TMBG

They Might Be Giants came to town! We just had to go! Les has never seen them live except for an in-store performance at Borders, and I haven’t seen them live since New Year’s Eve 1992 (I think – it’s so long ago, now).

They were originally going to be at City Hall, which is a venue we’ve wanted to go to for a while, but then they changed the venue at the last minute to Exit/In, a smaller club that we saw Sharon Jones at and like quite well.

We got to the club and queued up outside in a sizeable line of people who appeared to have never queued up before (there were two lines for apparently no reason). When we got to the door, we found out that I needed ID to get in, even though – I assure you – I definitely appear to be over 21 and our tickets said nothing about ID being required. We rushed back to our car, drove home, got my ID, searched for parking, and got back to the club in time to see the show, though we did miss the opening band and heard he was great. I am yet again SO thankful for living in such close proximity to the city! If that had happened in Michigan, when we lived an hour from everything, we would have either skipped the show, snuck in, or I would have gotten to wait in the car. Yay, Nashville!

The show was great! TMBG are so clever and energetic and wonderful! We had a fabulous time!
A few years ago, when Les and I were going to 2 to 4 shows a week, we devised a system to boil down our show experiences and document them so that we would walk away with specific memories from each show. It’s just called our “5 Things” list (obviously, it’s more about documenting things than selling our system to the public through clever naming and marketing!).

My They Might Be Giants 5 Things are:

1. A lot of their songs were faster, more upbeat, rockier takes on the album versions. At times I thought I was at a punk show. Rock on!


2. They had a confetti cannon for one song. How awesome is that?


3. The audience was “old” – for once I felt like a young person at 32.


4. I asked for and got the set list from the sound guy. It’s my first set list ever, and even though it’s not the band’s set list, it still had interesting drawing on it and was cool.


5. They played a song called “Fingertips,” which is just a bunch of short snippets from never-written songs. It’s a weird song and not exactly one that would be easy to play live, so I was thrilled to hear it.