Month: March 2023

New Music Friday: Psychos by Jenny Lewis

It’s another banner week for new music. The biggest music news of the day being the drop of the first full length boygenius album. My husband said to me this morning oh there’s an article about boygenius in the New York Times. I was like yes, there and in literally every other major news publication that I follow. I pre-ordered that album on vinyl, and it showed up my house a day early. Though because I was at work late yesterday for our 50th anniversary celebration I didn’t even get to listen to the whole thing last night. Anyway, that’s not the reason I’m not writing about that album today. I don’t tend to like to write about more than one song off of an album, and I already wrote about “Emily I’m Sorry” when they put out the first few songs from it months ago. Also, as I said you can go pick up pretty much any news publication, scroll past the news about Donald Trump’s indictment and you’ll find someone writing much better about boygenius than I would.

There’s also another single off of Jason Isbell’s forthcoming album that came out earlier this week. I’m also not writing about that because I just wrote about the first single not that long ago, and see what I just said about trying to diversify what I’m writing about. So what I am writing about is the new song “Psychos” by Jenny Lewis that is off her new album releasing on June 9 the same day as Jason Isbell’s album. That’s going to be a great day for new music.

I don’t often hear a song and then just start listening to it on repeat, but I totally did with this one. It’s still not my favorite Jenny Lewis song (That’s “She’s Not Me”), but it did just jump pretty far up on the list. It’s just very groovy and has the appropriate video stylings to go along with it. I also like that there are few little surprises built in that give you that little jolt when you realize that something happened you weren’t expecting like when the lyrics change mid-sentence around the 2:25 mark. Also there’s a little bouncing star in the video guiding you along the lyrics and at one point in the chorus it does something different than it had been doing up to that point and it gave me a little smile the first time it happened. Take a listen and enoy!

Last Week Delight 3/28/2023

Another week. More delights.

  • My friends had their annual St. Patrick’s Day party on Saturday. Yes, I know it was a week late, but it’s really more like the party that they hold annually at some point in March as schedules allow that features Irish food and drink. It’s always funny to think back on when we used to have those parties at night and kick a keg. We haven’t gotten a keg in years because it would barely get drunk. Now the party is in the afternoon, there’s a dozen kids running around, and the party is over about the time we used to the start the parties back when we were young.
  • A couple at my church got married on Saturday. I don’t know them that well, so I wasn’t invited to the wedding but I saw lots of photos of it from other people’s social media. Anyway, they were actually at church on Sunday morning with a lot of family who were in town from Nigeria for the wedding. There was a couple minutes at the beginning of the service where we celebrated them, and it was just a very joyous moment that I’m glad I got to be a part of.
  • The Peabody Heights Brewery hosts the Baltimore Record Bazaar twice a month on a Sunday. One of my friends suggested we go check it out. I snagged a couple of records. I was also pleased at the number of people wearing masks. It was of course a tiny minority, but I figured walking into a brewery that I would be the only “weirdo” in there masked up. I’ve been in the stark minority for a long time, but in the last few months I am often only the only one or only one of a couple people even in very crowded indoor spaces. Even when there were like only 10% of people masking I didn’t feel as weird, but now I often feel self-conscious about it even if that’s not going to make me take my mask off. It was nice to not feel like I stand out so much, especially in a setting where I very much expected that I would be the only one in a mask.
  • I’m so happy Ted Lasso is back. I’m going to be very sad if this is the last season as it is expected to be. I’ve seen a lot of negative reviews of this season (or at least headlines, as I refused to read any of those reviews), but I still very much love the show. It’s rare that I literally laugh out loud at tv shows, and that I was cracking up during the second episode. Which leads me into this week’s musical delights.
  • There was a reference to Ted’s break up CD during that episode, and they actually created it and put it up on Spotify. I’m not sure I buy that all these songs would be on a playlist that Ted created, but I appreciate the effort nonetheless.
  • HBO announced that the documentary about Jason Isbell will be released on April 7. As you probably know I love Jason Isbell so much and am super excited about this film.
  • Speaking of Jason Isbell, he played a cover of Wet Willie’s “Keep on Smilin'” with Allison Russell at the Love Rising concert that she put together in Nashville to support LGBTQ+ rights in light of all the legislation being passed there. I first become familiar with this song during the early days of COVID when Jason’s wife Amanda Shires was doing daily YouTube concerts that he would sometimes join in on. They sang this song on one of the episodes, and it was a real highlight of the whole series for me. It was nice to hear him play it again. It’s still a great song to lift your spirits. If that call and response refrain around the 4:10 mark doesn’t put a smile on your face, I can’t help you.
  • It’s not that rare for me to hear the song “Electric Feel” by MGMT, but I heard it again this week and just thought about how much I love that song. I’m always happy to hear it. That is all.
  • Someone I follow on Instagram posted this TikTok video to their stories. The hilarious part about it is that my husband proved it exactly right because he could hear the sound, but had no idea what I was watching and as soon as the sound came on he perked right up and said hey I know that song. In all fairness he thought I was playing Heardle and that was the song of the day, but it still cracked me up because it was so spot on playing out what the people in the video were playacting.
@therealslimsherri

