Singer-songwriter Feist played at Chicago’s Riviera Theater on November 4. Never before have I been to a concert that made me want to fall asleep until this one. Despite being a little tired from the week, I was ready to rock.
In every other concert I’ve been to the headliner usually comes out with one of their faster songs to get the crowd ready to jam out for the next hour or so. Not so with Feist. She played a slow song followed by another slow song and then another and another and it went on like that for the next 45 minutes until she played “My Moon, My Man” from her 2007 album The Reminder. Standing in the middle of the middle level would seem like an ideal place to take advantage of a venues acoustics, but this was not so with this concert.
Because of the acoustics of the middle level and how slow (and quiet) the set was, I could hear all of the chatter happening around me. People have conversations at concerts, that’s a given, but I have never been to a concert where I could hear all the conversations happening around me. Concert goers were “shh-ing” each other because all the conversations were so loud. Two guys standing above me almost got into a fight over how much noise one of them was making.
Feist played for about an hour before leaving the stage and returning for her encore. At this point my friend and I talked about encores are now expected and therefore not really encores, but that’s enough of a discussion for another article. She came back and played four more songs, including two upbeat numbers that might have been better if they had been worked into the main set.
The problem for me with this show was that I came into it expecting Feist to play a set that would have included more of her music from her last album. Maybe I should have gotten in my time machine and gone back to 2007 for that concert. It seems as though Feist has turned her back on the commercial success that was The Reminder. Having your music featured in a commercial for an iPod nano can bring on unexpected and even unwanted commercial success. It seems as though this is the case with Feist.
I did not keep track of the set since I was unfamiliar with most of the songs, but you can find her set list from her November 6 show in Atlanta here. Feist is currently on tour supporting her fourth Studio album, Metals, which was released on September 30.
Image via Flickr.
