This trip wasn’t exactly a vacation.  We drove down to the cities, hit the concert not long after we got there…crashed out and came back right away in the morning.  It would have been nice to take a little more time and make a weekend of it, but neither the wife nor I have the time to take off right now.  With the move coming up this summer we couldn’t spare the time from work.  It’s a lot of time in the car, and if I had it to do again I would probably chose to skip the concert instead of trying to force a rushed trip.  For the kid I think it worked out O.K., for the wife and I not so much…but it was something for the kid so that’s fine.

As I said earlier, this is the second swift concert we’ve been to.  The first one was the last stop on her first big tour.  The setup for that one was quite a bit more to my liking than this one.  In that one she got talked to the audience a bit more and the overall performance felt a little more organic.  I got the feeling that she had an outline of what she was going to do, but over all she was a little more loose and open to whatever happened.  This concert was very heavy on production.  Each song was setup as a “play” for lack of a better word depicting what was happening in that song.  There were probably 10ish wardrobe and set changes.  While it flowed fine and it didn’t lag too much from one set to another the overall concert felt more like a performance…a play.  It didn’t matter that there was an actual audience there…there was very little crowd involvement.  She said the obligatory “I love being in [insert town and state]”  ”[insert town and state] you feel so much like family!”.  Outside of that there was no dialogue that was specific to this show, this night in this town.  It was very scripted.

The crowd ate that up, they seemed to love the production and how things went down.  Could thousands of screaming teenage girls be wrong??  It wasn’t my cup of tea though.  I enjoyed the first concert we went to, but this one felt like I could have just as well been watching it on T.V.  There was nothing unique about being there live.  I didn’t feel like I was part of the overall experience…I don’t feel that we (as a crowd) mattered to her performance.  That’s really why I go to concerts…to be part of the whole show.  I want the performer to make me feel like I am part of their rock star life for those couple of hours.  I want to “party like a rock star” while I’m there.  I want to buy in to the whole life style and I want to feel like the whole crowd is jamming out like one big house party.  I want to feel like the performer is talking to me, like we’re all part of one big party…not like it’s a show put on for my amusement.

I thought, for example, nickelback (hate ‘em if you want…I enjoy their music) put on a great party.  The tickets were around 70 each and there was something like 5 bands that started at 6 and went till around 11-12.  Nickelback did a good job playing up to the crowd and making it feel like it was one big party.  I’m sure what they said was pretty standard from town to town, but it didn’t feel like it.  They didn’t change clothes, change sets or have some big drawn out story that we were suppose to follow…they just jammed for 2hrs.  There was one part of their act that I’m sure was a bit regional.  They came to the front of the stage and played a couple of covers.  I would expect that changes from place to place…but they reacted to the crowd depending on how the crowd reacted to the songs they played.  They didn’t have a lot of production but there was some pyro that was pretty cool.  Overall it was a good value.  I’ve also been to two theory of a deadman concerts and I really dig on those guys.  The first one I saw was at the “Hub” which is a very small venue and that was the best way to see those guys.  The crowd was going, those guys were going hard…it was really cool.  They don’t have pyro like nickelback but they play to the crowd really well.  They react to what the crowd is doing and comment on it.  To the contrary…swift didn’t seem to bring the crowds reaction into her script at all.

In the end though the kid really enjoyed it, so that was worth the trip.  I’m not huge in to going to do stuff.  I have most everything I need within 100 miles of the farmstead.  Whether that’s because all I want is in that area or because it’s the way I was raised I have no idea.  When I was a kid we didn’t go do much.  I had the “things” I wanted/needed but we didn’t do much for trips.  I’m sure that was a product of both time and money.  The old man was a rancher/farmer so spring-fall was full of work.  Winter was full with school, and there wasn’t a whole lot of money for extra traveling.  It’s fine if Sam grows up and decides that everything she wants/needs is within a short radius of wherever she decides to live, but while she’s growing I want to make sure she gets opportunities to do things.  Stay in the cities and screw around at a water park for a couple days, catch some concerts, amusement parks…etc.  I’m curious to find out if a child who is brought up doing stuff like that is prone to being an adult who will be more interested in traveling.  Granted, a sample size of one will not tell me anything…but when she gets older I can be confident that we gave her chances to do some things and have some experiences.  I don’t think I missed out on much as a child.  Looking back though, the one thing I would have liked more opportunity to do is amusement parks…ride and water slides.  I got to go a couple of times and those things were a blast.  As an adult I really like going to movies and concerts…so the monster will have some opportunities for that, at least the age appropriate ones.

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