My God, is Andrew Bird good. I was as excited to see him last night at the Middle East as I’ve been about seeing anything in ages. I was about as happy as a boll weevil in a cotton field. Despite the high expectations I was still blown away. I won’t belabor the point as I’ve already written about why I love him, and I have a feeling I’d veer off into hyperbole pretty quickly. And I feel like I’ve done my piece by making a small handful of converts by proselytizing in these pages (though I swear I’m not a BzzzAgent!).

Terri got some fantastic photos by pushing her way to the front of the stage armed with her trusty D70.

I agree with Terri that If you have any interest whatsoever, go see him live. He goes completely crazy, and the studio versions of his songs, while nice, just don’t do them justice. If you can’t make a live show, there are several live records as well as a full video of a concert available from this venue in Amsterdam.

The Downstairs was packed, the crowd was really into the music and was about as diverse as a crowd of white people at the Middle East gets.

By the way, I did some resesarch, and indeed, the reason that the live version of “i” is so much different from the album version on Weather Systems is indeed that Sony, the copyright holders of the “we all live in a capital ‘i’” Sesame Street song, were going to charge him usuriously to use just that one phrase. Also, while I’m doing some linkery, Ed emailed me a nice bit about Mr. Bird from the Boston Globe.

Margaret, I hope to have a full concert report from Pittsburgh in a couple of days.

Small Update: I forgot to point out as proof of how excited I was for this show that Editrix and I jumped the gun and walked to the Middle East at lunch to buy tickets the day that they went on sale. In fact, we mistakenly walked to the Middle East at lunch a week before tickets were on sale. And I also was remiss in pointing out how nice it was that John could make it down from Portland, that it was lovely to grab some grub at Cambridge 1 with him and Mr. Villain and Editrix.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 16th, 2005 at 10:16 pm and is filed under music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.