Daryl Tay.net

[edit: Videos of the full performance and all the songs are up here!]

I think I’ll be doing a proper review for Jon over on his blog, but I’ll tell you about my “adventures”.

So the concert was at Massey Hall in Toronto (which took me 2 and a half hours to get there by train) and it was a pretty swanky venue! The type of venue that suits a Mraz performance perfectly, I think.

Lisa Hannigan kicked off the show. I don’t dislike her music, but I think the urgency to watch and hear Jason play just made me impatient during her segment. I like her stuff with Damien Rice, though.

Jason Mraz came on, and musically, it was brilliant. If you check out my videos on YouTube, you can see what the set looked like. It was almost like an additional band member. (Don’t worry I’ll be posting all the videos soon. There is only so much bandwidth that can be used at once!).

My singular complaint, which is no fault of anyone’s, is that the best “live” songs weren’t sung. ie no Zero Percent Interest, Unfold, Better or After An Afternoon (we did get Sleeping To Dream). However, practically every song from “We Sing, We Dance, We Steal” was performed, as well as the default hits You And I Both and The Remedy. Again, only complaint is of all the songs he chose to leave out of the performance, Coyotes (my fave off the latest album) was one of them.

As an experience, I’m struggling to decide if I enjoyed this more, or the Singaporean performance in 2006 more. In 2006 it was an acoustic set with just Toca, so perhaps it was a little more intimate, but having a full band really brought life to the music and everyone was really in the mood.

The “official” concert ended at 9:51pm and my train back to Kingston was at 10pm. Knowing there was no way I was going to miss it, I stayed on for the encore (like there was really any other choice to be made) which lasted a full 40 mins more including “Lucky” with Lisa Hannigan taking Colbie Calliat’s role (I prefer Colbie Calliat). So with no means to go home, luckily Raphael let me crash on his floor for a couple of hours, and I was on the first train back to Kingston at 6:55am.

The one thing I love, that I didn’t experience in 2006, is the real sense of community around this. Within a day of the concert the videos are flooding YouTube, and even though none of us know who the other is, there is that common bond of knowing somewhere in Massey Hall, we were “together” and experienced that wonderful night together. If you were there, please leave a comment!