closer to 4 minutes each, at a time when the shortest song in 42 years is topping the Hot 100 chart), and it’s natural to improvise and even create live, in the midst of a performance.

“For a long time, when I would do solo tours, I’d write songs and lyrics just off the top of my head and watch YouTube clips later, find the lines that worked, and use them again,” says Hull.

In my dive through their extensive catalog – there’s the grand and vulnerable 2011 Simple Math, 2014’s prolific, lean rock album Cope, 2009’s Mean Everything to Nothing (Joe Chiccarelli – The Shins, My Morning Jacket – produced) – I was taken back in time. And it’s no wonder – Hull started the band at the age of 16, and that’s what Manchester Orchestra’s music crystallizes: the time in a person’s life when everything is felt personally, deeply, and overwhelmingly.

Though Andy Hull has come some way since high school, now a proud father of a baby girl for whom “The Maze” and “The Sunshine” off their latest A Black Mile to the Surface is for. He also notably co-wrote the primarily a cappella soundtrack for surreal indie comedy Swiss Army Man. But the band is still not afraid to elevate melodrama, which comes together beautifully on A Black Mile as they deal with themes of inheritance, mortality, and family. “My axis changed (with the birth of my daughter),” Hull says during the private concert. “So a lot of it is a love letter – and an apology to my daughter for bringing her into this place.”

Manchester Orchestra lives in their vulnerability, and allow their audience by extension to do the same. Just listen to the acoustic set from their private concert. Maybe bring the tissues.