#duet with @mrprofessor318 #Duet Happy Monday people!! I have been tagged in this so many times I couldnt pass it up! Enjoy and remember to dance like nobody’s watching! Laugh like you mean it and let the fingers fly at anything that disturbs your peace today! 😎🤘❤️ #fyp #genx #millennial #xennial #sledgehammer #80smusic #dance #mondaymotivation

♬ sonido original – Claudio Puppo I❤️80

TV Diary

Shrinking

I saw mixed reviews of this AppleTV+ comedy by Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein starring Jason Segal, Harrison Ford, Jessica Williams, Christa Miller, and Michael Urie. Jason Segal is a father of a teenage daughter whose wife died in a car accident a year ago. He is also a psychologist who has started to provide some pretty unorthodox and probably unethical treatments due to his grief. Harrison Ford is his mentor and colleague. Jessica Williams works with them and was his wife’s best friend. Christa Miller is the next door neighbor who has pretty much been raising his teenage daughter while he’s been MIA as a father, and Michael Urie plays his best friend. It starts off very much focusing on the therapy stuff and then settles into more of the hang out comedy show that Bill Lawrence is so good at. Something happens at the end of the first season that I wish they hadn’t done because it means they are not going to just lean into the hangout comedy stuff in season two like they should. I saw people complain that they didn’t like how delved back into the grief stuff after it felt like you were past it in the show, but I feel like that’s how grief is. You think you’re okay, and then something happens and you’re not. So I didn’t feel like there was the whiplash that others referred to. I just thought it was a great character driven show with a lot of heart. This is all I want from a tv show. Bill Lawrence is married to Christa Miller and keeps casting her in this same sort of role where she is constantly putting down her husband while saying she loves him. Makes me wonder about their marriage a little bit. Also fun fact, Michael Urie graduated from the same high school as me, but 2 years later and since the dumb schools in Plano, Texas are split 9 and 10th and 11 and 12th for football reasons we were never in the same high school at the same time and I didn’t live there when I was younger and we might have crossed paths in a school that you went to for longer than 2 years.

Daisy Jones & the Six

I very much liked the book by Taylor Jenkins Reid that this show was based on. It’s actually the only book of hers that I’ve found to be more than just mediocre despite their popularity. So I was very excited about this tv show. I thought a show about music, which you know I love, based on a book that I really liked. This has a lot of potential. Sadly the show did not live up to my expectations in the least. I thought Riley Keough was very well cast as Daisy, and that’s about it. There are a couple of songs from the show that I liked, but most of them I didn’t think were that great. The show just felt kind of flat and boring most of the time like it was just going through the motions and hit the high plot point so the book without trying to convey why any of the characters would be motivated to do anything they were doing. Somehow I feel like I simultaneously liked it more and less because I read the book because it gave me more insight into the characters, but then made me mad about what they changed or didn’t convey properly. I didn’t really care that they combined two of the minor band characters into one in the show other than the fact that it then made no sense for the band to be called the Six, which made me unreasonably angry. Also, the number of times these people walked into a studio to record without having rehearsed the songs or sometimes even heard them when that studio time would have been astronomical drove me bonkers. Mostly I just hated what they did to Camilla. Her love for Billy was at the heart of that book, and that did not come through in the show. Granted, I think she probably acted in the show more like someone would have actually acted in real life than some of the more martyr like things she did in the book. However, the changes they made really turn her into a different character that changes the heart of the story. I have no idea how this show would play to someone who hadn’t read the book before watching it.

