Butch Walker....

and the lets go out tonights!

so i've had this question in my head lately, since i'm a singleton; worse, i'm a thirty-person. which is less cool? going to a rock and roll show alone, or skipping it altogether? my research indicates that it is WAY worse to skip something you dig than to go alone. if you dig it, go to it. if you enjoy going to a ball game, then go to a ball game. anyway, you might have a better chance of getting a single seat at fenway than if you have to get one for a sidekick.

so i went to see Butch Walker at axis the other night. i timed it perfectly, i arrived just in time for the last set change, so i didn't have to see the openers or sit through the awful set changes, which i swear bands intentionally make long. and then out come seven people. seven! and they've all got the ridiculous 80's get ups on. it was very funny. i was a bit nervous at the beginning, there was a lot of sort of dorky things; like tossing the pick into the air and all that hokey stuff. but i realized it was part of a little schtick. and it was a short lived schtick, and we soon got down to business of rockin.

the thing i love about this guy butch walker is that his stuff is really like these little stories and anecdotes and a little bit of poetry. it's sound really queer, but his stuff is this really emotionally charged material. even when he was with marvelous 3, the material was full of this sort of truth. i told my friend eric that i would swear his guy writes his stuff whilst spying on everyone's life, though it's probably about his own life mostly. on the album Letters, there are three songs in particular, Mixtape, Best thing you never had, and Maybe it's just me; that every person in the whole world can apply to their own life. everyone! and on a marvelous 3 album there's a song called Beautiful that every girl dreams about some guy dedicating to her.

so this show was full of all this ridiculous emotion, and energy, and tangible, palpable truth and realism. at one point walker sat at a piano all by himself and sang three of the most heart wrenching songs i've heard in a long time. complete with sorrowful back stories. that really is a ballsy move for a musician- who knows if the crowd is going to tune in on the sorrow behind it? and you know, and that certainly does reduce the pace of a show to a crawl. who knows if they'll be able to recover from it? it might be hard to get the rockin energy back. but it was perfectly seamless. such a good part of the show.

i have no idea if it was the end of the tour or the middle, but it hardly matters, because it could have been on my living room with 5000 close friends. it was such a good show, and i would have been so mad at myself if i talked myself out of going simply cause i had no companions.