After Daddy Daughter Day (I took the girls climbing, then for quesadillas, bought La Serpiente new shoes, then we celebrated with doughnuts and Lego, and finished off by playing in the park) my wife and I went to a concert down in Seattle. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been to live music.
This was an odd one: a guy called J P Saxe who sings about doomed relationships and is a favourite of "sadgirls" – typically women, weeping after being dumped while tasteful music plays in the background. I really wasn’t sure it would be my thing.
Live music is also just odd now everyone has an iPhone. I don’t mean that in the curmudgeonly sense that people are too busy videoing the set or taking selfies to have time to pay attention/spit at the singer/crowdsurf but more the odd things I saw people doing, like looking at all the lyrics to each song as it was being sung. But anyway.
Live, the band is a lot louder and more fun. The lighting rig at the concert was gloriously overdone, like a massive stadium gig, and the bassist was a very cheerful man, striking all kinds of rock poses. While the support act felt like quite generic female-singer-songwriter fare, and the first half of Saxe’s set was a bit too soppy for me, the second half was quite epic and I really enjoyed it.
Then we drove home, and nothing bad happened in the car, which felt quite miraculous after the last couple of weeks.