banjochickie
04-11-2004, 01:18 AM
I posted this last night on Green&Gray, but here it is again. ;)
Oh my GOSH.
I just got home from the Hollywood show. It was even better than San Diego, and that's saying a lot 'cause San Diego was awesome. Thanks to the wonder that is general admission, I was front and center both nights. Grin.
My friend Lily and I started off the day's escapades yesterday with a coffee and sandwich run at Vinaka (a yummy little coffee shop in Carlsbad), and then we made our way down to UCSD. The concert was actually on the college campus, so a lot of the people there in the audience were young. Surprisingly, it was a very well behaved audience. Everyone was quiet during all the quiet moments, no unnecessary play the FOOOOOOOOOOX or we love youuuuuu! or anything like that (until the encore, and then people got a little crazy, but oh well!)
Okay, set list. TOTALLY off the top of my head and I guarantee I'll forget songs and put them in the wrong order and what not, but they started it off both nights with Scotch and Chocolate, an extremely fun new instrumental, then they did Should've Known Better, ummm let's see. Gosh I wish I coulda gotten that set list! Okay, they did Tom Bombadil, Butterfly, Starve Them to Death (with new and even better lyrics), The Fox, Jacksmith, Cuckoo's Nest (yeaaaaaaah cloggin'!), Doubting Thomas (oh man, that song got to me.... It's insane how well written it is. I can't even begin to describe it so I'm not gonna try, oh, man. no words.) Okay ummm other songs... the set list was pretty much the same both nights, but they did throw in Lighthouse the second night. Oh yeah, they did When You Come Back Down, which made me very happy 'cause that's the song that got me into them to begin with! And then there was Out of the Woods, Ferdinand the Bull, a few random fun cover songs (yeah, I don't like rap, but when Chris Thile's rapping and it's freaking mandolin, fiddle, and guitar in the background, Hannah finds herself grinning and boppin' her head, hehe), oooh yeah they did Caleb Mire, a Gillian Welch tune that Sean and Sara do at their Watkins Family Hour shows sometimes.... tonight they did the acoustic encore, which they didn't do last night. They encored both nights, but tonight they came out for a second one and unplugged everything. They did Brother Wind (yay!), and then a really awesome old timey sounding bluegrass tune where Chris sang about Tennessee and yodeled (hehehehe fun times), and then they finished it up with an instrumental. I guarantee I've left songs out, but there's the set list to the best of my memory.
Oh, man. I really can't describe how amazing they are live. They are such freaking awesome musicians, for lack of a more eloquent description, hehe.... I mean, I was talking to this guy after the concert who's my age who's also a mandolin player, and we were talking about how insanely fast Chris can play, and the guy said something very true - Chris plays so fast, it's like you can't even comprehend it, like his fingers go faster than your brain! lol it's totally true... it's insane how fast he can play... I've started learning a few Nickel Creek songs (Butterfly and Cuckoo's Nest), and I can play them cleanly at medium tempo, but then I go see Nickel Creek live and I see him playing so much cleaner and so much faster and I feel so hit with the feeling of how far I've got to go, but at the same time a feeling of total inspiration where I just want to sit down in my room with my mandolin and play for hours and hours. I asked Chris last night how many hours a day he plays his mandolin, and he said three is the bare minimum, but he doesn’t like to go less than four, and that he doesn’t like to go more than eight. Eight. DANG. The most I’ve ever gone is five. I try for two a day, which is a lot considering I work full time and go to school full time, but I do my best. But man, eight hours a day, that’s so freaking awesome. What an inspiration - there’s what can happen and how good you can sound, boys and girls, if you practice every day!
