Week 12: Glen Rambles

I’m a little behind schedule this week, but with good reason! I had to work on my usual blogging day in order to take yesterday and today off for a mini-vacation to Seattle to see Glen Hansard at the Moore Theatre. I have mentioned this trip to enough people over the last few months to know that your next question is: Who? So I will tell you.

Glen Hansard is a singer and songwriter from Dublin, Ireland. He started out as a busker, fronted a band called The Frames for many years, and starred in the movie Once, which won the Oscar for best original song in 2008. He wrote and performed that song with Marketa Irglova, who he went on to make an album with called The Swell Season. I had not heard of any of that the first time I saw Glen in concert.

In 2011, I had tickets to see Eddie Vedder on his solo tour. He was doing two shows in Seattle at Benaroya Hall. The drama that unfolded in the 24 hours leading up to that show could be a blog post in itself, but briefly; I realized on the Thursday night before the Friday show that my passport was expired. Anyone who knows me will agree that this is VERY unlike me, but somehow it happened.

Everything I googled said that the fastest I could get a new one would be 24 hours, and as it was already end of business day on Thursday, that essentially meant Monday morning. But like one of those moms lifting a car off her trapped baby, I can manage extraordinary feats when it involves Pearl Jam or its members. By Friday at noon, we were on our way to Seattle with my brand new passport in hand, and I was heading towards one of the most magical concert experiences of my life.

It may have been the overwhelming relief that I had actually made it to the show, combined with the amazingness of Benaroya Hall, but a big part of it was also finding Glen Hansard, who I didn’t know was missing from my life. Second song in, he sang Leave and blew our minds (you’ll understand if you get to about the 2:00 mark). There was no going back from there.

Since then, I have seen him 6 or 7 times in Seattle, Vancouver and Las Vegas, and he has never let us down. Unfortunately, this tour only included a single stop in Seattle and nothing in Vancouver, so we took a little road trip and had to resign ourselves to only one show.

Joining me and Michel on this trip was my mom, and her friend Allison. My mom had seen Glen with us a couple of times in the past, but Allison had been won over by listening to a single song and eagerly joined us.

We arrived in Seattle in the early afternoon and checked into the Moore Hotel, which is next door to the Moore Theatre. We often stay here because it’s close to everything and it’s reasonably priced. After dropping off our bags, we split into two groups: people that hadn’t been to Seattle in a while (mom and Allison) and people that no longer felt like visitors (me and Michel).

Michel and I headed down the street for pizza at Serious Pie. We had been trying to eat here for years and it had so far never worked out. Yesterday, we succeeded and we were there for happy hour. We started off by sharing a margarita pizza, which was so delicious that we then ordered a half size of their most popular pizza, the one with Italian sausage, peppers and provolone. It too was excellent.

After our late lunch, we walked another half block to get slices of the amazing Triple Coconut Cream Pie at Dahlia Bakery. This is not to be missed if you’re ever in the area, so we made a point not to miss it.

Our lack of interest in seeing any local sights also allowed us to fit in a nap before the show. It hadn’t been a very strenuous day, but after spending 3 hours driving that morning, I did need to rest my eyes.

At 6:30pm, we headed downstairs to go to the concert. Our tickets were excellent Row D floor seats. By the time the opening act started, the venue was about half full. The opener was a duo from Rwanda that was playing in North America for the first time ever. The audience was very supportive, and they seemed to appreciate it.

Before the lights went down for Glen’s show I saw Eddie Vedder’s wife and daughter arrive to the balcony box across the auditorium from us. This, of course, got my expectations for a guest appearance by Eddie up extremely high. I still feel like I’m in a major Pearl Jam drought, so it’s hard not to wish for these things. (Last time we had seen Glen at the Moore, we were hoping Eddie would come out for a song or two, being good friends with Glen and a resident of Seattle, but no such luck.)

Glen, as usual, was charming and interesting and sounded fantastic. In between songs he would tell us stories of how the songs came about, or what he had done that day or at other stops on the tour. If he announced a show where he was just going to stand on stage and chat about random topics, I would probably be just as likely to buy a ticket as I would for an actual concert.

The majority of the songs he played were from his new album, The Wild Willing. Admittedly, I am less familiar with this album than the previous ones. I do own it, but I mostly listen to music in the car and I don’t drive very much anymore. The album, unlike his other work, has a lot of layers and huge contrast between quiet, soft parts and extremely noisy jumbles of sound. It’s almost like something Trent Reznor would come up with if he was an Irish poet.

With such a large catalogue of material from his years with The Frames and The Swell Season, and his previous solo albums, I knew that I probably wouldn’t hear all the songs that are my favourites, however; I also know I wouldn’t want to go see him play the same songs over and over again, so I am more than willing to take whatever setlist he deems appropriate. He knows what he’s doing.

I think it was a pretty long show, but I was making a point of not looking at the time. I didn’t glance at my phone once, and it wasn’t difficult at all. As I have been so many other times, I was fascinated by the people around me and how they experience live music. Not that there’s a right or a wrong way, but it just seems very weird to me that the people that are outwardly acting the most excited, by yelling or waving their arms or whatever, are also the people that spend half a song looking down at their phone to go through the crappy pictures they just took, or run out to get a beer in the middle of the show.

Overall though, I found the crowd great. Glen Hansard is not widely famous enough that people just buy tickets to his shows without already knowing his music, and that tends to cut down on the amount of lame people that just go to things so they can take selfies to prove they were there. I enjoyed watching the guy in front of me, who had come to the show alone, make friends with the people sitting on either side of him.

After the main set was finished, the crew brought out two stools and two mikes to the front of the stage and I knew Eddie was coming out. (Plus I’d seen a person with a flashlight enter the balcony box earlier and escort someone out, so I had a bit of a heads up.)

Eddie and Glen are good friends and have toured together a lot over the past 8 or so years. It is clear, watching them sitting together and talking, that they have great respect and love for each other. I have seen them do some songs together in the past, always at shows that Eddie was headlining with Glen as the guest, so it was a huge treat to see them together in reversed roles.

They sang Society, from Eddie’s Into The Wild soundtrack, and then they did Pearl Jam’s Smile, which is one of my favourites. As excited as I was witness this, I was probably more excited that my mom got to experience it. She has been subjected to my love of Pearl Jam for 25 years or more and has had to spend many, MANY hours listening to their music in the car, or listening to me talk about them.

It was also appropriate that she finally got to see Eddie live at the Moore Theater, because I’m sure she’s still regretting not taking me to see Pearl Jam in 1995 when I had free fan club tickets to a show there… or maybe she would have long forgotten about that if I didn’t still bring it up to this day. Either way, I’m sure she checked that item off her bucket list as soon as she got home today (only 24 years later than necessary.)

My list when I got home was to paint the trim on the basement door, return my library books and write my blog post. Done, done and done. Time for dinner and some TV. Mid-week weekends are tiring, but I highly recommend them.