Modern Minstrels

Rockin' The Suburbs

Ok, I'm finally getting around to blogging about the Ben Folds concert last Tuesday. The concert was up in Concord, which is in the northern East Bay. Five of us (all interns) left Apple around 4 and drove to the BART station in Freemont. There's a BART station in Concord and they had free shuttles running to the pavilion where the concert was. The one problem with the shuttles were they apparently only left after a BART train arrived. After we got to Concord, we grabbed some food from Burger King and then got on the shuttle. Unfortunately, it waited at least 15 minutes before leaving, so we ended up missing one or two of Ben's songs, so that kind of sucked. We were really surprised there wasn't an opening band. The one cool part about coming in late is that just as we were walking in Ben said "And this next song you can get on the iTunes Music Store."

Ben put on a great show. It was just him and a piano, like when he performed at CWRU. He's so good at getting the crowd involved. He played a couple new songs off of Speed Graphic that were quite good, so I'll need to download that from the ITMS here soon. He also played Brick, which I don't think he played at CWRU. When he was introducing Brick, he said he hadn't played it in a long time, but he was ok with playing it now. He also did an impression of Radiohead's lead singer Thom Yorke. I think it was in reference to Thom saying a similar thing about Creep.

After Ben's set was over, we walked around for a bit. We walked past this one girl with spiky hair that looked at us and yelled "Fuck Tori Amos, YEAAAAHH." We couldn't help laughing.

There's not much to say about the Tori Amos portion of the concert. She's an excellent singer, but not much of a performer. By the time the 4th song hit, I was wondering if she was going to say anything at all to the crowd. She did talk all of twice throughout the concert. She did the whole encore thing, but most bands/artists that do that say something before the "last song", but she didn't. So she just kind of left for a few minutes and it got dark, and then she came back. Kinda strange. Even given all that, I still enjoyed her singing.