Conor Oberst with the Felice Brothers at the Madrid Theatre, Kansas City MO 3/10/17

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Kansas City was night 2 of a 3-night trip during the March leg of the Salutations tour. I had a lovely time visiting some high school friends, Jessi and David, that I hadn't seen in a long time. Jessi and I went to the venue early and camped out in the 40-degree weather for kind of awhile. The venue owner came out after an hour or so, and she congratulated us on being the first in line and offered us drinks. We drank some water and chatted with her about what it was like to own a venue.

The Felice Brothers
The venue was beautiful, with curved staircases up to a pretty swanky balcony. However, the stage is ridiculously tall. So tall that, if you're standing right in front of it, you have to crane your neck to see up at it, and probably wouldn't be able to see anything over the monitors. We ended up opting to see the show from the balcony, which made our sitting in line for hours in the cold kind of a moot point.

The show was excellent - the Felices were in fine form during their opening set and as a backup band. Everything from their record Life in the Dark was killer. James Felice is my favorite to watch because he just exudes joy on stage.
Conor Oberst and the Felice Brothers

Conor was great - enthusiastic and seemingly psyched to be on stage with the Felices debuting music from Salutations, which came out the next week. The set was heavy with new Salutations material and there wasn't a whole lot of chatter (no long political rant, for instance). "Poison Oak" about killed me. In the encore, Conor played the still-unreleased song I'm thinking of as "Bedroom Day" again.

There's a review in the Kansas City Star here.



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