Train At Radio City

Drunk Girl and Drunk Mom were the unexpected bonus of the evening when Eddie took me to see Train at Radio City Music Hall.  We settled into center stage seats towards the back of the hall and noticed that it was pretty empty during the opening act.  The duo, Alex & Sierra, folk-rocked out and then folked-out Britney Spears's "Toxic," which was amusing and inspiring.  The theater filled up as they played, and then the rest of the row arrived to Eddie's left.  Enter Drunk Girl.  She clutched a drink in each hand.  Behind her, Drunk Mom followed.  At first, I thought one drink was for the mom.  Then I saw that Drunk Mom had a drink of her own, but only one.  When Alex & Sierra finished their set, Dunk Girl and Drunk Mom disappeared and came back before Train came to the stage with more drinks.  Twice.

When the lights went down and the stage came up, Drunk Girl jumped up and hair danced.  What's a hair dance?  Well, it's when you dance with your head bobbing forward and to the sides because your neck is too drunk to hold your head up, and so your hair falls all over, making it seem that you do not have a face.  Along with the hair dance, she also had half a chicken dance going, and Eddie and I feared that his face might suffer with an elbow jab or two before the end of the night.  When the more well-known songs came about, Drunk Girl tried pulling Drunk Mom to her feet to hair dance and half a chicken dance along with her, but Drunk Mom kept saying, I can't stand.  Class act!


So if that was the bonus, you might imagine what the show was like.  It was like, well, hmm.  Words cannot describe the awesomeness of this show.  In a small venue like Radio City, it's as if the band sings to each individual, one word, one note for each person there.  Then to make it even better, Pat Monahan takes selfies one-handedly with other people's phones while running around in the audience and walking on chairs (security must love him), and then he signed shirts and threw them.  They don't need to do those things.  They do because it's enjoyable for the audience, but without them, the show is still all kinds of Uh. May. ZING.

What it looked like through the camera phone.

Lots of colors and music and magic and fun

And this is what they sounded like.  You may be familiar with this song.

 
They played some older stuff.  Love it.

Side note: I've been catching up on Patcast, which is the podcast by Pat Monahan.  I am really behind because I just figured out how to play podcasts through my car, and now that's all I listen to.  I've been following Train on Instagram, and I've always wanted to listen to the Patcast after I see photos of them.  Now I listen as I'm driving and I'm always wishing I were listening while doing nothing because they are so inspiring and funny that I want to write shit down and steal the words and make poetry, but I'm always driving and smiling and I must look like a maniac because whenever someone says something brilliant, I start to repeat it over and over so I'll remember it, but I never remember it because I get distracted by the rest of the podcast.  Nobody knows the trouble I've seen; nobody knows my sorrow--brought to you by English Professor Problems.

So okay, I've given you the bonus and the make it even better moments, but here's the best moment of the night.  Pat Monahan decides, hey, I'm gonna sing with no mic.  So he holds the mic down by his waist, takes a huge singer-sized breath, and starts to belt out the words: When it rains it pours and opens doors... and he sways side to side and his neck and head look like they're about to come off, not because he's doing the drunk hair dance like Drunk Girl next to us but because he's using every lick of energy to make the sound hit us in the back row.  And it did. And it was every bit of heaven on earth as cosmically possible.

Eddie was like, The mic is still picking up some of the sound.

I was like, Ruin this for me and I will cut you.

Eddie was like, No, no, it's great.

And he actually meant that because he does like Train, though it's quite possible we both like Gavin DeGraw a little more than Train by default since he's the act Eddie has seen in concert the most, and we were both a little bit let down that he was not on the bill. But back to Train and their being great--Eddie has some songs downloaded on his iPod, some of which he could have simply downloaded from me instead of buying them from iTunes but someone did not think to ask someone else if someone else already owned the songs. Hey, support the cause, right?  "Soul Sister" is actually kind of like our song.  I know, it's everyone's song, but really, it's ours.  Like, have you ever liked a song so much that you just can't listen to it sometimes?  That's that song.  Also, that Marry Me song is one we like, too, or actually, liked until I pointed out how it seems a bit stalkerish--I mean, he's singing to this girl to marry him but then asks, Will I ever get the nerve to say hello in this cafe?  That, to me, indicates that he's been staring at this girl forever and wants to marry her but he hasn't even said a word to her.  I have written a poem influenced by this song, but the song itself is not recognized in the poem because that's what poets do.  We steal.

Back to the concert.  There's Pat Monahan, shout-singing "When I Look To The Sky," and then the band kicks in louder and he uses the mic before he passes out and then well I. Just. Can't.  It's too good to be described.

To wrap it all up, they used "Dream On" as their bow.  Now I've heard lots of covers of "Dream On," and the only one that actually sounds like a good song is the version Train does.

A pretty spectacular birthday present.  Thanks, love.