Category: Music

Some pics

Yesterday’s concert at Mohegan Sun was awesome. Amazing, even. It was definitely in my top 5 Mraz concerts ever. Considering that I’ve been to six of his concerts in less than a year, that’s really saying something. Right now I’m exhausted, so I’m taking myself off to bed soon, but I’ll share a couple of pics.

I’ll go into more detail about the concert in general and Mohegan Sun in the near future.

Whee!

I’m on the train from New York up to Mohegan Sun. I’m excited partly because I get to see Jason Mraz again for the first time since April, but also because I’ve never been to Mohegan Sun before. I haven’t been to a casino lately, so I’m itching to be parted with my standard $20.

I still have five hours before the concert, so it’s too early to start listening to Mraz. Thankfully, my good friend Ingrid Michaelson is here to keep me company.
I’m bringing my camera, but the concert has assigned seating, so I don’t know how well any pictures will come out. If they’re not terrible, I’ll post them tomorrow.

For the love of Mimi

I will leave discussion of the zoo of Michael Jackson’s memorial to pretty much everybody else on the planet, but I wanted to mention how cringeworthy Mariah Carey’s performance was. She just didn’t sound good at all. To add insult to injury, Trey Lorenz, the backup singer who appeared with her on her original cover of “I’ll Be There,” still sounded pretty impressive and actually propped her up a few times.

As usual, the commenters on Youtube have shown no mercy for poor Mimi, and are being quite mean about the whole thing. Showing more self-awareness than is her wont, She of the Butterflies wrote on her Twitter account about her performance. She explained that she was choked up with grief, and that her performance suffered for it. Yeah, right.

For comparison’s sake I offer three videos. The first is the performance on Tuesday at Michael Jackson’s memorial. The second is her performing this song with Trey Lorenez at last year’s Save the Music concert. The third is the original from the 90s when she was still really good. Still, I think it could still be said that, even at 50% of her original awesomeness, Mimi can outsing a good 70% of the pop music industry.

Music crisis

Jason Mraz has been my favorite musician since 2003. I have followed him all over the Northern Hemisphere, and so far I’ve seen him twice in 2009; I already have tickets to two other shows later in the year. Now, however, I feel like I may have another favorite musician, and I’m not sure that Mraz is still #1 in my head. Ingrid Michaelson’s music has been in my head ever since I first heard it, and everything that I hear just makes me like her more. Her use of harmony is especially attractive to me, but I love her songwriting skills, too. I just think that a lot of what she says speaks to me more than Mraz. She uses clever turns of phrase, maybe not as often as he does, but I just get what she’s saying. I have played “The Chain” and “Keep Breathing” over and over, and they’re now the top two songs in my collection, in terms of play count. There are six songs from that cd, Be Okay, in my top 25.

But I don’t really want to choose. I want my great musical loves to love one another. If these two reproduced, they’d have a really cute kid who would probably throw tantrums in perfect pitch. Ingrid opened up for Jason last year, and here’s a video of them doing one of her songs, then one of his.

I didn’t even have to use my AK

“Today was a Good Day” by Ice Cube is one of my favorite old skool rap songs. I can hear it any time and be transported to the days when I watched Video Music Box after school. Here is a really cute flow chart that maps the whole song.

So awesome.

Belfast

So I’m having a pretty good time here in the UK. Northern Ireland is lovely, and it seems that I brought with me unexpectedly good weather. Lots of people commented to me how unusual the warm sunshine was. You’re welcome, Belfast.

For the most part, the people I met were awesome. A lot of them were really interested to hear that I was from the US and genuinely wanted to know what I thought of their fair city. Many expressed admiration and apprehension that I was on my own, and I felt like I’d traveled to a city of my own relatives. The first night, I met three older guys who showed me the local bars and told me all sorts of stuff I wouldn’t have learned otherwise. One wanted to grab dinner the next night, but I figured that it would be silly to tie myself up with the same parties two nights in a row, and nicely declined. A word of advice to anybody going to Belfast: eat early. I guess I was still in New York mode and thought that leaving my hotel room after 10 would give me time to grab food and hit the pubs, but that was absolutely not the case. I struck out at all the restaurants I saw, and was lucky to make it to McDonald’s before they, too, shut down for the night.

