Virtually Home

You, reader, are lucky. You're lucky because you get to view my low-light, scratched-first-gen-iPhone-camera-lens photos of The National. What a boon. The show was epic. It started out with a set by Other Lives, who looked puzzlingly familiar to me all night long until they walked off stage and someone near me said the word "Kunek". And then it hit me. I'd seen Kunek perform during Welcome Week, my freshman year of college, at the union. I was trying to figure out when at Austin City Limits 2010 I'd caught their act. But they didn't look that familiar. Other Lives sounded great. The preponderance of musical instruments they brought with them looked like a parody of a stage set. A veritable obstacle course. Every member of the band played at least two instruments in every song, though the average per band member (if you exclude the drummer from the data set) was probably closer to four. They had everything, from guitars and keyboards to bells tied to deer a...

Saturday was less a music festival and more a Monsters of Folk festival. For me, anyway. I skipped out on seeing a number of minor bands that I didn't mind missing in order to stand in line at MOF's autograph table. We were near the end of the line where they cut it off, and I was nervous that I would be the first one NOT to meet the band (which is what had happened at the venue the night before) but it all worked out. The guys were all surprisingly nice, and I got to have a (brief) conversation with each of them. Afterward, Cliff and I contemplated the decision between seeing half of Broken Bells' set, and being ideally placed for Monsters of Folk's set. As obsessive as this sounds, we chose Monsters of Folk. If it had been The Shins instead of Broken Bells, I think my decision would have gone the other way. I dreamed recently that I got to go back to ACL and see all the bands I didn't see when I was busy seeing other bands. It was excellent, but turned out to b...