Thursday, February 25, 2010

Chris Garneau @ City Winery

Last Friday I caught Chris Garneau at City Winery. City Winery is an interesting place for a music venue, but I thought it was quite nice to be able to sit and drink wine and enjoy a relaxing performance. Chris played for about an hour and had a fairly large band for the small stage (from what I could see from my weird side angle, two cellists, a violinist, three brass players and I could hear a percussionist but couldn't see them). He played more of his beautiful ballads than of his weirder songs that I love so much - though he did play "Fireflies," which is one of my favorites. And it's possible that he did play my favorite ("Dirty Night Clowns") and I just missed it because I got there about 10 minutes late and the show started promptly on time - how very unusual in the music industry! Seeing him live and really being able to hear the lyrics clearly, though, made me realize how dark even his ballads are.

The audience seemed to be mostly composed of people who didn't know that much about him (except a few friends scattered throughout the audience) but by the end of his set, everyone seemed to love him. I could hear people around me talking about how blown away they were by him and at the end of songs it wasn't unusual to hear a murmur of "wow" or something along those lines. I wouldn't necessarily say I was blown away but I that's mainly because I have been a big fan of his for a while now, so I knew he would put on a great performance, which he did.