Ingrid Michaelson and related

So today was a pretty awesome day. (Or rather, yesterday was an awesome day. Today is officially Tuesday, when yesterday's evening of idle frivolity will come back to bite me.) First I managed to clear one standard deviation above the mean on my BioE midterm. And then I drove up to San Francisco with ML for an Ingrid Michaelson concert. Before the concert, we ate in a little Italian restaurant called Pescara, which has a pleasantly large ratio of food quality/quantity to price. As we finished consuming a meatball sandwich, the Giants won the world series. And then we experienced the concert (see below). And then we went to Quickly's (who had all the drinks normal PMT places have, but - get this - NO PEARLS. what kind of madness is this!? but milk tea is still delicious.)

And the concert. It was fabulous. I feel like I should write this all down this very minute, even though this week will be pretty terrible, workload-wise. It's important to remember these experiences and special moments, because that's what I will remember years from now. Or maybe I just don't want to do homework. I'm going to regret this so much later this week. Or even later tonight. (tick tock tick tock 1am...)

The opener was The Guggenheim Grotto, a great singer-songwriter duo in their own right. They're also Irish, so their accents gave them bonus points. I must make a note to look up their songs on Youtube.

Here's the set list for Ingrid Michaelson:
Immigrant Song (Led Zeppelin cover)
Soldier
Breakable
Once Was Love
Die Alone
Parachute
Mountain And The Sea
Everyone
You And I - sung with band mates and The Guggenheim Grotto
Nightswimming (R.E.M. cover)
Annihilate (new song)
Always You (new song)
The Chain
Locked Up
The Way I Am
Maybe
San Francisco - this was unplanned, see below
Toxic (Britney Spears cover)

Encores:
Be OK
The Way I Am, punk rock version

Basically, this is probably my favorite concert to date. The Fillmore is a great venue (a sort of vampire-mansion glamour) with great energy. The only thing I regret is not wearing heeled shoes. I don't think I ever felt my short stature as acutely as I did tonight. But I don't mind only catching short glimpses of Ingrid and craning to peer over people's heads. Because Ingrid Michaelson is a fantastic performer, from the moment she came out with her band mates (I <3 Allie Moss!) in black hooded cloaks. Plus, she could sing and play the song San Francisco, which she wrote and recorded four years ago but never put on an album. A girl in the crowd asked her to play it, and she actually managed to cobble it together from memory despite not having played it in ages. That is a mark of a great musician, in my book. In addition to having a unique voice and singing in tune, two criteria which Ingrid also fulfills.

She also used a looping pedal quite adeptly in Nightswimming. It's this device that can record sound and repeat it back, and then you can sing on top of it and add another layer to the looping track. I actually really wish I recorded that song. She sang it by herself, with only the looping pedal and no instruments. It had several layers, and at the end it sounded like an a capella group singing together. Also she couldn't mess up because any off-tune notes would keep repeating for the song. But she didn't mess up, and it was phenomenal. For real.

Basically, it went something like this: (not my video)

Amazing, no?

Also, I love the snark-tastic stories she tells between songs, like freaking out before singing at Carnegie Hall for a R.E.M. tribute concert, and then giving a kick-ass performance, and then getting drunk from champagne at the afterparty and embarrassing herself in front of the lead singer of R.E.M. Quote from this incident: Sometimes you feel proud of yourself, but then something happens to remind you that you are a troll.

And her punk rock version of "The Way I Am" was ridiculous. In a good way.

I don't regret going to this concert at all. Even though it's hella late and my homework remains unfinished.