Ethereal

Last night, the Laura Veirs gig, oh my gosh it was magical - that's the only word for it magical, all of it. Despite it not being the cheapest gig ever at £12 a ticket, which is quite expensive for the Academy, and as I paid for both my baby and me because it was my gig - it was me that wanted to go and see her, it was worth every single penny. She was brilliant and it was the perfect venue for her - the Academy 3 is such a small, intimate venue and as such if you got close enough to the stage, well it was like she was playing in your living room whilst you had a couple of hundred friends around. That doesn't really make sense does it? What I mean is if she was playing a venue any bigger, say the Apollo or something, or maybe even Academy 1 for that matter, the music would have been lost. That kind of music lives and breathes in such small venues, it's the attention to detail within the musicianship that counts here and not the volume level; whatever it was better than I imagined and my baby..............

He wasn't overly looking forward to it but he really did enjoy himself - he said she's much better live than on the records, which was a fair point; the songs really did come alive in front of us - they were a bit less clinical and a bit more rough around the edges. And Laura is such an awesome front woman and so sweet, in between songs she was telling tales of growing up and living in Portland, inspirations for her songs and her accounts of what it's like visiting different places whilst on tour. She really has that kind of homespun, innocent, eyes wide open kind of appeal to her and that's what really did come across last night; she wasn't doing the music to make loads of money and become famous, she was doing it to make connections. It was so refreshing and so heartening; and she did her job, she made some connections and new friends in Manchester last night - my baby included.

For me it really did hit home, there were times that I could have cried last night, seriously, she really did make a connection somewhere in my soul; not only with the music but with the tales she was telling, I don't know it just felt so real and so visceral. Like I said it was magical and ethereal, that's the word that describes it best - ethereal; like we were lost between the present and the past or halfway between home and somewhere else, somewhere not of this planet. The gig just took us away from the here and now for the best part of one and a half hours, whatever worries, thoughts or concerns you took in with you were soon forgotten about. Not that we had any such worries or concerns and as much as we may have been lost in the moment we certainly didn't forget about each other; throughout the gig we were either holding hands or had a hand in each others back pocket. It was a night to be close to one another as much as being so close to the music; it just felt right that if you were lucky enough to experience such a spectacle it should be done with someone you love close to hand. I guess my baby was right when he said he thought her music was best suited to chilled out late nights together because that's exactly what it was. We were just so lucky to have been there, together.............