Now that I’m playing mandolin (for a whopping 6 months now, YEAH!), I feel like I can appreciate it so much more than I used to, and maybe even grasp it a little better than I used to before I started playing. Like, the first Nickel Creek concert I went to I was just in awe, “oooh listen to all the pretty music!” but now it’s like I’m just in a trance staring at the mandolin the whole time, analyzing his technique and just listening to all these sounds that are so beautiful they make me want to cry… and I did cry twice during the concert, but neither time were they mandolin-induced tears, both were caused by lyrics. The first time it was the opener, Mindy Smith, who is freaking awesome and I want her CD, and it was a song she wrote in memory of her mom. The lyrics were really touching and I got a little teary eyed. The second time I got choked up was during Doubting Thomas, which is an amazing song about spiritual doubt. There’s this one line in the song, where Chris sings quietly, “oh me of little faith” and then Sean and Sara do this cool “ooooh” harmony thing… oh man… I can’t describe it… that song is amazing… I talked to Chris about it after the show tonight and I asked him if it’d be on their next record, and he said he hoped so, and that they’d been getting really good feedback about it. I told him I heard them do it at Largo but I didn’t really hear the words, I mean I listened, but it didn’t sink in… but now I’ve really heard it, and it got to me. He was of course thanking me up and down… I adore how humble they are! And then he was all “hey I’ll see ya at the symposium right?” which was so dang nice of him to even remember chatting with me at Largo… I was like “yeah, I’m so excited!” hehe... Oh and it was fun, this one guy who I was chatting with (the one who brought his mando), he was sitting on the sidewalk playing songs waiting for them to come outside, and one of the roadies came by and gave him two of Chris’s mandolin picks. Well the guy was so nice, he was all, “you play mandolin, do you want the other one?” (to me! ‘cause he knew me from mandolincafe.net)… so I have one of Chris’s mandolin picks, yay me! Anyway, Chris signed his mandolin, and then the guy (I think he said his name was Robert?) asked Chris if he’d play a song on it real quick, and he did… so everyone gathered round, and Chris played us a song on the random dude’s mandolin. It was fun times. I got to talking with a bunch of the people waiting at the bus (I adore other Nickel Creek fans! I may be biased, but I think we are an extremely fun, cool bunch! Hehe), and there were these four or five guys and girls who were Christians who’d just gotten back from a missions trip (one of them was the mandolin guy), and then there was a girl who had driven in from Santa Barbara and who’d been at the show last night also (like me! Yay!) So that was lots of fun. Yay for friends at concerts. My friends who I came to the show with decided they were too sleepy to hang out after the show, but I had no problem making new friends to hang out with for a little while. :D
Oh, Mindy Smith. Yeah, one of my new favorite singers. Usually I don’t like opening acts, I’m like come on, bring on the artist I came to see, but that girl was RAD. I’d totally go see just her in concert. She’s a songwriter, and it’s just her and her guitar and her mandolin player. She had this one song that she called her “fightin’ song,” where she’s like you can try to take me down, but you’ll have to take me out, ‘cause I’m not going down alive….. But the tune is totally upbeat and cheerful, it’s great. And then there’s the one she wrote in memory of her mom, which is the one that made me cry, it’s called One Moment More, and in it she asks her mom to please stay, and then she says I know you’ve gotta leave, but will you hold me… oh man… and then there’s Come to Jesus, which is a really awesome song as well, which talks about how He’s the answer and He’s always there and stuff… awesome.
Stage banter. They are SO freaking hilarious, my stomach hurt from laughing so hard! Chris does this upside down punk rock thing that he calls “Rock cloggin’” when Mark does the clog dance during Cuckoo’s Nest… so freaking funny… at the San Diego show he kept doing it randomly throughout the show, hehe… it was great, tonight Sara looks at Chris and she goes, “Hey Chris, why don’t you play Ode to a Butterfly?” and he’s all “Why Sara, I didn’t know that song meant anything to you.” and she goes “It does, I like that song!” and he goes right up to her (they are so competitive when they play, it’s great) and she goes “ready?” and he’s all “okay, this is how it goes.” and she goes “1, 2, 3, 4!” and he just starts playing it. Hehe, so funny… their mannerisms while they’re playing are great… they’ve all gotten a lot bouncier from their last tour (including Chris, who was already bouncy to begin with), and they do this thing sometimes where they walk right out to the edge of the stage (with no regard to the fact that us front row-ers are leaning against it, and we have to hurry and back out of the way real fast or we’ll be stepped on, lol it’s great) and they play up there and then they back away again… and they like to stop playing a song, go into another song, and then return to the first song, which is super fun. And their IMPROV! Oh my GOSH, those solos that they take, it’s INSANE! I’m biased ‘cause it’s what I play, but Chris’s mandolin improv totally amazes me…. Anybody who’s good at improv usually gets my attention fairly quickly, it just is so cool to me that someone can take the basic hook or whatever of the song and just go with that and play with it and make it your own. Tom my mando teacher is slowly but surely teaching me how to improv, it was great, at my last lesson (or the one before that, I don’t remember), he played chords slowly and I improvised, and it was really slow but it was fun DANGIT! Anywho, back to Nickel Creek, all three of them ROCK at improvisation. It’s nuts.
(gosh, if I ramble on for this long after two concerts, imagine how I’m gonna be after mandolin camp)… eeek…
Okay, I’m done, I swear. Yay music.
