the serious game of growing up / The Garage, 9.11.’11
How much do you bring to a song and how much is there already?
Maybe it’s because I’m grappling with this situation myself at the moment but the main theme of last Wednesday’s concert at The Garage seemed to me to be that of coming to terms with growing up, connecting the support and the headlining act in a very smooth arc. Maybe all that I heard was only my interpretation. Maybe it was there anyway. I’m not sure. What I am sure about is that it was another beautifully passionate concert by The Head and The Heart, with the support of Singing Adams, who set the mood just right and introduced me to some wonderful new songs.
Singing Adams
Steven Adams, Matthew Ashton, Melinda Bronstein and Michael Wood have songs that extend from dancable to personal hymns. In the former category are songs like Injured Party, Good Luck or Building a Wall, while the latter holds I Need Your Mind, St. Thomas and my personal favourite, Sit and Wait.
All the songs have lyrics that in some way deal with loosing dreams, realizing that priorities are changing, becoming aware that personal ideals aren’t what they used to be anymore – in short, they deal with the transition from the adventurous, finding-onself part of adulthood to that part where things become more serious, where reality checks some of the wild ideals and first disappointments happen. Does this sound very sad and dismal? It’s anything but. The lyrics are witty, ironic, nice-at-first-glance-until-you-really-listen-and-have-to-laugh-from-surprise. The music is has driving rhythms (girl drummer, yeay!), solid guitars and the singing a cheerful, yeah-it’s-a-bit-tough-right-now-but-let’s-not-take-it-so-serious attitude. And at least two of the songs (I Need Your Mind and Sit and Wait) felt like hymns-in-the-making to me, the kind of hymns you sing at the top of your voice.
(this is from the actual concert)
The Head and The Heart
*sigh* What can I say? I love them. In my eyes they couldn’t do anything wrong. Even better, they didn’t do anything wrong. They delivered everything I expected: beautiful songs, a passionate performance, down-to-earth attitude and heaps of fun. There isn’t a TH&TH song I don’t like, but I do have some that somehow touch me more than the others,and Lost in my Mind leads on that, with Ghosts following closely behind. All of them, however, gave me chills, made me dance and some of them almost made me cry (Lost in my Mind and Josh McBride) . Chasing a Ghost, the first encore performed by only Jonathan and Charity, was almost painful in its beauty.
Drops of sadness:
a) Singing Adams didn’t hang around long enough for me to get the chance for a chat, while The Head and The Heart were beleaguered and therefore equally inaccessible (very sad!!!)
b) The London crowd’s disinclination to dance. It’s very boring/frustrating to dance to songs you love in a whole crowd of people standing still and giving you strange looks.
All in all – non-dancing crowd, but soul-freeing music in an interesting venue that I will check out more. A great evening!
Posted on November 15, 2011, in day-to-day and tagged concert, folk, London, music, review, Singing Adams, The Garage, The Head and the Heart. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
cresting the words 
There is something so fantastically affecting about seeing ‘Josh McBride’ in person. Never gets old.
I have a short video of them singing it, but somehow I can’t include it in the post. 😦
I’ll try to put it here.
Awesome. It worked. 🙂
Reblogged this on cresting the words and commented:
In the course of merging my other interests into this blog, as thought about in the last post, I’m re-blogging some of my own content over here: