I was pleasantly surprised with a pair of tickets to see Sarah McLachlan last night at the Excel Energy Center in St. Paul. I had discussed going to see this concert with my wife, but due to certain scheduling conflicts I had decided it just wasn't possible. However, my wife, found a way to work out all the details and surprise me with the tickets. (By surprise I mean, my wife left her web browser window open to her ticketmaster receipt page on Thursday night, so that when I went to check the weather on Friday it was the first thing I saw.) The opening act was Butterfly Boucher and was quite good. She had an interesting voice and its always fun to see a female lead vocalist playing bass guitar aggressively. She spent a lot of time joking about selling her album at the venue. Evidently she is from Australia and was invited on tour with Sarah after being heard in a small club in New York. It looks like the closest she'll come to Minnesota is Aimes, Iowa on 9/22/2004. All in all, she was very fun to see. She played an interesting mixture of vocal forward loud and quiet music. Sarah McLachlan was every bit as good as I had hoped. She played mainly her recognizable popular tunes, describing it as a mixture of the songs she loved to sing. I wish I had taken notes on the songs played. My favorites were Adia, Building a Mystery, Ice Cream, and Answer. I was pretty taken by how her band took on the task on building a really deep sound with a lot of odd instruments even on tour. The music sounded similar to the album version, but each contained subtle vocal flourishes or slight changes in tempo and arrangement. Sarah's commentary between songs was not annoying in the least. She came out for three encores, and the last time came out sporting a Minnesota Wild Jersey, which got the audiences attention. A lot more women than men attended the show. I would see a lot more live shows if they were a little cheaper.
