Concerts and Things

I went to a few concerts recently, though I abandoned my plan to go to the Shakira concert in London on the 20th because there was lots of snow, and even in the best of circumstances travel takes 2 hours each way (the venue is in a corner of London, which entails 45 minutes of metro travel from the train station). I would have come back very late and faced a decent chance of getting stuck in London, so I decided that Shakira didn't make the cut for me to bother. Maybe another time.

There are two recent concerts in London that I did actually attend. One was Dar Williams, which took place in the Union Chapel, which has church services by day and concerts by night. It's a rather nice venue, and I got there early enough to literally have a seat in the front row---and I've never had one of those. The concert was cool, but Dar did spend too much time talking and not enough time singing. I later went to a Squeeze concert in which the Lightning Seeds were the opening act. That concert was awesome! Hearing "Cool For Cats" live gave me goosebumps (so did a couple of other songs), and the 12+ minute version of "Black Coffee in Bed" that started Squeeze's performance was awesome.

I have greatly enjoyed a couple of recent albums. One of the standout albums from 2009 (ok, so this one is not so recent, but I want to mention it anyway) is Röyksopp's "Junior". Their 2010 album "Senior" is much more mellow and unfortunately not as good (though it has a couple of songs I like). I also want to mention A-Ha's 2009 album ("Foot of the Mountain") and the new Loreena McKennitt album that just came out last month. I hadn't realized McKennitt was going to have a new album, and I'm really enjoying several of the songs---especially her version of "Star of the County Down". There are some other good albums and individual songs I've gotten in the past couple of years, but these are the ones I wanted to mention in this post.