The Last of Us

I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about this show going in. I’m not super big into zombies or post-apocalyptic survival worlds, so it didn’t seem super up my alley. It was getting a lot of good buzz leading into it though, and I knew my husband would want to watch so I figured I would at least try it out and I could bail whenever I got tired of it. So far at least that hasn’t happened. We’ll see what happens in season 2. They’ve done a good job of making it almost episodic where there is an overarching plot and goal, but then each episode to some degree has been it’s own self-contained little story. They all interconnect to a degree, but at least so far many of the characters from each episode are gone within an episode sometimes two as they either die or Joel and Bella move on. Each story is well told though like a little short story so that they don’t feel like throwaway characters. You actually get a sense of who they are and their motivations.

Bad Sisters

Bad Sisters on AppleTV+ is about 5 sisters in Ireland who are very close after the eldest sister raised the younger ones when their parents died. One of the sisters is married to a real bastard who is extremely emotionally abusive to everyone, but especially her. The other sisters eventually decide that he has to go, and set out to kill him. You find out that he did in fact die at the beginning of the show, but you don’t know how he was actually finally killed until the final episode. There are also two brothers who run the insurance agency left to them by their father who hold his life insurance policy that they don’t actually have the money to pay out. So they are investigating the death trying to prove that foul play was involved so that they don’t have to pay. I very much enjoyed the show. I feel like maybe it was a couple of episodes longer than it needed to be as I felt like it was spinning its wheels a bit at the end, but I would still definitely recommend watching it. Plus it has some really great house porn. Like I want to live in all of these sisters houses in the Irish countryside.

Extraordinary

Extraordinary is a British tv show available on Hulu, though a lot of the actors are actually Irish including Siobhan McSweeney who you will know as Sister Michael from Derry Girls. Here she plays the mother of the main character Jen. They live in a world where everyone has a single super power that they develop at the age of 18. They are not necessarily your typical super powers. Some are quite bizarre. Thus, it’s not always clear what they are right away. Jen is now 25 and either never developed a power or still hasn’t figured out what it is and is very much struggling to deal with that. It’s a fun little comedy with a lot of irreverent humor.

South Side

South Side was an HBO show that was set on the South Side of Chicago. It just ended recently after three seasons. It mostly centers around characters who work in a rent to own furniture store and two Black police officers working in the South Side. I loved the first season of the show. The second season got a little less realistic and a little weirder, and I didn’t like it quite as much. The third season was just off the rails and felt like it had a completely different style than the first two seasons. I didn’t care for it that much. The first two seasons are still worth watching though even if you don’t follow through the entire series. And if you can resist chiming in to sing South Side the way they do at the end of the theme song, then you are not me.

Cunk on Earth

Cunk on Earth available on Netflix is an absurdist mockumentary tv show where Diane Morgan plays Philomena Cunk, a clueless interviewer, interviewing real historians about various historical events. They do know what the bit is, but they are meant to answer the questions she asking in a totally serious manner. It’s very ridiculous, but also a lot of fun. There is a recurring bit with a particular song that is the highlight of every episode. There are apparently other Cunk On… series that exist, but this is the only one on Netflix at this point. I hear that some the others are available on YouTube, though I haven’t gone looking for them yet.

Slow Horses

Slow Horses is another AppleTV+ show that is a British spy series. I heard a lot of great things about it, but I just couldn’t really get into it. I mostly paid attention through the first season, but I was only half paying attention at the beginning of the second season probably because I was playing on my computer while trying to watch and I very quickly got lost and had no idea what was happening with the plot. Consequently I mostly paid zero attention to the second season while my husband watched it. So I don’t think this show was for me, though your mileage may vary given how much other people seem to like this show.

