In a few hours from now, as I’m writing this, “The Swell Season” will be performing at The Wiltern in Los Angeles, CA for their second night this week. Unfortunately I won’t be able to make tonight’s concert, but here is my recap from last night’s show…
First off, I’ve been to The Wiltern before, so I won’t be having that feeling of not knowing what to expect from a venue (like how to get there). That’s the thing, I know how to get there, so why did I let the GPS tell me where to go? The directions that the GPS was giving me was far more confusing than what I would have done. Go figure. By the time I parked and got in the venue, opening act “Josh Ritter” started performing already. Before I got in though, I made sure that my camera was okay to bring in (especially considering what happened last time). I asked two different people twice, just to make sure, and I was good to go. First thing I did was check and see if they had a t-shirt I wanted in my size. Nope, sorry, my size was already sold out. Bummer.
At that time I wasn’t sure if I was completely interested in seeing Josh Ritter, and although the little I could hear from outside in the lobby sounded good, I considered just waiting it out. I did however make an attempt to see where my seats were located first, so I knew exactly where to go when I go back in later. When the usher saw my ticket, he was actually surprised that my seat was all the way up front (third row from stage), and I admit that it is pretty cool that I was able to be that close to the stage. I didn’t want to squeeze into my row while the show was going on at that time, so I went back out to the lobby.
BTW, I should mention that there’s one thing that I was a bit surprised about, is that The Wiltern actually had rows of seats to watch the concert. Out of all the concerts I’ve gone to in this venue, it’s always been general admission, standing room alone (unless I was at the balcony). I suppose because this was a more “slower” rock band, it caters more for this kind of setup. Just looking at the audience, I could tell that this wasn’t a crowd that would have enjoyed standing up the whole time anyway. Let’s just say that they looked a lot more “sophisticated” than most concert goers I encounter in other shows. Speaking of the crowd, The Swell Season always happen to bring in very attractive ladies, so that’s nothing for me to complain about.
Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova got on stage by themselves by around 9:15PM and immediately played a song; “Fallen From The Sky.” Afterward, the rest of the band showed up, who by the way are also members of Glen’s other band “The Frames.” After a few songs have passed, I was once again immersed in how much I love the music that the Swell Season plays. Glen Hansard also has such a great stage presence, what with the entertainingly stories he tells in between songs (they were either very moving or funny), and how he is able to joke around with the crowd quite effectively. Even when things go a little wrong; like losing a guitar string while performing, Glen is still able to make light of things and keep the entertainment going. I also enjoyed the times Glen encouraged us to sing parts of the songs, and for one particular song, somebody in the audience was recognized for having such an incredible voice and really impressed Glen.
There is a certain format to their set list, where besides having the full band for several songs, Glen and Mar each gets to take the solo spotlight and hold the show by themselves, as well as violinist Colm Mac Con Iomaire who for one portion of the show gave us a lovely instrumental piece. Marketa at one point also brought in a family friend of hers to sing a song in Czech, which was definitely something unexpected but nice to listen to. The biggest surprise of the night was probably when the band brought in “How I Met Your Mother” and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” star Jason Segel on stage, where he sang a hilarious original song of his, that was essentially him inviting any of the fans that night to have a booty call with him. The Swell Season’s whole set lasted about two hours and it was so great that I honestly could have stayed for another hour (they have enough material to pull that off if they wanted to).
Last year I said that seeing The Swell Season at the Greek Theater was probably the best concert I experienced in 2008. After this phenomenal show, I’m inclined to now say that seeing The Swell Season at The Wiltern is probably the best concert that I experienced in 2009. You know how people say that they “give 110%,” well The Swell Season really look like they are giving “150%” and it shows in their concerts. Like what I told Glen Hansard to his twitter, their music just puts me to another plane of happiness. Great band, great show, great night.
* click here for the photos I took from the show *
* click here for a new untitled The Swell Season song from that night *
* click here to see the funny Jason Segel “booty call” song *
- unexpected surge of popularity with this particular video. It’s being passed around on twitter, plus I’ve seen it in websites like “Pop Candy,” “Reuters,” “slashfilm,” “digg,” “SPIN,” “Entertainment Weekly,” and the “Los Angeles Times.” This video has fast become one of my most popular youtube videos, and reached almost 21,000 views in just one day. Incredible.
*update (Nov 20, 2009) * 2 days and 71,418 views later, Jason Segel passes Megan Fox + Kevin Smith as the most viewed video on my youtube! – –
*another update (Nov 21, 2009) * In light of the fact that Jason Segel’s song is now my no.1 most viewed video on my youtube (currently at 97,120 views as I type this), I went ahead and called the number. He actually picked up! I’m sure most people who called asked the same thing I did at first… “Is this really Jason Segel?” But then he got to ask “Is this really the guy who uploaded the video on youtube?” Jason said he appreciated all the attention he’s been getting from the video, and asked me to send him the raw file of it, so that he could personally keep a copy of his performance. Really nice and cool guy.
Check out The Swell Season’s beautiful music video for their song “Low Rising”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5KV1L…
http://www.theswellseason.com/
http://jason-segel.com/
P.S. If you are wondering if I took more videos from the show, I did (14 total). I uploaded the Jason Segel one, because that’s too funny not to. The new untitled song should be uploaded there in my collection as well. Now considering what I said earlier this month, that I was going to abandon my youtube account, those other videos are going to have to sit in my hard drive until I find an adequate alternative to youtube. I’ll toss the occasional video into my youtube account from time to time, but not to the extent that I’ve been known to do.
