Fiery Crash

Thursday night, Noam came back into town. She came over to my dorm and she did math, while I did chemistry. Just like old times (except that we both would have been doing math). That was the kickoff to my fantastic weekend.

Friday night was Andrew Bird — he is absolutely amazing. He played a couple years ago when I was in high school — at this point a bunch of my friends went to see him and kept bragging that they could see Andrew Bird because *they* were 18 (the age required to get into the particular venue where he was playing). I didn’t know who he was at that point and immediately realized my mistake. Luckily this time I didn’t miss out. My guess is that this concert involved more musically interesting things because he had a very large concert stage to set up on. It looked a little like this. He’s strumming on his violin at this point:

His original training is in violin (Suzuki method!) and he makes good use of it — most of his songs began with him playing a line on the violin, recording himself in realtime, and layering himself over this recorded track. He did use the guitar a bit too (often standing with the guitar on his back and holding his violin in front of him). He also whistles and hums a lot.

Because he’s essentially a one-man-band, he sounded pretty different live than recorded. When he played Fiery Crash, I didn’t really recognize it until he said that line (though it sounded familiar somehow). A really 抜群 concert, I must say.

Unfortunately, around the time Andrew Bird was singing about a Fiery Crash, Nathan was actually having an epic bike crash with a sidewalk…

The rest of the weekend involved… going home and coming back and forth to campus the entire weekend for the purpose of studying and going out — finally saw Ariana’s apartment, etc. I stayed at home until Monday morning, and apparently people came hunting for me Sunday night, mysteriously right before the CS homework was due…

So I’m off to CS.