New Music Friday: Look at Us Now (Honeycomb) by “Daisy Jones & the Six”

There are an insane number of new albums being released today. Am I going to talk about any of them? No I am not. Most of the ones I would have been likely to talk about I have already shared songs from anyway. Instead I’m sticking with my plan to write about a fake band. I will have a review of the actual tv show Daisy Jones & the Six in my next TV Diary post. For today I’m just sharing one of the songs that the band in the show sings. It’s one of the few songs written for the show that I actually think is any good. Most of the songs don’t actually sound like I imagined the band would sound when I read the book. They’re too subtle and ballady. The song “Look at Us Now (Honeycomb)”, which in the book and the show is supposed to be their breakout hit, is far and away the best song on the show. I actually just enjoy it as a song fake band or not. I’m not 100% sure anyone needs to watch the tv show, but I do at least think you should listen to this song.

Last Week Delight 3/20/2023

Happy first day of spring y’all. Now if someone would tell the weather that, I would appreciate it.

  • I shared last week that we used the at home pet euthanasia service, Peaceful Passage to put our cat down. At least that is who I thought we used until I received a sympathy card in the mail from Home with Dignity. When my husband called Peaceful Passage they did tell him that their vet was out the day we were looking for, but they would see what they could do and call us back. He got a call back and with a time for the next day, and we never thought twice about it. I guess Peaceful Passage must have contacted Home with Dignity on our behalf and we never realized it. Both were recommended to us by our normal vet, so we probably would have called them next ourselves anyway had Peaceful Passage just told us they were unable to come on Thursday, but it was really nice that they work together and just made it happen for us during a very difficult time and didn’t make us have to call multiple places on our own.
  • I very much enjoyed watching Robert Smith of The Cure fighting against Ticketmaster this past week even if I don’t get to bear any of the fruits of his labor since I sadly will be out of town when they play the Baltimore area. They really wanted the tour to be as affordable as possible for fans. They set ticket prices low with the lowest ones only being $20 without the fees, which is unheard of for a band of their stature these days. They refused to play any of Ticketmaster’s games refusing special Platinum pre-sale pricing and demand driven pricing. They also made it so the tickets can’t be transferred to anyone else, but can be resold for face-value only. That has been something I have been complaining about for years now that all these ticket companies have everything locked up in their mobile apps I’m like why can’t they do this. Turns out they can, they just don’t because they can make more money from taking a cut of the higher priced resale tickets too. Anyway, then when fans who got verified presale codes couldn’t get into to buy tickets Robert Smith made them release more tickets instead of hold them back for the general on sale. And finally when people started complaining that with the low base prices that the Ticketmaster fees were literally more than the face value of the ticket, he got them to refund people some of the fees and lower them for the few remaining tickets available for the general on sale. Amazing! I do realize that Ticketmaster’s willingness to acquiesce on some of these things comes as a result of their fiascos with the Taylor Swift and Beyonce concerts and being called to account in front of Congress, but I do appreciate Robert Smith trying to stand up for his fans and get them into The Cure shows at a reasonable price. I go to a lot of concerts, and they really have gotten hellishly expensive. It’s rare that once all the fees are added onto the already steep face value prices that I can get to a show for much less than $100 at any major venue, and I’m here to tell you that I’ve paid so much for some recently that I sort of felt sick and had a moment of instant regret after buying them even though I can afford it.
  • Actor Lance Reddick died this past week. It is not a delight that he’s dead, but it has been a real delight seeing the outpouring of love for him as an actor and apparently just a generally good guy all around. As a Baltimore native who is probably best known for his role as Cedric Daniels on The Wire, I knew he would get some love from people around here. He’s not an actor that you hear people talk about very much though, so I was surprised how much his death seemed to hit people on a much larger scale. So that was very lovely to see.
  • We went to see To Kill a Mockingbird as one of our season ticket shows at the Hippodrome on Friday night. The seats there are super small with almost no leg room, and thus pretty uncomfortable. There were a couple of really big broad, tall guys sitting in the back row of the section in front of us. At one point one of them even tried to move out and sit on the stairs because he was so uncomfortable, but the usher immediately came and told him that was a no go. The front row of the section we are in has lots of leg room because it sits in front of the aisleway separating the two sections. At intermission the people sitting in front of us in that front row offered their seats to those guys so they could be more comfortable, which I thought was really awesome. At least for about 30 seconds until those guys were actually in the seats and it was clear that at least the one in front of me had gone out and smoked weed during intermission which I could tell both based on the smell and the fact that he was super giggly at things that were not funny, repeating the lines of the play back, and talking to the character. Though I did actually laugh out loud when the character who was on trial was recounting how he as a Black man was going to go inside this young white girl’s house because she asked for some help and he was like don’t do it as if it was a horror movie and someone was about to do something really stupid. Luckily he did calm down after about 10 minutes or I would have been more annoyed. Add to that the woman who started shouting repeatedly, “this play sucks” shortly before intermission and the fact that people got confused about when the end of the play was and a bunch of people left at the end of a scene 10 minutes before the play was actually over and it was a very interesting night at the theatre.
  • My friend came over and hung out with me for a few hours on Saturday, and we put together a puzzle. A nice chill, relaxing afternoon.
  • Yesterday I got to go for a hike with my friend and her new puppy. She’s very cute and sweet. I was hoping that my foot was going to be okay because it has been bothering me less lately, but turns out not so much. I do in fact still need that appointment with the foot and ankle doctor that got pushed back from this past week until April. I’m still happy I got out and got some hiking in even if I’m paying for it now.

