Nathanson @ Streetside Records
I don’t think that I’ve ever adequately professed the awesomeness of Matt Nathanson in the history of this website. So, without any further ado:
Matt Nathanson is fantastic. Sure, he’s not for everyone, and I know that there’s lots of people who are turned off on him for a handful of reasons (he’s too vulgar on stage, he covers 80’s hair band songs, whatever,) but he’s been writing some great songs the past few years and he has absolutely one of the best live shows that I’ve ever seen. He’s fun, energetic, he always interacts with the crowd, and he works his ass off to make sure that crowd leaves talking about how great the show was.
So in April of 05 he did a short little record store tour promoting the live album he just released. One of the stops on the tour was Streetside Records (at the Loop.) The recording and setlist can be found at the archive, here: http://www.archive.org/details/mn2006-04-29.instore.
Pluses and minuses to this, obviously. The plus here is that it’s free, and it would be a relatively intimate setting compared to the normal stage-concert.
The cons: A very much abridged setlist, likely not to clock in at over half an hour, the possibility of having way too many people crammed into a record store, and (as we would find out later) Matt’s manager/crew/whoever being a total pain in the ass about taping the show.
Laura, Christine, and myself all went to this. It was at about 10:30 in the morning (and Christine’s first live matt experience) and he stars absolutely came into alignment for this. The weather was bad – it was the coldest day we’d had in a few weeks, and it was raining and gloomy all day. So needless to say, everyone who was there wanted to be there.
Not only was it a very small crowd, but everyone was perfectly behaved. They laughed when he was funny, they were quiet when he sang, and they didn’t talk on cell phones during songs. Matt was funnier than usual, played some stuff that was neat to hear in that setting, and the recording sounds fantastic – really worth checking out if you’re even just a little bit of a fan. The whole show is worth having, but Car Crash, Detroit Waves, and Suspended are especially fantastic if you only want to check out a few.
The Matt Nathanson trifecta is now complete – I’ve professed the greatness of Matt, reviewed the Matt show that we went to, and made a shameless plug for one of my own Matt recordings.