Last night I headed over to The Paradise to see Liz Phair. I met up with Lukas and his friend a little after 8 and we headed in.
So, I go to the Paradise on a pretty regular basis. Probably once a month or maybe a little less. I have certain routines I am used to there, where I stand, what I drink, etc. Well, when we walked in to the main room, these all went out the door, there were chairs on the floor. This was a very strange sight. The seats were already full, so we decided to head up to find a place to stand. Luckily, Lukas bumped in to some friends, so we ended up with a great place to stand, just one level up and on stage right. We had a perfect view of the stage.
When we arrived, Mat Kearney was on the stage. Just him and an acoustic guitar. He had a nice voice and sounded pretty good. I think I would have enjoyed seeing his whole set rather than just the last few songs, but he definitely had some potential.
A few minutes after 9 Liz came out with a guitar player. It was incredible being about 15 feet away from her. She played a great set over the course of the night. I think I've got a good list of the songs (below). She really seemed to be enjoying herself. She apologized early for flashing the front row (she was wearing a skirt and sitting on a stool). At that point, I was wishing to have been sitting in the front row ;) She actually was heckling the crowd at one point during Rock Me and seemingly cracked herself up enough to lose track of where she was in the song. She talked a lot over the course of the night. As people yelled songs, she would say, yeah, that would work, sadly, we haven't work on it yet. This was the first show of the tour, so they were seemingly just getting in to the flow of things. She polled the crowd at one point on which of two songs they wanted to hear. She was playing this strange looking guitar that didn't have a body, but had the outline to one. At some point, someone mentioned something about how she was balancing her breast on top of the guitar. She said something like, you can either use the smoosh method or else this method, and the guitar has this great curve there ready for it.
A very interesting part of the evening was her mentioning on multiple occasions that she would be doing a podcast in the near future. That should be real interesting. Guess I will have to keep an eye on her site to see when that starts happening. Seems like this is becoming somewhat popular with some artists.
It was definitely a great night. She played for a little under 90 mins. Good mix of new and old stuff. She really just seemed like she was chilling out and having some fun. Almost seemed like a bunch of friends sitting around an apartment jamming out some tunes. Very glad I was in attendance to see this. If I had some more cash, I'd even be tempted to try and go back tonight for the second night (which is most likely completely sold out like last night was).
So, the set list started like this:
polyester bride
girls, girls, girls
extraordinary
mesmerizing
And ended like this:
why can't i
fuck n run
In the middle (in no order) were these:
rock me
wild thing
supernova
6' 1"
divorce song
She also did 3 new songs. Two from the new album and one that got cut. One was Somebody's Miracle, the title track. The other two, I can't quite remember the names to. If anyone has an exact set list, that would be awesome.
Overall, a great time.
Someone got a great shot of Liz on stage here
