Happy birthday Danette! Continuing the long tradition of birthday mix tape songs, this year's entry is The Avett Brothers "Kick Drum Heart", from their 2009 major label debut "I and Love and You".
It's a fun song and a fan favorite at concerts, but it makes the
Danette birthday list for two reasons. First, it poetically captures of
the ecstatic moments of breathless young love:
Mother Mary heard us approaching her door
Though we didn't make a sound
and second, it fast forwards and nicely describes the small wonders of everyday love:
There's nothing like finding gold
Within the rocks hard and cold
I'm so surprised to find more
Always surprised to find more
I won't look back anymore
I left the people that do
It's not the chase that I love
It's me following you
With Danette I'm lucky enough to continually & simultaneously experience both aspects.
The picture to the left is from Herbert and Lisa at the Avett Brothers concert in Albuquerque, New Mexico 2015-02-04 (setlist). They went to the show on my recommendation and although they I think they enjoyed it, the Avett Brothers didn't resonate with them as much as they do with Danette and me. One thing they mentioned about the NM show is that the venue, the Santa Ana Star Center, was too large for a band like the Avett Brothers. Judging by their picture, it looks like their seats were pretty good, but they still felt the venue was not intimate enough for the kind of music they play. This echos our experience in the NYE 2014 show in Raleigh where we had really bad seats in the PNC Arena. Our experience almost surely would have been better if I had ordered tickets sooner, but then perhaps they should not have played in a venue where bad seats were even possible?
This brings up an interesting question: can a band grow too popular for their ideal venues? Obviously you'd prefer to see bands in the smallest possible venues. On the other hand, you can't fault a band for gaining popularity and filling (or nearly so) increasingly larger venues. But some bands' sound transposes to larger venues with less of a problem. The Avett Brothers are high energy, and they've slowly accreted band members to help them have a consistently bigger sound, but they're still not really an arena rock band, either in terms of popularity or sound. Is there an ideal venue size for an indie/folk/roots/country/bluegrass band like the Avett Brothers? David Byrne in his 2010 TED Talk (transcript) explored the relationship between venue and music, but did not really explore the idea of an optimum venue size for a particular sound.
The setlist is available for this as well, and it amounts to about an hour of music (shorter than a headliner concert). I'm not sure if there was more music and it was edited down to an hour, or if their hour simply straddled sunset (the sun appears to go down at the ~45 minute mark). Apropos to the venue size question above, note at about ~31:50 how Seth leaves the stage and tries to pump up the audience by running around the WWI style trenches that separates the band from the audience. I get that it's a large, outdoor festival, but that just doesn't seem like the best way to see the Avett Brothers.
Continuing on this theme, here is a short, five song 2015 Austin City LimitsTV show appearance where the venue is small and intimate but the audience appears sedated if not fully dead. Once again it falls to Seth to venture into the crowd and inject some life (~14:20). Perhaps it is just the nature of TV audiences to be lifeless, cf. my review of Wire's 1979 concert "On The Box".
In summary, I'm very thankful that in years past we have been able to see the Avett Brothers in the Portsmouth Pavillion, which might be the ideal size (~6500 people) in addition to its absolutely beautiful outdoor location right on the Elizabeth River. I'm also glad Herbert and Lisa got to see them even though it's not exactly their thing. So far their tour page doesn't list a return to Portsmouth, but right now there are only a few dates booked for May, June, and July so I would expect more dates to be announced soon. I'm hoping they return to the area and that we're in town for them (we missed them last year for the 2014 Power Tour). Between Michele & Chris, Joy, Marilee, and possibly some others we'll be a good chunk of the audience in what might be a perfect venue for them.
As part of her Christmas present, I bought tickets for Danette and her family to see the Avett Brothers at the PNC Arena in Raleigh NC on New Years Eve 2014. Since it was NYE and they're from NC, it was an extra long show (~3 hours of music) and they had several special guests, including their sister Bonnie and father Jim. They put on an excellent show, but our seats (section 305) were not very good, as the picture to the left indicates (taken during the end of "Kick Drum Heart", IIRC, where bassist Bob Crawford was so overcome that he just had to sit down to play). We were basically eye-level with the balloons they dropped from the ceiling at midnight. Danette blogged about the show, and the Raleigh News & Observer had a glowing concert review as well.
I've often wondered that those who film shows on their mobile phones record the moment at the expense of not actually experiencing the moment. It's not something that we typically do (other than a few pics like the above just to prove we were there), but in this case our seats were so bad that various uploaded Youtube videos (some of them recorded quite well) from the show actually let us experience (sort of) what we missed from our seats. Borrowing the setlist from setlist.fm (and making some of my own corrections/additions), below is a list of songs from the Avett Brothers 2014 NYE show, with links to the videos where available:
