Tour Memories (and occasional musings)

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...

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...

String Theory As readers of this blog already know, I had my reservations about the String Theory album, which had left me pretty underwhelmed. I figured that String Theory was a project designed to be appreciated as a live concert, with a full orchestra and the kind of acoustics that only a symphony hall can offer - not something cobbled together from mostly old recordings with the orchestral parts emailed over from Eastern Europe. A lot of my US friends had been to shows during the US leg of the tour and said the same: you have to see it live . I’d set out to avoid most spoilers - watching only a few seconds of clips here and there, just to get a sense of what to expect. I had to lift my self-imposed embargo for the String Theory show at BTTI, but aside from that, I made it to February with an open mind and my expectations still untainted. And so, on a cold Sunday afternoon, five days after returning from Jamaica and dragging a suitcase that was bursting at the seams, I boa...

It started badly, with a repeat of last year’s weather that was more Back to the Quagmire than Back to the Island , and as a result, our first day was spent between huddling under the Level gazebo and swimming in the rain. It definitely felt like a lost day, although at least the rain had stopped in time for the show to take place on the beach rather than in the dreaded “Greenhouse”.   This year, there were no official daytime activities other than a Q&A on String Theory, which was interesting enough until I found myself zoning out at the umpteenth “I come from a village in Brazil” mention. The lack of activities meant that we had more time to spend by the pool - something many of us welcomed. But on the last day we found out that the Dunn’s River excursion, which for this year had strangely been included in the price, had featured a surprise appearance from Taylor. My friends and I had been to Dunn’s River before and as a result, we had chosen to skip the exc...

(Trigger warning: this post contains references to the loss of a parent.) Zac: A Coming of Age Setlist If you read my blog posts on last year’s BTTI , you might recall that I’d been very unimpressed by Zac’s solo set. Well, this year Zac amply made up for it: first, I loved the setlist, which included two new songs, “Reading Your Mind” and “The Ballad of Seymour Better Times” (the latter had first been performed at the 2018 solo set). I will never tire of “Musical Ride” which sums up the life of a Hanson fan, and I’ll forgive Zac for messing up the beginning of “Fire on the Mountain” . Predictably, “Bittersweet” - by now a regular staple of these solo sets - made an appearance, and the rarely played “Use Me Up” also got some airtime, preceded by a funny introduction in which Zac recalled how that song had caused concern among some fans about his mental well-being. I first saw Zac perform a solo set in 2015, and back then he performed song after song without much talking. W...

Members Only Show Setlist The Members Only Show set is probably the BTTI ‘theme’ that gets the most votes every year because, well, when else do you get to hear those songs? For 2019, the Members Only set would fall on the final show - a momentous but inevitably bittersweet culmination of the event. I had high expectations: I’d loved the String Theory show and earlier in the day, I’d seen Taylor perform the best solo set I’d seen in five years.   Technical problems crept up two songs into the set. On my phone pad, where I keep a note of the setlist, I’d jotted down ‘sound!!!’ next to “Best of Times” . Shame, because the Isaac lead from the 2013 Sound of Light EP has become a kind of unofficial BTTI anthem and it’s one of those special ‘island moments’ that I always look forward to. Four songs later, the guys came to the front of the stage for “On and On” , one of the most visually striking songs in Hanson’s repertoire, providing a rare opportunity to see the three...