Ah, young love at a Strokes concert.
A Michigan couple got engaged during Monday’s Strokes concert at Pine Knob, and video of the moment was posted to Instagram. In its first 24 hours, the video has been seen more than 250,000 times and has received more than 50,000 likes.
Dess Hull, 28 and Carly Hernandez, 30, both of Lansing, are the happy couple. She’s been listening to The Strokes her whole life, after her mom, Linda, turned her onto the band. “I remember being so little and just hearing them all the time,” Hernandez says.
So Hull knew he had to pop the question during their first Strokes concert together. (They hadn’t had any previous chances; Monday’s concert was the band’s first headlining concert in Michigan since 2006.)
“All day I was a nervous wreck,” says Hull, a mural painter in Lansing, who started planning his proposal in April and assembled a group of a half-dozen friends to join them at the show.
Hernandez, his girlfriend of eight years who runs her own housecleaning business, was slightly suspicious why so many pals were going with them to the concert. “It’s a good time! Everyone loves the Strokes!” he says he told her.
He had a friend help him smuggle the ring — the same ring his late father proposed to his mother with, which he received from his mother back in November — without his girlfriend seeing it or catching on to what was going on. He had it in his pocket during openers Hamilton Leithauser and Thundercat. “I was just hoping I didn’t drop it,” he says.
Hull’s best laid plans involved proposing to her during “Call it Fate, Call it Karma,” a favorite from the New York City rock group’s 2013 album “Comedown Machine.”
But it was getting late in the set and the band hadn’t played it yet, so he went with option B, “Selfless,” from the band’s 2020 album “The New Abnormal” (sample lyrics: “I don’t have love without you ’round/ life is too short, but I will live for you”). “It’s one of our biggest love songs,” he says.
The song came on “and I was shaking,” he says. Hernandez, meanwhile, was dialed into the show, and was capturing videos to send to her mom.
Then a friend tapped her on her shoulder and Hull was next to her, down on one knee. In his head, Hull says he had a lot of things he wanted to say, “but I only got a chance to say, ‘You’re my best friend,'” he says.
He did manage to get to the important stuff: he asked her to marry him, she said yes, and she immediately jumped into his arms.
Then the crowd around them on the hill at Pine Knob, noticing the moment, started applauding. “All of a sudden people started flashing pictures, around five or six other people started taking videos,” he says. “It was so magical.”
As an added bonus, a few songs later, the Strokes played “Call it Fate, Call it Karma” during their encore.
On Tuesday, Hernandez posted the video to Instagram. She only has 134 followers on the platform, so she wasn’t expecting much, but the algorithm got a hold of the video and it immediately took off.
She says they’ve been “floored” by the reaction. “Everyone is so happy and excited,” she says. “I don’t know these people, but they’re all so sweet!”
Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. reached out to say congrats, as did a friend of drummer Fabrizio Moretti, Hull says.
He’s hoping Strokes lead singer Julian Casablancas gets a chance to see it, “but he’s so nonchalant, we are not that lucky,” he says. (Hernandez is such a big fan of Casablancas that she has a tattoo of “Human Sadness” from his other band, The Voidz, on her chest; “It’s my favorite song of all time,” she says.)
Hull and Hernandez are going to look at wedding venues this weekend, and they’re planning a 2027 wedding. He’s going to look into getting a Strokes cover band for the reception, he says.
Hernandez says she had no idea any of this — the engagement, the video’s virality — was going to happen, and she’s ecstatic for all of it.
“I’m just so grateful for everything,” she says. “I’m grateful for my friends and for Dess, so much, that they were there. I’m grateful that I even got to see the Strokes, because I never even thought I’d be able to afford to go to something like this.
“So I was so happy to be even be there, and then for this to happen on top of it? It was the best moment of my life so far,” she says. “I’m over the moon, completely.”
agraham@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Michigan couple gets engaged during Strokes show at Pine Knob
Reporting by Adam Graham, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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By Adam Graham, The Detroit News | USA TODAY Network
