Yesterday was probably the best experience of live music I’ve had, one of those everything-comes-together situations that just makes me feel incredibly lucky to be living the life I’m living. I’m gonna try and get some of those moments onto the record and point you to some spots on the Internet where you can catch a glimpse of them.
I went downtown to World Café Live to see a Free at Noon concert with Crowded House and Joan as Police Woman, a concert you can hear online at NPR. I’d never been to the venue, but it’s a very nice little theater and the sound was pretty good. Joan was pretty good, doing three songs on the keyboard with a bassist and drummer before switching over to electric guitar for her finale. The radio host misread her notes at one point during the interview, which made me feel bad – I beat myself up when I mis-speak in front of 30 students, which is merely one reason that a career in radio is probably not for me. But this is an important point in today’s story – we’ll come back to it in a moment.
After Joan’s set Crowded House walked onto the stage, looking very much like they wanted to know whose bright idea it was to get them up to perform this early in the day. Most of the band members were wearing T-shirts, and I’m not sure Neil Finn had gone near a comb that morning. They were in good spirits, though. When someone from the audience yelled “You forgot Tim!â€? (Neil’s brother and frequent collaborator), Neil feigned surprise – “I knew I left something behind!â€? – before nodding toward his son Liam and saying “I brought his nephew.â€? At this point the radio host started introducing the band and referred to their most recent album as Together Alone, at which point the audience started murmuring in a way that I interpreted as “Umm . . . should we interrupt her?â€? before Neil said, “That wasn’t very recent . . .â€? Turns out the host had written a note to say that the band had just put out their first album since Together Alone. The philosopher in me thought that was an interesting case of how our brain can just grab a piece of information and run with it based on prior patterns and expectations, but I put that out of mind. There was music to hear, now with the added benefit of a running joke. Read the remainder of this entry »