The On Blog

I enjoy going to concerts.  Not as much a many of my friends do, but I, on occasion, go see musicians and bands that I like live.  I feel there are two types of concert going experiences.  The first is the one where you are all excited that your favorite band is making a quick pass through your city.  You own all of their albums and have bootlegs of the underground stuff they did over a decade ago.  These concert going experiences are awesome and can lead to some truly mind blowing evenings.

That is all great and dandy, but the ones that I am more interested in talking about are the second type of concert going experiences.  These are the ones, where your friend says that they are going and asks if you want to go too.  You think about it for a minute.  You have heard of the group that you would be seeing.  You might even know one or two of their songs that have been on the radio.  You say, “Sure, sounds like fun.”  Uh, oh.

Ok, not really, “Uh, oh,” but you should be prepared for what you are geting yourself into.  Turns out what you hear on the radio makes up a grand total of maybe 10 minutes of the concert.  Between the rest of the set and the opening act you have another hour and 50 minutes of music that you are going to have no idea what to do with.  Hopefully the bands are amazing enough where their music just seeps into your soul and your ignorance of the lyrics matters not.  Not being a music aficionado, I must say that I have struggled to enjoy some concerts when I wasn’t prepared for the experience.  That being said, one of the most entertaining performances I have been to was for a group that I had never even heard of before.

I say performance because it was that as much as it was a concert.  Bands that are touring are all making good enough music to have warranted said tour.  Well at least their music is marketable enough to fill a venue and make a return on investment.  The great bands step it up, and put on a show.  The music is the primary element to the show, but there is so much more to it.  Lights, crowd interactions, suspense building… all the intangibles can make the experience magnitudes more enjoyable.

At a concert, epicness is made of more than just the audible experience.