very once in a while I’ll hear a song for the first time and know the words immediately. I’ll feel like I’m six years old again, scanning a certain album cover that features four strange guys in furry animal costumes, or wondering how a band could get away with calling itself The Doors. Time has passed, replacing this innocence with responsibility, vulnerability, and, best of all, experience. But certain things will always break me down and bring me back. Delta Spirit did this to me Monday night upstairs at the Middle East. It was 70 minutes of nostalgia mixed with triumph and a few tears.

Delta Spirit will soon become a household name. Its second LP will be out in May and its recent East Coast tour, which included two shows at the Middle East, sold out weeks in advance. When they come back, expect these guys on a bigger stage. The equation has to add up—a cocky swagger that doesn’t exude entitlement, a familiar sound that somehow escapes convenient comparison, and songs that can be digested by layman and smug hipster alike. The band deals in anthems not unlike U2’s, but only if Robbie Robertson ousted the Edge. Delta Spirit has a stripped-down, drunken country vibe, but can also moisten the intelligent listener’s palate by carefully playing with noise. It all fits somewhere. I just hope a witty businessman doesn’t come along and try to turn it into the next Kings of Leon.

People forget that Creedence Clearwater Revival was from San Francisco and the Band was from Canada. That’s because their songs bring us to a mystified southern world. It’s a romantic place where hard living came at a high cost, a place where people don’t hide from brutal honesty and harsh truth, a place that inspired some of the best music known to man. I’ve never lived there, but through music I feel like I have. The guys in Delta Spirit haven’t lived there either, but they sound like they could have played a high-school prom in Macon, Georgia in the mid ’60s. Home is where the heart is, as they say. Not bad for five punks who live in southern California.

Front man Matt Vasquez sings in the vein of Dylan and Cash, but he knows his place as a twenty-something who has few answers and only his own experience to share. It’s like an emo-kid downing a few extra PBRs and realizing there’s no reason to be miserable anymore—that as long as you are living, you have something to live for. And the Delta Spirit guys have lived. On some nights when they were broke and on tour they’d have nowhere to sleep, even after playing in front of a packed house.

Something about Delta Spirit makes me believe in the power of music and being true to yourself. Vasquez summed it up perfectly at the end of the night as he sealed up the last verse of “People Turn Around” with the line, “The song that needs singing / has already been sung before.”

The guys in Delta Spirit sing the only song they know—their own.