A year ago tickets went on sale for Tim McGraw and Faith Hill’s Soul 2 Soul tour at what was then Verizon Center. It was so long ago the arena even changed names since I bought the tickets. I was super excited to finally get to see them in concert and together. I’ve been a fan since they both popped into the country scene in the mid-90s. In the early years of their touring I was a poor college student, then a poor grad student so I didn’t go to many concerts. Thus I missed out on seeing them during that hey dey. Then Faith Hill pretty much quit the music business for the most part to raise their kids. I get it, but if I had to have chosen one of them to stop making music for a couple of decades I would have gone the other way around.

Even though Tim McGraw has been around this whole time I haven’t loved any of his music as much as I loved his first few albums, so I never felt compelled to go see him by himself in the past 15 years. Plus I feel like I have never seen him have a Baltimore date in all that time, and that his DC dates have always been at Jiffy Lube Live. An ex-boyfriend took me to a Peter Gabriel concert there for my birthday one year, and while the concert was good I did not care for the venue or the fact that it’s ridiculous to get in and out of. There has yet to be a concert there that I’ve wanted to see enough to go back.

They opened the show covering the Aretha Franklin and George Michael hot hit, “I Knew You Were Waiting”. I adore that song. It really deserves a blog post of its own at some point.  Honestly that probably wound up being my favorite bit of the concert. After that they took turns sing songs with each other on stage with a couple of other duets thrown in between. Then they each performed a short set of their own songs before coming back together to sing “It’s Your Love” as the final song of the regular part of the show. It was backed by a lot of pictures of their family from over the years, which was cute.

For the encore they each sang one song while walking through part of the audience. Faith was not super great at being able to interact with the audience while continuing to sing. That happened a few times from the stage, but a lot during that song. They finished with a final duet together alone on stage.

For something called the Soul 2 Soul tour, it unfortunately felt a little soulless to me. Part of it is that arena shows in general just don’t do a whole lot for me. It’s kind of weird because you would think that as someone who really likes theatre that I would like the theatricality that goes into arena shows, but I just don’t. I like my live music to feel at least a little unscripted. This wasn’t at all. I was kind of surprised that they didn’t incorporate their new single that they just released on their anniversary, but the show is highly scripted, so they didn’t.

I also felt like the stage design was really weird. It sort of had two wings coming out on the sides of it where each of them stood to sing for the most part. I guess it maximizes the amount of the audience you’re singing to, but with them being so far apart even when they were sharing the stage it felt like they weren’t even part of the same show.

I’m still glad I went, but I can’t say that it fully lived up to my expectations. Moreso it was a reminder of why I tend to shy away from arena shows for the most part.