Arcade Fire

I saw Arcade Fire at the Shoreline Amphitheatre on Friday… Google somehow got a whole lot of free lawn tickets so several of us went after work. I enjoyed the show, though it was a rough wait with two openers, a long-ish intermission, and some rain. I liked to see the variety of instrumentation in the music, which I hadn’t thought about as much before I saw it. Lots of the music has a really big sound that translates well to filling an amphitheatre (e.g. Intervention).

Backing up a bit, a week before that Girts got some free tickets to see Jonathan Coulton in San Francisco, so we headed up with a few other googlers. He’s a singer/songwriter with some great music and entertaining lyrics. One of my favorites is his a folk-style cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” (you can listen here).

After exploring his website a bit, I discovered that he covers a bunch of songs from The Show with Ze Frank, which I really enjoyed (though nobody I know seemed to).

I also enjoyed Mr. Fancy Pants (song, not person), though it’s much better live when performed with one of these. It’s ridiculously stupid and catchy.