Dancing and Singing With Our Friends is AWESOME!

Thanks DJ Lance.

So, last night Bill and I went to the Rascal Flatts/Taylor Swift show at Frontier Days. It was a lot of fun! I'm not a huge fan of either, although I do like (and actually knew) most of the Taylor Swift songs. But something about a live show is just exciting, you know, it kind of sucks you in to the atmosphere of it all and you find yourself wanting to dance and sing along (unless, of course, you're Bill). It's funny, because in spite of the "country music" label, there were few things about any of the songs that could have been classified as "country". Sure, there was a fiddle and a banjo, but basically we're talking a pop/rock experience. Of course the inordinate number of cowboy hats, boots and belt buckles (and lack of people of color!) gave away the type of audience being catered to. Now, my indie rock loving friends would probably turn their noses up at a concert like this. There was no angst or really deep, meaningful stuff being thrown around. But you know, sometimes I just need to hear a song that doesn't talk about how much life sucks. I know that already! Sometimes I just want to hear Britney Spears singing "Stronger" or Taylor Swift singing about "that stupid old pickup truck you never let me drive." Hence me singing along to "Life is a Highway" at the top of my lungs along with thousands of other people. I can enjoy the intimacy of a folk type concert in a small setting as well as a loud, showy, pop concert. There's plenty of room for both these options, and more, in the music world. Music, like other art forms is meant to entertain, to bring you somewhere else, to help you maybe forget life for a little while and experience something on a different level. You know, if I had to watch movies like "Blood Diamond" all the time, I'd end up driving myself and my family off a cliff. Sometimes you need to see "Knocked Up" and just laugh your head off for a while and forget the seriousness of life. That's kind of what this concert was for me. I'd been feeling pretty rotten all week and for a couple hours I wasn't worried about Uganda or kids or money or terrorism or the election, I was just having a good time.

Concerts are funny too, they bring out the same types of people no matter what the music genre is. You have your hard core fans who are disdainful of everyone else because certainly no one knows this band/artist as well or as much as they do. There's THOSE people wearing THOSE shirts. (If you don't know who THOSE people are you are probably one of them.) There's the young girls who wear tiny tank tops and tinier shorts and who are unaware just how gorgeous they are, and the young girls wearing the same outfits who are unaware just how inappropriate those tiny things are for their more-than-tiny selves. Then there's the middle aged women who dress and act like those young girls, hoping to ignore their middle age spread, greying hair and wrinkles but who aren't fooling anyone but themselves. They come in packs of three or more. I was lucky? enough to be sitting next to a threesome of this sort, and kept getting Bud Light splashed on me as they would jump up screaming in an effort to out-do the sexy 17 year olds a few rows ahead. It was funny watching the 17 year olds--they were beautiful and I thought "did I ever look like that when I was 17?" But then I remembered, oh yes. I was 17 during the late 80's/early 90's, and I was into "alternative rock" so I was dressing in my father's old shirts and shapeless pants, so who knows if I ever had a body like that! I've been robbed! I wasted my teenage body on the "grunge" look!

Anyway, we had a good time but you can tell we are old (or just didn't care so much about the band) because we left before the encore because we were tired and didn't want to be stuck in the exit rush. I think concerts are good though, because its an entirely different way to interact with music. If it didn't cost a ridiculous amount of money (these tickets were free) I'd go more often because it is a great way to spend an evening!