Oh my GOSH.
I just got home from the Hollywood show. It was even better than San Diego, and that's saying a lot 'cause San Diego was awesome. Thanks to the wonder that is general admission, I was front and center both nights. Grin.
My friend Lily and I started off the day's escapades yesterday with a coffee and sandwich run at Vinaka (a yummy little coffee shop in Carlsbad), and then we made our way down to UCSD. The concert was actually on the college campus, so a lot of the people there in the audience were young. Surprisingly, it was a very well behaved audience. Everyone was quiet during all the quiet moments, no unnecessary play the FOOOOOOOOOOX or we love youuuuuu! or anything like that (until the encore, and then people got a little crazy, but oh well!)
Okay, set list. TOTALLY off the top of my head and I guarantee I'll forget songs and put them in the wrong order and what not, but they started it off both nights with Scotch and Chocolate, an extremely fun new instrumental, then they did Should've Known Better, ummm let's see. Gosh I wish I coulda gotten that set list! Okay, they did Tom Bombadil, Butterfly, Starve Them to Death (with new and even better lyrics), The Fox, Jacksmith, Cuckoo's Nest (yeaaaaaaah cloggin'!), Doubting Thomas (oh man, that song got to me.... It's insane how well written it is. I can't even begin to describe it so I'm not gonna try, oh, man. no words.) Okay ummm other songs... the set list was pretty much the same both nights, but they did throw in Lighthouse the second night. Oh yeah, they did When You Come Back Down, which made me very happy 'cause that's the song that got me into them to begin with! And then there was Out of the Woods, Ferdinand the Bull, a few random fun cover songs (yeah, I don't like rap, but when Chris Thile's rapping and it's freaking mandolin, fiddle, and guitar in the background, Hannah finds herself grinning and boppin' her head, hehe), oooh yeah they did Caleb Mire, a Gillian Welch tune that Sean and Sara do at their Watkins Family Hour shows sometimes.... tonight they did the acoustic encore, which they didn't do last night. They encored both nights, but tonight they came out for a second one and unplugged everything. They did Brother Wind (yay!), and then a really awesome old timey sounding bluegrass tune where Chris sang about Tennessee and yodeled (hehehehe fun times), and then they finished it up with an instrumental. I guarantee I've left songs out, but there's the set list to the best of my memory.
Oh, man. I really can't describe how amazing they are live. They are such freaking awesome musicians, for lack of a more eloquent description, hehe.... I mean, I was talking to this guy after the concert who's my age who's also a mandolin player, and we were talking about how insanely fast Chris can play, and the guy said something very true - Chris plays so fast, it's like you can't even comprehend it, like his fingers go faster than your brain! lol it's totally true... it's insane how fast he can play... I've started learning a few Nickel Creek songs (Butterfly and Cuckoo's Nest), and I can play them cleanly at medium tempo, but then I go see Nickel Creek live and I see him playing so much cleaner and so much faster and I feel so hit with the feeling of how far I've got to go, but at the same time a feeling of total inspiration where I just want to sit down in my room with my mandolin and play for hours and hours. I asked Chris last night how many hours a day he plays his mandolin, and he said three is the bare minimum, but he doesn’t like to go less than four, and that he doesn’t like to go more than eight. Eight. DANG. The most I’ve ever gone is five. I try for two a day, which is a lot considering I work full time and go to school full time, but I do my best. But man, eight hours a day, that’s so freaking awesome. What an inspiration - there’s what can happen and how good you can sound, boys and girls, if you practice every day!
