[music | Leonard Cohen - I'm Your Man]
Tonight is China Forbes @ The Paradise, Boston.
Natalie is the big Pink Martini fan here, I like them well enough, but she's the Lounge Music superfreak. We knew this wouldn't be loungey, but it was a very good show. She's a good song writer, and their performance was great. It was kind of an odd show because a huge part of the audience was friends and family (I guess she grew up in Cambridge), and so there was lots of in-joke back and forth.
The Grandmother stuff was the best. Her grandmother is 90 and apparently couldn't hear a thing, so Forbes was just hoping that everything "looks good anyway".
Opening was Lael Alderman, who is also the rhythm guitarist/everything-elsist for China Forbes' band. The audience was super light anyway, and not many people were there for his set, but he was good in a solo-male-singer/songwriter-Jack-Johnson sort of way. If you like Dashboard Confessional, you'll like Lael Alderman. I hope we were able to give him enough love from the 6 people in the audience at that point!
The main set was really entertaining, she pretty much played everything off of '78, and a couple of covers (R.E.M - Superman, Bryan Adams). The Bryan Adams song was good because of the story. This was her encore, and since no one in the audience seemed to go to many shows, they don't understand how encores work. When she said "It's been great playing here, hopefully we get back to Boston soon yadda yadda bye", everyone left. Every. One. So she said she had wanted to skip the encore but that the band made her do another song. So she told a story of Bryan Adams going back out on stage 30 minutes after a show in some stadium and playing to the few dozen stragglers who were still around.
Some of the people came back in after they started playing again. Many didn't :-)
A much higher percentage of my photos came out this time. Previously, I mentioned the blurry/grainy tradeoff I was willing to make, and I made it. I don't care, at least they're visible this time. No new camera however, the one I was trying to buy doesn't come out until June. Forcing ISO 400 and then playing with shutter speed seems to have done the trick largely. Maybe I'll put it at 200 next time for a while and see what happens.
Here they are:
