Skip to main content

Day 1 - The Welcome Show


















As an international fan, and a relatively new one, I haven’t seen that many Hanson concerts yet - only 6 regular tour dates in Europe and last year’s BTTI. So maybe my expectations are different to those of an American fan who has been to 100 + shows. The more you see, the bigger the chances of a not-so-good one. It’s called the law of diminishing returns for a reason.

That’s kind of what happened for me at Show #1 - the Welcome Show. Maybe it was the setlist, which contained a lot of classics like ‘Where’s the Love’, ‘Lost Without Each Other’ and ‘Waiting for This’. They’re undoubtedly really good songs but there are so many others that Hanson could have picked, and I couldn’t help thinking that it was a safe choice for a party crowd. Yes, we did get a few pearls like ‘Dance Like You Don’t Care’, ‘White Collar Crime’ and the hardly-ever-played ‘Tonight’, but overall, most of the setlist was quite predictable.

Setlist photo courtesy of Iria Rodriguez





















Hanson have a huge catalogue of songs to draw from; more than most artists I can think of. So what better opportunity than BTTI - a fan club only event - to pull out those deep cuts from the vault and play them live to their fans? The last 2 EPs barely got a look in through the whole event. What happened to ‘On The Road’? How about the songs from the ICON book?
Are Hanson trying to play safe to the crowd (but why? we’re all fan club members) or - worse - is it because the old and trusted classics need little or no rehearsing? [opinions are welcome in the comments section]

Overall, it was a good show, of course (can these guys ever put on a bad show?). But somehow it failed to grab me the way all the other shows I’d been to before had done. It was good but not spectacular. Still, we had two more shows ahead plus the solo sets, so I wasn’t worried: every little thing gonna be alright.

*I’m going to embrace the Jamaican way of worrying less for 2016. These people really do have a good handle on life.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Jody L. Powell14 January 2016 at 19:56

    I'm on of those who has many concerts under my belt, and yes, I've heard the staples more times than I can count. I, too, would LOVE to hear the deep cuts from the vault. This is their best opportunity to play those songs and be pretty much guaranteed that the crowd will still sing along.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jody L. Powell14 January 2016 at 19:57

    I'm on of those who has many concerts under my belt, and yes, I've heard the staples more times than I can count. I, too, would LOVE to hear the deep cuts from the vault. This is their best opportunity to play those songs and be pretty much guaranteed that the crowd will still sing along.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Cecilia15 January 2016 at 02:08

    Totally agree with you, and I'm a returning fan who hasn't been to too many shows either... Maybe I set the bar too high ;)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hanson Day 2019: a Recap

Registration To everyone’s surprise, registration opened before the event had even officially started, on Wednesday afternoon. I don’t know if that was planned, or if it was a last minute decision, but it was a good idea regardless. It’s obvious that more and more people are arriving to Tulsa earlier in the week, so it makes sense to try and register as many attendees as possible, as soon as possible. So by late afternoon on Wednesday I had my bracelet, my tickets and, most importantly, my EP. I’d lugged my trusted old MacBook Air and an external CD drive all the way across the Atlantic with the sole purpose of being able to listen to that EP straightaway so I headed back to my hotel room for a very exclusive Listening Party. ( Check out this blog again soon for a full review of the EP .) Storytellers Setlist This year’s Storytellers was effectively an acoustic show, centred around the Underneath album. It’s a golden combination for me, as I discovered the b...
1 comment
Read more

A BTTI 2017 Post-Mortem - Part 1: Dissecting the Shows

It was only going to be a ‘once in a lifetime’ experience: the solo sets had sold it to me, and besides, I’d never seen Hanson play with the full band. A one-off. Yes, it was only going to be a one-off. Well, that was 2015. On a grey and wet British New Year’s Day, I boarded a Jamaica-bound flight, ready to do it all again for the third time in 2017. Those who have read my blog posts from BTTI 2016 might remember that I wasn’t exactly awestruck by last year’s event: I’d found the shows lacking something, not to mention I'd been left seriously disappointed by Isaac’s solo set (for an Isaac ‘girl’, this is a serious matter). Aside from having fallen in love with Jamaica, I guess my mixed feelings about 2016 were part of the reason for wanting to go back: I had such fantastic memories of the 2015 shows in Cancun that I wanted another taste of that experience. I knew BTTI was more than a holiday with friends: it was a chance for me, as a European fan, to load up on Hanson conc...
8 comments
Read more

Is this In Real Life? A review of Hanson's 2019 Fan Club EP

I was in my hotel room in Tulsa when I first listened to the EP. I’d ferried my trusted seven year old MacBook Air all across the Atlantic, complete with an equally old and battered external CD drive, with the sole purpose of ripping that CD the moment it was in my hands and listening to it in religious contemplation. Compromise The first song in the EP, "Compromise" starts with a piano and guitar intro, and instantly puts me in a state of acoustic bliss that reaches its nirvana as Isaac’s voice comes on some twenty seconds later. Before you can scream ‘Isaac lead’,  Zac takes over vocals on the second verse,  with the final part going to Taylor. After my initial split second of disappointment, it made complete sense: it’s a song about compromise, shared among the three brothers and layered with their trademark harmonies in between each verse. What is that if not a perfect example of musical compromise? Thematically, my first thought was that the lyr...
Post a Comment
Read more