Now that I’m playing mandolin (for a whopping 6 months now, YEAH!), I feel like I can appreciate it so much more than I used to, and maybe even grasp it a little better than I used to before I started playing. Like, the first Nickel Creek concert I went to I was just in awe, “oooh listen to all the pretty music!” but now it’s like I’m just in a trance staring at the mandolin the whole time, analyzing his technique and just listening to all these sounds that are so beautiful they make me want to cry… and I did cry twice during the concert, but neither time were they mandolin-induced tears, both were caused by lyrics. The first time it was the opener, Mindy Smith, who is freaking awesome and I want her CD, and it was a song she wrote in memory of her mom. The lyrics were really touching and I got a little teary eyed. The second time I got choked up was during Doubting Thomas, which is an amazing song about spiritual doubt. There’s this one line in the song, where Chris sings quietly, “oh me of little faith” and then Sean and Sara do this cool “ooooh” harmony thing… oh man… I can’t describe it… that song is amazing… I talked to Chris about it after the show tonight and I asked him if it’d be on their next record, and he said he hoped so, and that they’d been getting really good feedback about it. I told him I heard them do it at Largo but I didn’t really hear the words, I mean I listened, but it didn’t sink in… but now I’ve really heard it, and it got to me. He was of course thanking me up and down… I adore how humble they are! And then he was all “hey I’ll see ya at the symposium right?” which was so dang nice of him to even remember chatting with me at Largo… I was like “yeah, I’m so excited!” hehe... Oh and it was fun, this one guy who I was chatting with (the one who brought his mando), he was sitting on the sidewalk playing songs waiting for them to come outside, and one of the roadies came by and gave him two of Chris’s mandolin picks. Well the guy was so nice, he was all, “you play mandolin, do you want the other one?” (to me! ‘cause he knew me from mandolincafe.net)… so I have one of Chris’s mandolin picks, yay me! Anyway, Chris signed his mandolin, and then the guy (I think he said his name was Robert?) asked Chris if he’d play a song on it real quick, and he did… so everyone gathered round, and Chris played us a song on the random dude’s mandolin. It was fun times. I got to talking with a bunch of the people waiting at the bus (I adore other Nickel Creek fans! I may be biased, but I think we are an extremely fun, cool bunch! Hehe), and there were these four or five guys and girls who were Christians who’d just gotten back from a missions trip (one of them was the mandolin guy), and then there was a girl who had driven in from Santa Barbara and who’d been at the show last night also (like me! Yay!) So that was lots of fun. Yay for friends at concerts. My friends who I came to the show with decided they were too sleepy to hang out after the show, but I had no problem making new friends to hang out with for a little while. :D
Oh, Mindy Smith. Yeah, one of my new favorite singers. Usually I don’t like opening acts, I’m like come on, bring on the artist I came to see, but that girl was RAD. I’d totally go see just her in concert. She’s a songwriter, and it’s just her and her guitar and her mandolin player. She had this one song that she called her “fightin’ song,” where she’s like you can try to take me down, but you’ll have to take me out, ‘cause I’m not going down alive….. But the tune is totally upbeat and cheerful, it’s great. And then there’s the one she wrote in memory of her mom, which is the one that made me cry, it’s called One Moment More, and in it she asks her mom to please stay, and then she says I know you’ve gotta leave, but will you hold me… oh man… and then there’s Come to Jesus, which is a really awesome song as well, which talks about how He’s the answer and He’s always there and stuff… awesome.
Stage banter. They are SO freaking hilarious, my stomach hurt from laughing so hard! Chris does this upside down punk rock thing that he calls “Rock cloggin’” when Mark does the clog dance during Cuckoo’s Nest… so freaking funny… at the San Diego show he kept doing it randomly throughout the show, hehe… it was great, tonight Sara looks at Chris and she goes, “Hey Chris, why don’t you play Ode to a Butterfly?” and he’s all “Why Sara, I didn’t know that song meant anything to you.” and she goes “It does, I like that song!” and he goes right up to her (they are so competitive when they play, it’s great) and she goes “ready?” and he’s all “okay, this is how it goes.” and she goes “1, 2, 3, 4!” and he just starts playing it. Hehe, so funny… their mannerisms while they’re playing are great… they’ve all gotten a lot bouncier from their last tour (including Chris, who was already bouncy to begin with), and they do this thing sometimes where they walk right out to the edge of the stage (with no regard to the fact that us front row-ers are leaning against it, and we have to hurry and back out of the way real fast or we’ll be stepped on, lol it’s great) and they play up there and then they back away again… and they like to stop playing a song, go into another song, and then return to the first song, which is super fun. And their IMPROV! Oh my GOSH, those solos that they take, it’s INSANE! I’m biased ‘cause it’s what I play, but Chris’s mandolin improv totally amazes me…. Anybody who’s good at improv usually gets my attention fairly quickly, it just is so cool to me that someone can take the basic hook or whatever of the song and just go with that and play with it and make it your own. Tom my mando teacher is slowly but surely teaching me how to improv, it was great, at my last lesson (or the one before that, I don’t remember), he played chords slowly and I improvised, and it was really slow but it was fun DANGIT! Anywho, back to Nickel Creek, all three of them ROCK at improvisation. It’s nuts.
(gosh, if I ramble on for this long after two concerts, imagine how I’m gonna be after mandolin camp)… eeek…
Okay, I’m done, I swear. Yay music.