The next night, I learned my lesson and left to find food at 8:15 (and even that was too late to get food at some of the local pubs that served meals). I had a good dinner, went back to the hotel and watched Dollhouse and the first episode of Cupid (I’ll talk about that some time later), and then went to a couple of local bars. The people in the first weren’t really as outgoing, so I left after one drink and ended up talking with Ricky and Ian, two nice guys who work at the Belfast Telegraph. We chatted for a bit outside, but they were smoking cigarettes and I was kind of freezing, so I told them to find me when they came inside the bar.

As I sat waiting for them, this old, super drunk guy who was actually sleeping when I first walked by awakened and started mumbling to me. I have discovered that it is nearly impossible for me to understand a Belfast accent when the speaker is under the influence, so I gave him a vague smile, told him I was waiting for my friends, and went back to reading on my phone. He had just asked me to join him at his table when Ian and Ricky showed up. He scowled at us and all was well until about a half hour later, when the guys went to grab more beer and I stayed at the table. Then the drunken fossil asked me how much I would charge to go back to his home with him. At first I thought that I’d misunderstood, but he said it again and I realized that he thought I was a prostitute.

I was really hurt and wondered what I’d done to give him that impression. Later, I realized that being a single foreign woman alone in a bar, who then ended up sitting at a table and talking with two local men might give somebody the wrong impression, if that person was inclined to think like a pervert. But, while I realized it wasn’t worth disabusing him of his incorrect notion, I simply said no and decided not to stick around for the pitch. I went over to the guys at the bar and told them what the old dude had said. They were touchingly offended on my behalf, and when we got back to the table, the fossil kept yelling vulgar things at use. Ian, the cute one who looked like David Wright (he’s never really done it for me, but add an accent and I can start to understand the appeal) got up, looking pretty angry, and headed toward the old guy’s table, but Ricky stopped him from going over there, and we ignored the fossil after that.

We stayed at that bar until last call, then went to another one. On the way, I somehow managed to lose one of my pretty new dangly earrings, which made me sad. I pulled out the other one so I didn’t look deranged. Even though we went to another bar afterward, we got there after last call there, too, so I helped Ricky talk to a girl he found cute. Things were going well until she told him that she was 24 and he told her that she looked 28. It was not untrue, but that lost him major points, and it took him a while to recover his lost ground, and a lot of that was due to me. I guess I haven’t lost my touch and still make a pretty awesome wingman. The guys and I parted ways in the cab back to my hotel. I got out to find my earring and had no luck, but I went back out the next morning before leaving for the airport, and found it with no problem! It was a little crushed, but I think that it can be bent back into shape.

I had heard that there wasn’t a lot going on in Belfast, and I scheduled my vacation accordingly. If I’d known before booking how awesome Belfast is, and how relatively sedate Birmingham is in comparison, I probably would have spent 4 days in Belfast and only stopped over in Birmingham for the concert. I definitely intend to go back to Belfast and spend a lot more time there!

The first Jason Mraz concert is tonight, and I’m a bit worried. I’ve heard from a person who went to a concert in Brussels, and he said it was blah, and that’s exactly how one of the free London dailies described the Mraz concerts in London over the weekend. Maybe a day off will allow him to rev up and be on his A game for Birmingham. I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

She who hesitates…

I knew knew knew that I wanted to go to Jason Mraz’s Birmingham, UK concert this coming April. I already have a ticket to his Dublin show, but I thought that I might as well see him a couple of times while I’m in the UK and Ireland. I’d even gone so far as to amend my hostel reservation in Dublin to allow me a stop over in Birmingham. So why didn’t I just buy my ticket??? I mean, I bought my Dublin ticket a couple of weeks before I got the plane tickets, so what possible excuse could I have? Today I tried to purchase a ticket, and the concert appears to be sold out. Bother! Now I’m left hoping that 1) new tickets will become available through Livemaster (or whatever they’re calling themselves these days), or 2) I can find a reseller whose prices do not make me feel scalped.