New Music Friday: Bang, Bang by Momma (Plus Some Bonus Thoughts)

I had the song “Bang, Bang” by Momma on my docket for this morning, but then there were some other things that came around that made me think I should maybe set it aside for something else. Ultimately I’m going to stick with that song as my feature, but first a round up of thoughts about some other new songs. I’ll probably regret writing about all of them quickly right now when next week I inevitably am struggling to find something to write about.

  • It’s not really technically a new song, but Taylor Swift dropped the latest Taylor’s versions of a few songs last night ahead of kicking off her new tour. We’ve already established that I am not a huge Taylor fan, so I don’t actually care about this. What has been pointed out is that one of the songs she re-recorded is a song from one of the Hunger Games movies that featured The Civil Wars. That band had their own civil war and spectacularly split. It seems that Taylor Swift at least sort of got Joy Williams and John Paul White back together to re-record that song. Though technically I suppose they could have done all their recording separately and never seen each other. But it’s nice to think that band existed again for a moment. Whenever there’s some sort of social media thing going around asking about bands you wish were still together they are always at the top of my list along with The Sundays.
  • Hozier has a new EP out this morning called Eat Your Young. It’s only three songs so a quick listen at just over 11 minutes long. It’s a very enjoyable 11 mintues though if you’re a Hozier fan. It’s very much what you have probably come to expect from Hozier at this point. So I don’t have much to say about it other than I’m always happy for some new Hozier music.
  • One of my friends shared a new song by the band Extreme called “Rise” on Facebook this morning. The only other song I know by that band is their 1990 hit “More than Words”, which is a drastically different song. I have not been keeping up with what that band has been doing over the past 33 years, so I have no idea if they’ve been together all this time putting out music or if they’ve only recently reunited. I’m sure the internet could tell me, but I’m not even bothering to look it up because I don’t care that much. I don’t particularly care for the new song. It’s not my preferred musical style. I’m not particularly surprised by the sound though since I did see that they are part of the M3 Rock Festival and think to myself at the time, huh I didn’t know Extreme was still a band. But the new song fits with the type of music that happens at that festival. It was mostly just a little bit of huh in my morning that I thought I would share.
  • And now we will finally get to the song “Bang, Bang” by Momma. I wrote about the band last year when they put out an album. Right now “Bang, Bang” is just a single. I presume that they’ll be putting out a new album with this song on it at some point. I actually don’t have much to say about it I’m realizing, but I heard it this week and enjoyed it. It’s a fun pop punk song.

