Local opinion: Heaven lives in a 500-person room and a 20-year echo

On Monday night, Dec. 15, The Format comes to Tucson for an acoustic set at La Rosa (800 N. Country Club Rd.) — a 500-person beautifully restored former Benedictine church, in a tour stop that feels almost surreal after Phoenix’s full-blown 14k-seat hometown spectacle late September this year at "Madhouse on McDowell" during the Arizona State Fair.

If Phoenix was the headline, Tucson is the footnote you circle in pen. This is the desert version of a secret handshake: You don’t have to be loud to be important.

I keep thinking about the first time I saw them, twenty years back, under Pima County Fairgrounds, when a small stage felt like a promise. At the time, it felt like the ceiling of what a night could hold. Then life happened. Careers, kids, grief, and the songs didn’t leave. They just got heavier and somehow more useful.

But Tucson isn’t a consolation-prize city. It’s the place where songs don’t just play, and they lodge. They become part of your nervous system.

Matthew Luke Vyborny was my closest friend. The kind of person who fills entire chapters.

It was July 14, 2007. I was about to see The Format go on when I got the call: Matt had gone to heaven. And after that, I didn’t think I’d ever see Matt or the band again in this life.

If you’ve lost someone young, you know the strange math: The world keeps adding years, but the person stays fixed at the age they were. You carry them forward like a private frequency. Sometimes music is the only technology that can tune back into it. And sometimes it feels like the frequency isn’t just memory, it is presence. Like Vybo’s not frozen in 2007 at all, but moving through the people who loved him, showing up in the choices we make, the way we treat each other, the full presence we give people, the way we keep going.

Maybe that’s what I mean by heaven, at least in Tucson terms: not a far-off place you only earn later, but something you can build here in small rooms, by paying attention, by staying close, by refusing to let the people we’ve lost get smaller with time. Their presence doesn’t have to fade. It can grow, if we let it, encourage it.

That new Format album is out Jan. 23, 2026, with three incredible singles already released. Ruess explains the title came from misreading “boycott Heineken” as ‘boycott heaven,’ and he’s blunt about the intent: It is not an anti-religion record.

Some would say if you name an album Boycott Heaven, you’re poking a bruise. That is part of what art is allowed to do. But the better question for Tucson, where faith communities are real, visible, and varied, is whether we can read the provocation as what it appears to be: a refusal to outsource goodness to ‘someday.’

If "heaven" is used as a metaphor for a place we escape to after we’re done with the mess of other people, then "boycotting" it is a moral dare: stay here, love harder, build something decent now. There are no do-overs in this life.

Monday night won’t just be about the songs. It’ll be about what we project onto them, our faith, our disappointments, our losses, our friends who should’ve been standing next to us.

“Don’t go wasting all your time.”

“Been gone for way too long.”

“I never meant to say goodbye.”

“Back to life.”

“Praying for a sign.”

None of those lines are complicated. The older you get, the more you realize the deepest truths are usually embarrassingly simple, even if still hard to live.

So here’s the Tucson version of the message: the desert doesn’t promise you anything. It just gives you a chance to choose. And on Monday, in a room small enough to feel each other breathing, we get to choose again with presence over postponement, memory over numbness, love over the illusion that we have all the time in the world.