Even if I’m not able to get a ticket, I think I’m still going to head to Birmingham. I read a lot of good things about it online that make me think it will be worth visiting, and that will be something, right? Plus, there is a chance that somebody might be selling reasonably priced tickets outside of the show, although I need to see what the law in the UK says about buying/selling in that situation. Wouldn’t want to run afoul of the law on top of everything else!

So apt

I don’t really talk too much about what what went on in my love life last year, but sometimes I allude to my single state and how I got there. I’m not intentionally trying to be cryptic, it’s just not much of a story: boy loves girl, girl loves boy, boy is no longer sure if he loves girl, girl doesn’t stick around to see which way will be up when the dust settles. Even though I’m okay now with being on my own, and even feel sane enough to date again, sometimes I will hear a song that speaks so much to what I was feeling when my world fell apart.

This time, I was listening to Toad the Wet Sprocket’s 1994 release Dulcinea. I love Toad, but I’m also listening to the cds of theirs that I don’t frequently play, in anticipation of seeing them in concert later this month (squee!!). So this song is, appropriately, entitled “Stupid,” and here is the chorus:

And it’s frightening
Oh, I didn’t expect that from you
It’s blinding
Serious are you seriously
I am feeling really stupid now

I would listen to Glenn Phillips read the freaking phone book if they’d sell tickets to such an event, but these words and the emotion in his voice pretty much summed up my July.

I love corrupting my nephew. He’s been walking around the house singing, “Tacos and mojitos. Cerveza, por favor. ¿Dónde está la biblioteca?”

Love. It!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9NFkB_GUDQ]

No more Mrazzy Goodness

I’ve been to three Jason Mraz concerts in the last week and a half, and I’m bummed that this great period in my autumn has come to an end. I enjoyed all three of the concerts, albeit in different ways.

New York was great because it was the first show that I attended this tour and I hadn’t seen Jason Mraz perform live in two years, and also because I’d never been to Radio City Music Hall before. I don’t know how I managed to avoid this in my 27 years, but it was just beautiful and definitely worth the wait. And!! THEY SERVE ALCOHOL. Sometimes they come in faux martini glasses with Rockette legs for stems. Cute, right? So yeah, I was totally lit up for that show. People were dancing in the aisles and I bonded with a group of Boston Red Sox fans in the row in front of me and ended up dancing with one of the cuter guys for a song or two.

The second show, which was at Brookdale Community College, was interesting because I’d never been to this particular school before. The energy of the college students was pretty great (except for this weird section of people who could not get enough of sitting on their butts and never stood until Mraz told them to get on their feet). I saw a Brooke Hogan lookalike in a way too short dress, and felt inexplicably cheered every time our paths crossed.

The Boston show was pretty fun, too. I was with a friend who is also a huge Mraz fan (and her much less fan-like but good sport fiance), so that was awesome. We’ve been to several shows all over the eastern seaboard (and Wisconsin), and it was nice to be back at a show with my #1 Mrazzy buddy. I brought my camera to this show, but left the freaking memory card in New Jersey. I missed most of the opening act searching high and low for a place to get a new card. Why do stores in Boston close at 7 pm? What kind of a city downtown closes so early? Just terrible. Anyway, I stumbled upon CEX, a British store just starting to appear in the US. It seems that pretty much everything they sell is used, but who cares when you can get a 4GB memory card for $20. Almost never happens at a brick and mortar place without some kind of an insane sale going on. I got back to the show in time to hear the last few songs of Lisa Hannigan’s set. and and took some pictures and video.

Here’s a video I took during the song “Live High.” All you Barack Obama fans, pay attention starting at the 1:15 mark.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4mkn516OK8]

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