Our evening with James Blunt

A couple months ago, Sandy and I were watching SNL and saw a singer named James Blunt. Sandy said she liked him because his music was great and he sounded like Barry Gibb. I thought he sounded pretty cool. I downloaded his album, burned Sandy a copy, and have listened to it off and on ever since. A month ago I was on his website and saw that he was going to be doing a concert at the State Theatre in Minneapolis. At exactly 11:00 am on February 5th I called Ticketmaster and went online and found that all the tickets were gone already. Prices were in the hundreds of dollars on other sites. I called TicketMaster and the automated system also told me all the tickets were gone. After a lot of bitching at the customer service people, they found me two tickets. I got my Mom to agree to sit the kids and put them to bed, and Sandy's friend Kate agreed to invite us over for a fake early dinner. I bought the tickets with my Mom's credit card so Sandy couldn't track it. . .everything went according to plan in the end, and I surprised Sandy with the concert tickets on our way to "dinner."

The concert was great. Our seats, while not as good as the front row spot we had for Donny Osmond last year, afforded us a great view of everything, and the crowd was
quiet when they needed to be. The concert opened with Sierra Swan and the boy least likely to. Both were really good. Sierra Swan was kind of angsty break up music for females, but very good and Sandy and I both liked it. The boy least likely to was. . .really fun. They sang great songs, were totally into what they were doing, moved around and had fun on stage, and did fun things like say they were going to play a song "about a Tiger" and then start playing Eye of the TIger for about 15 seconds, and then stop before playing their own Tiger related song which was completely different. They also had the house lights turned up so they could take video and pictures of the crowd. I think that Annika would have really liked their performance. Both the groups played about 40 minutes each, and then there was about a 20 minute wait before Blunt started right after 9 pm.

I'm not a music reviewer by any means, but I really liked his performance. He sang many of the songs from his album, and he sang some new ones we hadn't heard. He admitted before singing one of his songs that his songs were for really only "singable by women and people who sing like women, which is me." That was really funny, and true because he has a very high falsetto which women could sing along to, and I could sing along to as well. Sandy and I knew most all of the lyrics, and we often sang along. Blunt played solo piano on his song "No Bravery" where he shows his own "home video" of his time as a Peacekeeper in Bosnia. You could see the crying people and the shallow graves and bombed out houses. It was terrible and the song very poignant. However, the drunk couple next to Sandy chose this time to start talking in loud incomprehensible voices. Karma kicked them in the ass through, as they had to keep leaving to go to the bathroom or something, and somewhere between the last song of the set and the encore of "You're Beautiful" they actually lost each other. The lady ended up kinda leaning against a guy she thought was the guy she sat with, and then realized it wasn't him. After the concert we saw her standing outside alone looking like she was going to need a ride.

All in all, a great concert, a very pleasant and exciting evening, and a good surprise for Sandy. And thanks Mom for coming over to watch and stay with the kids during it all.