A.C. Newman at Johnny Brenda's (Philadelphia)

Some pics I took from his March 17Th concert:

The night's setlist is in one of the picsadamsjp2010's posted here on flickr (thanks for sharing!). Song before last was "Come crash", not showing in the pic. He made a "pact" with the audience and skipped the bit where they leave the stage to return for the encore, so the set was a smooth run of songs sprinkled with bits of banter all along... like, being a redhead on St Patrick's day he felt sort of compelled to explain he's not Irish but Nordic!, also joked about Neko being loaded...

Though he's not mainly known for his ballads those, to me, stood out in an impressive way and though I had not heard "Come crash" nor "The cloud prayer" before (am an AC newbie) I was mesmerized when he played them. Massively beautiful, had that something that live music has sometimes, like some magic something. I recorded a bit and uploaded it on youtube, but as usual it's not the same.
"The cloud prayer":

Sound in the room was overall a bit too loud, drums specially, but the peculiarity of this very special venue probably had a hand in it. And it was packed. There were a total of 6 musicians onstage and they played faultlessly, achieving a round sound, but the violin player's histrionics were a bit too much, at times it seemed she'd go and push AC off the stage to have more room!. But as far as musicality goes, fantastic. Show ended up hanging the "sold out" sign, and a curious thing was the proportion of males versus females in the audience, like 10 to 1 at least!
And lots of merch to choose from, like different arty prints made each for a different one of the cities of the tour (the one with the big white AC letters in the pic was Philly's). As per the pic, A.C. hung around the table before and after the show and made himself available for his fans.

Great show.

Labels: AC Newman Philadelphia, AC Newman Johnny Brenda's, AC Newman setlist, AC Newman prints, AC Newman posters