Last Week Delight 3/14/2023

This past week has been a rough one as you many have already surmised if you’ve been reading this blog. It was very sad and stressful with having to put my beloved cat to sleep. I’m just really ready for the world to stop piling terrible things on top of me. I’m tired of my body hating me. I was supposed to finally have appointment with a food and ankle orthopedist today, but they said he had a medical emergency and rescheduled me so that isn’t for another whole month now. I still can’t eat like a normal human. And the rest of my life is feeling more and more stunted and I feel more and more insane as everyone else has moved on with their lives and I’m still out here trying very hard not to get COVID because my body already hates me enough right now. The last thing I need is long COVID or it setting off all the autoimmune disorders I have that are thankfully under control at the moment despite my body making it’s best efforts to beat me down in other ways. But as always there’s some good with the bad, so let’s move on to better things shall we?

  • Although losing Scout was terrible, and my house feels very lonely with no furry companion in it, if she was going to go I honestly could not have asked for anything to go better than it did. When she was first starting to not eat well I tried to make a vet appointment and they told me they didn’t have any openings for two weeks. After the weekend when it was getting harder and harder to get her to eat anything, I called them on Monday to find out if I should go ahead and take her the emergency vet if they couldn’t see me sooner. Our regular vet was able to squeeze us in that afternoon. And I found out later when I got an errant phone call that the original plan on their end was for me to drop Scout off on Tuesday morning and just have her sit at the vet until the doctor could fit her in between procedures. Luckily the scheduling person found us an actual appointment on Monday, so Scout didn’t have to be even more traumatized spending one of her final days trapped alone at the vet. It was also a great week for all of this to happen because I was working from home, which I rarely do, attending an online conference. It meant I was easily able to jump at the vet opening, and I got to spend lots of extra time with Scout in her last few days. It also meant I was easily able to take off work Thursday when we decided it was time. I was a little stressed that she was going to hold on a few days longer into the beginning of this week because things happening at work this week would have made it very difficult for me to take off. I didn’t want to put her down even a few days earlier than I thought was necessary, but when she had been appetite stimulants and pain killers for two days and was eating only a couple of bites of food it was very clear the time had come. We used an in home pet euthanasia service called Peaceful Passage. I would highly recommend them if you ever need to put a pet down. We called Wednesday morning and asked about doing it Thursday. They said the vet was supposed to be out that day, but they would call us back and see if there was any way to get someone out to see us. Apparently there was since they did find someone to send over Thursday morning. Scout just got to spend her final time with us lying on her favorite spot on the sofa. I’m glad she didn’t have to spend it stressed out at the vet, and that we all got to go through this in the comfort of our home. I hate that she’s gone, and I miss her so much but I’m happy she’s not in pain anymore and got to have a death that was as peaceful as possible.
  • I’m also grateful for everyone who reached out via texts and emails and for people who sent flowers and cookies. It’s all very much appreciated. My favorite thing was something called a Warmie that one of my friends dropped off. It’s a little stuffed animal (mine’s a dinosaur) that is filled with flax seed and lavender, and you can microwave it to snuggle with or to use on your aching body. I’ve used it for both. It’s very soft and furry, and it was the perfect remedy for all the pain I was having in my shoulders, neck, and jaw from all the stress and crying. I’ve had similar things in the past that are just sort of pillow shaped. I do feel a little sadistic putting this adorable creature in the microwave and watching his little face stare out at me as he spins around.
  • I went for a walk on Monday night after finding out that our days with Scout were probably very numbered to sort of clear my head. There was a gorgeous sunset in one direction and a big huge looking moon in the sky the other way. So that was kind of cool.
  • I mentioned this in my post about going to see Into the Woods, but I was also very delighted that we managed to get to our seats just as it was time for the show to start and that we didn’t miss the opening curtain despite the horrendous traffic on the way there.
  • Every year the Newport Folk Festival does a slow roll out of the artists that will be at the festival that year. They don’t do a big poster announcement drop like most festivals. They don’t even announce who will be there until after the tickets are already sold out. Anyway, you may recall the other week when I wrote about new music by Abraham Alexander I said in that post that I fully expected that I would see him at Newport one day. Well turns out that day will be this year. Four days after I wrote that post, they announced that he will be playing this year’s festival. I’m definitely excited to check him out live.
  • And now for your musical delight I have the song “Spotlight” by Jennifer Hudson. This song was one of the Heardle answers in the past week. It’s a song I never hear, but at one point back in my iPod days I apparently bought that single from iTunes. So on occasion when I drag out my old iPod Nano this song always comes up on it. It’s part of the time capsule of music trapped on that iPod from back in the mid-2000s.

Dawes at the Warner Theatre

I really like the band Dawes and have seen them in concert a number of times, but I wasn’t going to go see them this time around because their closest concert on this tour was in DC on a Sunday night. I hate going to DC for concerts on school nights because it means I’m getting home well after my bedtime and am always exhausted the next day. However, back in December the radio station WRNR was doing a contest to win tickets to the show. I entered it and won. Luckily they sent me my tickets before their frequency got snatched out from under them and they disappeared. I think they might still be operating as an online only radio station, but I haven’t really investigated since they stopped appearing on my car’s radio. So I’m not 100% sure if that was just in the immediate aftermath or it’s going to be a longterm thing.

Anyway, the result of all that was that I did in fact trek down to DC to see the concert on a Sunday night. Given my experience driving to DC the previous day, we allowed ourselves plenty of time to get there and of course had no traffic issues and got there in a normal amount of time which put us at the venue almost an hour early. Can’t win. This is why I hate driving to DC.

This was my first time at the Warner Theatre. Every other time I’ve seen a show listed there that I would want to see it’s been on a weeknight, and I’ve never felt compelled enough to go to deal with that. It’s a very ornate old historic theatre that’s very beautiful. Our seats were up in the middle of the balcony, so not the greatest, but I could still see really well because unlike the dumb Hippodrome in Baltimore these seats were actually offset from the seats in the row in front so you were looking between people’s heads instead of directly at the back of the person sitting in front of you. So I still had a good view of the stage the whole time.

As Dawes is wont to do, it was an Evening with Dawes show meaning there was no opening act. They played two sets themselves with a short break in the middle. I’ve seen several of their shows that have been that way. I bought tickets to see Mary Chapin Carpenter at Wolf Trap later this year and they added Dawes as the opening act. I’m very perplexed by this combination of artists as even though I really like both of them, I don’t necessarily think that they appeal to the same audience in general. Anyway, I was joking that I’m not sure how they’ll ever play for the short amount of time opening acts get since I’m used to seeing them play for 2 and a half hours at a time as they did last night.

I was actually expecting that one half of the night would be them pretty much playing through their new album, Misadventures of Doomscroller. They actually played far fewer songs from that album than I was anticipating, but happily one of the songs they did play was “It Comes in Waves”, which is my favorite song off that album. They played a good mix of music from across their catalog. They’ve post a couple of the other set lists from previous shows that I’ve seen and it does seem like they’re mixing it up a lot from night to night. Sadly the show before mine they played two of my favorite songs “Roll with the Punches” and “Feed the Fire” that we didn’t get during this show. But even at 2 and a half hours it’s unlikely you’ll get to hear all your favorites, so I was happy with what we got.

I did like that Taylor Goldsmith, the lead singer, started the second half of the show doing a couple of solo acoustic songs, which is something I had never seen before. The first one, “St. Augustine” is sort of an ode to his childhood and then he played a new one that’s not on an album called “Little Ones” that he wrote for his kids that he has with his wife Mandy Moore. Yes, that Mandy Moore.

All in all it was a great night of music, and I’m glad I did wind up getting to see them one final time before their bass player Wylie leaves the band. I’ll be curious to see what the lineup is later this summer when I see them open for Mary Chapin Carpenter.

Into the Woods at the Kennedy Center

Yesterday my fellow Broadway loving friend and I drove down to DC to see Into the Woods at the Kennedy Center. It had a recent revival run on Broadway, and much of the final Broadway cast is now doing a tour. I was interested in seeing both the cast and the show, so it finally gave me a good excuse to get to the Kennedy Center. Somehow in the almost 23 years I have lived in Baltimore I have never gone to see a show there. I was going to see a concert there in 2020, but that obviously didn’t happen. We had really good seats like 5 rows back for less money than we would have paid to sit in the back row of a Broadway theatre.

It was one of the most stressful trips to get down to the theatre though. I really didn’t think we were going to make it before opening curtain. My friend lives way north of the city, so we decided to meet up at a Park & Ride close to 95 nearish the airport and then carpool the rest of the way into DC. Supposedly it should have taken us about 45 minutes from the Park & Ride to get to the Kennedy Center. It took us just under an hour and half, which put as at the theatre a few minutes before the show started. Traffic was just fubar everywhere. The GPS couldn’t even figure out what it wanted us to do. Normally we would have gone south getting on the DC beltway, but it told us to go West so we figured the Beltway was way backed up and it was going to route us some way the other direction. But then it changed it’s mind and had us get off at the first exit and turn back around and go the other direction on the Beltway. Then it kept changing it’s mind as to whether it wanted us to stay on the Beltway or get off at the BW Parkway and drive through the center of the city. We wound up doing the latter which meant a million lights getting across the city. It felt like we had to sit at every single one and they all lasted forever. We did get a nice view of basically every DC landmark on our way in though. They were ushering in the door quickly as they show was about to start when we got there. We basically sat down just in time. Luckily, though weirdly there was absolutely zero security so that didn’t slow us down at all. I honestly don’t remember the last time I went into any sort of public building like a theatre, concert venue, sports arena, or even museum where there wasn’t some sort of bag check and/or metal detector that I had to go through. So I feel like it is very odd that there was none of that at the Kennedy Center, but whatever.

We actually didn’t wind up seeing several of the cast members that I had been interested in seeing. From what I understand Sebastian Arcelus, who was supposed to be the Baker, has been out for the entire Kennedy Center run with a knee injury. I was bummed about him because his real life wife Stephanie J. Block is playing the Baker’s Wife, so it would have been fun to see them perform together. I had zero complaints about Jason Forbach, who was the understudy that played the Baker. I only even cared because I wanted to see Stephanie and Sebastian together.

Gavin Creel was the Wolf/Cinderella’s Prince was also out for our performance. The ushers weren’t handing out programs, and we missed the stack of them on our rush into the theatre. Not that we would have had a chance to look at them before the performance started anyway. So I kept second guessing myself as to whether Gavin Creel was actually supposed to be in the show when he wasn’t there. He’s doing a concert at the Kennedy Center on Monday night when the show is dark that I’ve gotten approximately one million emails about, so I was starting to think maybe I was just confused and I was just thinking he was in the show because of all those emails. But at intermission when we grabbed the program I saw that he was in fact supposed to be there and just out. I suspect he might be taking the weekend off from the to prepare for his concert. Honestly I have zero regrets that he wasn’t there because Eddie Lopez who was the understudy was absolutely perfect in the role, and I don’t think I would have wanted to see anybody else. The actor who played Rapunzel’s Prince was also out, but I didn’t know who the regular actor or the understudy were so that didn’t mean anything to me really. The rest of the cast was fantastic too. Montego Glover was a great Witch. Katy Geraghty who played Little Red Riding Hood was absolutely the best. She was a real highlight of the show.

The whole production was great. It was really funny. I had a great time, and I’m glad we made the effort to get down to DC and see it. I’m especially glad that we got there before the show started. The show is just beginning its tour, so if it comes to a city near you I highly recommend it.

New Music Friday: Just a Girl by Florence + the Machine

I wasn’t going to write a New Music Friday post this week because I didn’t listen to much music this week with everything going on with my cat, so I didn’t have anything on deck to write about and I didn’t have time to look into anything earlier today because I had a whole lot of work I had to catch up on since my attentions were very much not focused on work earlier this week. Then while I was washing dishes tonight, I heard the cover of No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” by Florence + the Machine made for the new season of Yellowjackets. So I figured I might as well throw together a quick blog post about it. I’m not a huge fan of the original song, and honestly I’m not sure how much more I like this version of it. As an academic examination of it as a cover though, I do appreciate it because it does what I like about cover songs in that it’s clearly still the original song but it brings something completely new and different to it. I do like how it’s kind of this slow haunting verse that peps up a little bit in the chorus and then finally breaks wide open at the very end of the song. And that’s what I have to say about that.